Survey Says: WAN Application Performance Critical

By Greg McNevin

May 12, 2008: The recent Interop conference in Las Vegas saw WAN optimisation specialist Riverbed take time out of presenting to conduct a new survey, with the results showing that application performance is the number one concern for remote offices.

An unsurprising result, given that wide-area data services (WDS) are Riverbed’s area of expertise, however, the survey of several hundred attendees – made up of IT and business decision-makers within the networking, storage and application markets – revealed that as remote offices are increasingly playing a critical role in modern business, so too are WAN services.

Visitors to the Riverbed booth were asked what the top two concerns that they will be addressing at branch offices in the next 12 months were, what the biggest hurdles their organisation faces were when it comes to remote office applications, and on a scale of 1 to 10, how important performance was for branch offices, data centres and mobile workers.

Due to the increasing focus on branch offices and teleworking, results showed that IT departments are struggling to keep application performance on par with demand, while the top two concerns were noted to be mission-critical application performance and data protection.

“The ability to deliver real-time access to critical applications enables a host of business benefits, including dramatically improved collaboration between distributed employees, improved productivity and happier, more satisfied employees,” said Eric Wolford, senior vice president, marketing and business development at Riverbed.

“However, as organizations consolidate their IT infrastructure to ensure data protection, application performance often suffers. The CIO's dilemma is reconciling these competing demands.”

Comment on this story