1 Latency Issues Can Be Solved Simply Adding More Bandwidth

False: Soon after more pipes are added, more traffic will come through and the same bottlenecks will exist; and the money wasted. You need visibility into who is requesting access to which sites or applications and whether that user has or should have rights to this data (policy control); if not, the request should be denied and will not load the WAN. The better solution is to implement a tool – ProxySG – to help break down the data and better organize and prioritize mission critical data.

2 Caching Yields Stale Data

False: Server consolidation is all about having a highly available, manageable and reliable – not to mention auditable and compliant – place to store data. The problem is users aren’t in the datacenter, and the network that connects them, be it the WAN or the Internet, is far from perfect. One solution would be to put an appliance with a file server in it, such as Linux Samba, as part of an optimization solution. That works, but undoes much of the simplicity and compliance benefits of server consolidation. A better plan is to mirror only the data that users need, just when they need it. Caching dynamically sorts out the most popular web, video and file share data automatically. And because it’s not an authoritative or searchable source, you don’t have to worry about keeping it up to date or ready for the auditors or lawyers to go trolling through.

3 Optimizing Packet Data at Layer 4 Will Yield High WAN Performance

False: Packet delivery is already highly optimized – and works pretty darn well. If you’re still having application performance problems, the problem probably lies where the applications live, up at layer 7. The problem is changing application behavior requires a bunch of things. First, it requires intercepting applications and having an idea of what’s going on and providing that visibility to the administrator, so they can make decisions about what’s on their network. Second, the solution has to have enough  nderstanding to know what to do to improve performance. Finally, it needs to align application protocols with the underlying network, at a minimum so things don’t break and ideally to make optimal use of the underlying infrastructure.

4 External Web Apps can be accelerated with normal WAN Optimization

False: WAN Optimization can make the hop between the branch office (or remote user) and internal applications faster with compression and protocol optimization. But  nce it reaches the datacenter proxy appliance, optimization is lost. Admittedly, some nominal upstream protocol optimizations for HTTP can be made; however, without an  bject cache at the edge these gains are necessary but not sufficient. Moreover, that only helps you for HTTP, while most important apps are HTTPS and the largest WAN offenders are video. You need a real gateway, with object caching, video, web and secure web optimizations. And if you can do all that starting right from where the user sits, even better.

5 Controlling Application or Content Flow Through Proxies at the Branch is not Necessary with a Control Point at the Datacenter or Gateway

False: Bandwidth management at the edge of your network improves your WAN in ways centralized control solutions cannot. Primarily, the limitation is one of location. In order to intercept your traffic and prioritize and secure according to policy, the centralized manager has to see the traffic. That limits the appliance to being inline with every WAN link at the core, or to low-level information like ports that don’t provide adequate visibility in a web-centric world. Secondarily, it assumes your network is impermeable at the edges. If you want to leverage the Internet at remote sites to reduce your backhaul – or if you have Internet access points you don’t know about – the control of a proxy solution at the edge provides you with the visibility to either safely pursue distributed gateways or protect from rogue access points.

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