Stories by: Keith Schultz

Speeding up the delivery of applications and data to remote users is the No. 1 goal of WAN acceleration and optimization. Not only does it help get more done over the same amount of bandwidth -- or less -- but WAN optimization appliances reduce response times and overcome latency inherent to long-distance WAN links. Using a combination of file- and byte-segment caching, TCP optimizations, and application-specific acceleration, WAN acceleration appliances help move the data that drives business.

With the economy slowing down and IT budgets getting tighter, trying to sell your boss on some new network equipment might defy conventional wisdom. But if the equipment helps reduce time wasted when working over a WAN, or better yet, improves overall WAN usage and user productivity, it might not be as difficult a sale as you thought.

Network admins have spent many a late night trying to figure out how to improve application response or file replication across the WAN. Faster performance is all about bigger pipes, right?

I sometimes wonder why there aren't any movies made about IT superheroes. Sure, there's always Superman (able to leap tall buildings in a single bound) and Batman (the caped crusader), but what about WANman -- the IT superhero that accelerates high-latency traffic and saves the company from additional Internet bandwidth costs? Well, the tights and cape might not go over well (except on casual Fridays), but any IT staffer that can give enterprise users more performance is well on their way to superhero stardom.

Safeguarding Web services is a lot like protecting your Web-based applications from attack. The current crop of application-layer security solutions can look for malformed Web traffic, URL tampering, and the like, but it does not look deep into SOAP messages or scrub XML for malicious content, thus leaving Web services exposed.

If you need to provide secure remote access to Web-based apps as well as other network resources, then an SSL VPN is a great choice.

Virtual private networks are experiencing a major technology shift as many enterprises discover the benefits of SSL VPN appliances over IPSec-based software solutions.