Chapter 1. Introduction to Cisco Wide Area Application Services (WAAS)

IT organizations struggle with two opposing challenges: to provide high levels of application performance for an increasingly distributed workforce and to consolidate costly infrastructure to streamline management, improve data protection, and contain costs. Separating the growing remote workforce from the location that IT desires to deploy infrastructure is the wide-area network (WAN), which introduces significant delay, packet loss, congestion, and bandwidth limitations, impeding a users’ abilities to interact with applications and the data they need in a high-performance manner conducive to productivity. These opposing challenges place IT organizations in a difficult position as they must make tradeoffs between performance and cost, as shown in Figure 1-1.

Figure 1-1. Tradeoffs Between Performance and Cost

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