Partner Article

WAN Optimisation & Increase In Remote Working

WAN Optimisation is a key driver behind the increase in remote working

Vice President of IT Optimisation at Intergence sees trend to remote working benefiting from optimisation techniques

21 March 2012: Dr Steven Turner, VP of IT optimisation at Intergence, has revealed that WAN (Wide Area Network) optimisation is one of the key drivers behind the increase in remote working, enabling networks to speed up bandwidth-hungry applications, relieve traffic congestion and reduce latency across remote branch offices.

According to Flexibility.co.uk1, the leading provider of news, views and resources about flexible working, the number of workers who will work part of the time from home will increase to 30% of the UK population by the end of 2012, prompted in part by the expected increase in travel congestion caused by the London Olympics and rising cost of transportation. The ability to use ‘dead’ time which is often lost through travelling can improve productivity. Furthermore, remote working can improve business continuity, should the normal workplace become unavailable. These are just a few of the drivers for the increase in working remotely.

Dr Turner, who has successfully completed a large number of optimisation projects for tier 1 and tier 2 clients, believes that the use of WAN optimisation has made it much easier for companies of all sizes to extract the best possible performance from their existing infrastructures when it is not feasible for them to upgrade equipment or bandwidth.

He explains: “From our experience, we are seeing more and more employees being encouraged to work from home to reduce traffic congestion and their carbon footprint. Indeed, many offices are now becoming ‘virtual’ offices with the majority of staff being home-based for better efficiency and to provide an improved work-life balance for the individual. Transport costs are also a major factor as fuel prices and train fares continue to rise relentlessly.

“Whilst many companies have their head office based in well-serviced areas such as London, they often have many branch offices located around the country and some of these areas are too remote for high speed internet access to be financially viable.

This means that local users must tolerate low bandwidth connections to access resources from their head office or data centre. WAN optimisation covers many areas which are of significant interest to companies with remote branch offices and who are struggling with performance,“ said Dr Turner.

These areas include:
1. Application Performance Monitoring – you must first baseline the end-user experience for each of your sites and understand the performance of applications before you can make an informed decision on how to improve them.

2. WAN Governance – performance sensitive applications such as voice, video and Citrix remote desktop require a minimum level of bandwidth in order to provide an acceptable level of service. WAN Governance can ensure these applications are protected from other traffic flows.

3. WAN Acceleration – large bulky traffic such as file transfers, e-mail and web-based applications can significantly benefit from WAN Acceleration. This technique allows data to be sent much faster across existing WAN connections through data reduction and acceleration techniques, overcoming some of the limitations of TCP/IP which can often restrict traffic flow on high latency links.

Whilst these techniques can significantly improve remote offices with low bandwidth links, they are also highly effective at improving larger sites as well. Companies which rely on accessing centralised resources and/or use sensitive applications such as Voice over IP and Video see great benefits in employing these solutions, even when their bandwidth usage does not appear to be excessive.

Dr Turner continues: “Most of us are used to having access to a high speed broadband connection at home, but often it can be difficult or cost prohibitive to provide high speed reliable connections to remote offices due to distance from local access points and variations in line quality.

“WAN optimisation can increase application performance significantly and make optimal use of your existing bandwidth, however restricted. It can help to improve the end-user experience of a remote user to be more alike to the performance they would experience where they connected to the local area network (LAN), and that has to be worthwhile investment.”

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Notes to Editors
1: http://www.flexibility.co.uk/homezone/Jan2012.htm

About Dr Steven Turner
Steve Turner is the VP of IT Optimisation at Intergence. He specialises in Network Optimisation and has successfully completed a large number of optimisation projects for clients in both the public and private sector. Steve is Cisco CCNA and CCNA security certified and is currently studying CCNP. Steve has gained a BSc (Hons) in Computer Science from the University of Warwick, and an MSc in Network Systems from the University of Sunderland. He has also completed a PhD using genetic algorithms in conjunction with parallel processing to produce a multi-utility network optimisation tool.

About Intergence
Intergence (www.intergence.com) is a leading independent IT Optimization Consultancy, headquartered in Cambridge, UK, with a regional office in the Middle East (Dubai, UAE) and was founded in 2003 to address the growing requirements of clients demanding high-level impartial expertise in networks and IT.
The company has recently (February 2012) been announced as one of the suppliers of the UK Government’s cloud computing procurement initiative, G-Cloud. The framework will feature services divided into four segments, with Intergence forming part of the specialist cloud services.
Our close relationship within the Cambridge academic community enables us to innovate in partnership, rapidly incorporating the latest technology advances into our products and services.
Intergence operates over two distinct lines of business; people and performance. Our expertise and knowledge within the field allows us to resource the right people in the right place, getting your IT projects completed quickly and hassle free. Utilizing world first products and professional optimization services, Intergence has a clear and common purpose- to improve performance and extract more value from your IT infrastructure.

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For further information on Intergence, please contact:
Laura Brown/Justine Smith KISS Public Relations T: + 44 (0)208 12345 75
E-mail: justine@kisscom.co.uk or laura@kisscom.co.uk
www.kisspr.co.uk

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Dr Steven Turner .