More business than ever is done in branch offices and remote sites, but fewer and fewer IT resources (e.g., applications, personnel, servers) are hosted there. Applications are being consolidated (sometimes centralized, sometimes outsourced) - cost is a driver, but compliance is the catalyst.

In many cases, a consolidated application translates to a poorly performing application. Long distances between users and applications, skinny/latency-prone network pipes, and applications and protocols stretched beyond their design limits mean poor application performance at remote sites. These issues are exacerbated by the introduction of additional bandwidth-hungry, latency-sensitive applications such as voice-over-IP (VoIP) and video.

The industry response is predictable - accelerate the traffic. While appropriate at a high level, the rush to a solution has left out some important questions, e.g., should everything be accelerated? If not, which applications are key? How are they evolving? What about encryption? How are networks evolving? Does Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) or going directly to the Internet from remote sites change things? Given the significant deployment efforts associated with rolling out acceleration technology, these questions merit consideration. Any solution under consideration to accelerate applications should be considered with the answers to the above questions in mind.

Enterprises (both private and public sector) need all of the techniques mentioned above for the array of applications deemed important to the business (file services, e-mail, web, secure web, video), but what about the countless "applications" that run on the enterprise network that are not business-related, or worse - harmful to the business? Given that approximately 30% of enterprise network bandwidth is consumed by unauthorized applications (e.g., web advertisements, inappropriate web surfing, P2P, Skype, spyware), removing the undesirable can be as important as accelerating the desirable.

IT must now follow a framework of technologies designed to bring all of the appropriate acceleration techniques (bandwidth management, compression, protocol optimization, byte caching, and object caching) to all of an enterprise's key applications - including web, secure web, file services, email, and video. Organizations need to manage all of their user/application interactions - to stop undesirable applications, throttle less-important applications, differentiate users and groups, and accelerate critical applications - even when encrypted. This gives IT the security and control that they need to enforce policy while accelerating applications across the WAN.

Acceleration technologies range from compression to caching, to bandwidth management and protocol optimization. All of these techniques have benefits, but for a given application, some improve performance more than others. Each user and application combination has an ideal set of acceleration techniques - apply the wrong techniques and performance benefits can be nullified.

Chris King is Director, Product Marketing at Blue Coat, 408-220-2099; email: chris.king@bluecoat.com; web: www.bluecoat.com.