As the business landscape evolves, enterprises continually seek ways to gain a competitive advantage through mergers and acquisitions as well as increased proximity to customers and suppliers. In particular, today’s financial services companies operate from several different geographical sites, between which large volumes of time-sensitive, critical data is transferred.

As a result of these changes, enterprise wide area networks (WANs) are in transition. Most are experiencing exponential traffic growth, largely driven by new high-bandwidth, mission-critical applications. This trend toward moving more data, and increasingly video, across the WAN necessitates an unprecedented level of network optimization.

Given the promise of greater IT asset reuse, ease of service integration and improved response time to an ever-changing business environment, more enterprises – across multiple industry verticals – are adopting Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs). However, despite the promising enhancements SOAs bring to IT environments, there is no doubt that SOA implementations increase the traffic load on the network. Thus, it is imperative that enterprises model their next-generation WANs appropriately.

More specifically, the emergence of distributed computing applications based on SOAs that connect applications across a network via a common communications protocol has enabled enterprises to reuse software and create flexible business processes. However, the effects of SOA-based distributed computing on WANs has resulted in increased network bottlenecks due to higher traffic volumes, more sensitivity to network latency and less predictable traffic patterns, which all hinder the transfer of applications and information across the WAN. Additionally, as businesses increasingly operate across multiple cities, countries or globally, financial services organizations need WANs that provide high throughput with minimal latency.

Employing an enterprise WAN strategy that accommodates these needs will help businesses meet the network requirements of emerging technology applications across any given geography. It also means that organizations can simultaneously solve three major network challenges: today’s networked remote storage, the near-term proliferation of Web services and future multiple-site grid computing.

Enterprises can meet these requirements for high-performance bandwidth by employing emerging optical network technologies that complement the huge installed base of IP routing equipment. Using today’s advanced optical network technologies, enterprises can assign application traffic to dedicated lightpaths, which can minimize network latency and optimize throughput, while being sized to fit bandwidth requirements with much greater efficiency. Enterprise WANs with emerging optical networking capabilities offer organizations the flexibility to software provision connectivity to meet application requirements while placing their IT and storage assets anywhere at anytime.

By optimizing the WAN and leveraging the security, resiliency and capacity benefits of today’s optical solutions, businesses can quickly deploy new applications across a highly-reliable and deterministic network. Next-generation WAN environments that utilize the benefits of both IP/Ethernet and optical technologies will provide an obvious competitive advantage for any business looking for a more effective communications infrastructure and to increase productivity.

Ray Patalano is a senior solutions marketing manager at Ciena Corporation (www.ciena.com), where he is responsible for defining and developing innovative, business and network solutions for Ciena’s enterprise customers.He can be reached via email at rpatalano@ciena.com.