What is WAN Optimisation?

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What is WAN Optimisation?
The whole thing about WAN optimisation to keep in the back of your heads is that it cannot fake the speed of light - it is what it is - WAN optimisation can make a 2mb connection feel like a 10mb connection.

If you are transferring information between short distances, WAN optimisation isn’t going to help. You need latency between the two places. When you plug in the technology, people are going to notice you did something if they suffer from latency issues.

Any WAN can be optimised. By the way, the further away or the worse the performance is at that remote site, the bigger effect WAN optimisation will have on its effectiveness.

Basically WAN optimisation can deliver LAN like performance over a WAN. So if you have remote users at another location or on-the-move, WAN optimisation can help deliver the same quickness as users in your data centre would feel.

In a WAN there's a limit to bandwidth, talking between locations and latency. So what many WAN optimisation solutions do is break up and label files and data and serve them up to users.

After the user has used the files and data - and made any modifications, the optimisation hardware and software will only observe the adjustments to the data and transfer them back to the data centre...not the data that the branch office or remote location already knows the data centre has!

Probably the biggest benefit of WAN optimisation is the benefit of less “round trips” in data transfers via satellite. A WAN optimised network can reduce data transfer by over 90% - meaning a lot less reliance on narrow bandwidth and a lot faster access to remote files.