The Lippis Report

By Nick Lippis, Lippis Consulting

Along with a turbulent macroeconomic cycle comes business rationalization and in networking the wide area offers a unique opportunity to deliver value, both in terms of operational efficiency and business initiative alignment. Advances in network-embedded, software-based WAN Services such as security, unified communications (UC) and WAN optimization are starting to deliver the same type of application experience and management tools to control application performance that was once only available over the LAN. But the wide area network has been pieced together, usually site by site, without a comprehensive plan. This lack of planning is most acute in branch-office-to-WAN and data center connections as geographically distributed branches are connected with inconsistent WAN Services and indigenous WAN transport. IT planners are being offered an opportunity to implement a common set of WAN Services embedded within routers such as UC, WAN optimization, security etc., between branch, headquarter and data center sites which promises to lower operational spend, align business initiatives and policy while delivering Local Area Networks (LANs) -like application performance. This paper presents a strategy for common WAN Services embedded in routers connecting branch offices to data centers and larger corporate sites that speed up workflow and business process for all employees independent of geographic location.

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