WANs are a little like highways. You can add extra lanes to cater for additional traffic, but the average speed during peak hours remains the same. When you remove all the traffic lights, merging lanes and other encumbrances, you get something more like a freeway that can allow faster speeds. When it comes to WANs, application network protocols are like those traffic lights on a highway. Common protocols such as TCP were mostly designed in the days of low-bandwidth, low-latency networks. Their typical "chattiness” and small MTU sizes (see glossary) have become a bottleneck in today’s norm of high bandwidth networks over long distances. Emerging business initiatives around IT centralisation, branch office expansion and mobility have led to constant increases in the workload of existing WANs. The result is twofold: older protocols perform increasingly poorly, and this poor performance has an increasingly noticeable impact on the organisation. When customer records don’t refresh or email attachment downloads barely trickle through, user productivity falls and frustrations grow.IT Departments often respond by either adding more bandwidth – the equivalent of adding extra lanes on a highway – or by placing servers and data at each location. Neither approach is particularly effective: adding bandwidth does not significantly improve performance, while the capital and operating costs of decentralised servers is prohibitive.Rather than trying to solve the problem by deploying more of the same infrastructure, companies should consider deploying technology designed specifically to optimise the WAN. Utilising WAN Optimisation technology can improve the behaviour of application protocols over WANs, delivering measurable benefits while reducing the overall cost of ownership.WAN Optimisation Controllers, such as Riverbed’s Steelhead appliances, overcome many of the limitations of older protocols such as TCP. Rather than switching to new protocols (which poses an immense challenge to virtually every business) WAN Optimisation Controllers can be used to deliver improved application performance across the WAN – on average, performance is 25 times better than when unoptimised, primarily through how the controllers streamline both application and data transmission.Application streamlining can minimise the volume of chattiness by completing as many transactions as possible locally. In some cases, this can reduce the number of WAN round trips by up to 98%. In a similar fashion, data streamlining works by "deduplicating” data, meaning only unique data is sent across the WAN. Take the common scenario where employees in different locations work on the same powerpoint file by making changes, then sending them back and forth over email. In an unoptimised WAN, the entire file is transmitted over the WAN every time. In an optimised WAN, only the unique data – such as changes – is transmitted, along with micro-sized references to the unchanged data which is then reconstructed locally. The number of organisations implementing WAN Optimisation Controllers is growing, and more and more firms are seeing a measurable Return on Investment. According to a white paper by IDC#, Riverbed Steelhead customers were able to reduce IT costs, improve IT staff efficiency, increase availability for users, and trim time to market with new revenue-generating opportunities. On average, these customers avoided almost $1m in bandwidth costs and almost $800 thousand in hardware costs annually. Perhaps more importantly, each user ended up with an average of 15.3 hours extra productive time per year.The trend towards WAN Optimisation as a standard has been accelerated by the addition of WAN Optimisation to the Infrastructure-as-a-Service industry. Macquarie Telecom offers a Managed WAN Optimisation (MWO) service to organisations in Australia and New Zealand which has already seen significant uptake by a wide range of new and existing customers. As locative flexibility and mobility gain in prominence for Australian businesses, we can expect to see increasing emphasis on WAN development for the working environment. WAN Optimisation is one of the most effective strategies for companies looking to literally bring their WAN up to speed, as it maximises the capacities of existing hardware and firmware while minimising one-off and ongoing costs. As WAN Optimisation-as-a-service is an OpEX model, there is no long-term cost commitment compared to acquiring and managing the infrastructure, a long-term CAPEX commitment – OpEX frees the organisation from having to make these significant, long-term investments. By optimising their WAN set-ups, companies can go from struggling with network jams to experiencing the data equivalent of a superhighway.  Glossary:Chattiness: The common term for how applications – including web sites, constantly check that the connection is still there.MTU: Maximum Transmission Unit – the largest amount of data that can be sent across the network at a time 1 Improving the Business Value of WAN Optimisation (sponsored by Riverbed).