Businesses all over the world in all industries are turning to wide-area data services (WDS) in order to accelerate business operations while controlling IT costs. Through technical solutions like application acceleration, IT consolidation and virtualization, faster WAN backup, and bandwidth optimization, WDS is enabling businesses to leverage their IT infrastructure in ways that they had never imagined possible.

By accelerating applications, WDS provides customers with much more than just happier end users or an optimized WAN. Faster application performance actually helps business solve many of the major challenges they are facing today. With wide-area data services, businesses can make the long distances between remote offices, mobile workers, and business HQ disappear. And when those distances disappear, businesses can take advantage of their human and technology resources in dramatically different ways. With WDS, business can:

• Radically improve business processes A core focus for many businesses, WDS can help accelerate operations by reducing the time to complete repetitive operations. Enterprises embracing a “follow the sun” operations model also benefit from faster data transfer to remote locations. Resource planning (ERP) systems and product lifecycle (PLM) platforms can be tightly integrated with distributed employees – even mobile workers - and at the same time opened up to suppliers. In all, businesses can deliver their product faster to market while spending less on the IT required to do so.
• Tap global markets, with less cost. A key objective for many companies today is to reach out beyond their existing markets. But the required investments in people and infrastructure often make that impossible. With WDS, businesses can tap the opportunity without the investment. That’s because WDS allows you to leverage your people and infrastructure as if they were all in one location, no matter how far and wide they are distributed.
• Enable outsourcing and distributed collaboration. With WDS, outsourcing and distributed collaboration of employees works far more efficiently. Users can work on massive design documents, large contracts, and important applications as if they were working in the same room. For branch offices and mobile workers alike,version control problems can be eliminated, wait times for large data sets are reduced by an order of magnitude, and communications can be streamlined as never before possible.
• Provide infrastructure for an agile business. Requirements in business change quickly these days. Typically, IT infrastructure cannot react quickly enough. But with WDS, IT can change the game. WDS allows IT infrastructure to be much more nimble: data centers can be anywhere – and can be moved in a tenth of the time; new applications can be rolled out faster; centralized implementations of servers and storage can serve global users with less investment. The end result is that IT can be more responsive to business needs without a ballooning budget.
• Secure critical company and customer data. WDS enables strategic and tactical efforts to protect company data against loss, theft, or disaster. WDS can help eliminate insecure remote tape backup in remote offices, and at the same time empower faster, cheaper replication from primary data centers to secondary data centers. All of this means that data is more secure at a lower cost.

The true power of WDS lies in the fact that it can deliver this strategic value while enabling your IT teams to cut unnecessary costs out of your operations. With WDS, your IT department can rearchitect technology systems so that they can serve distributed users without massive local investments or very expensive network connectivity. Imagine providing these savings for your business:

• Cut server costs and routine IT maintenance. By enabling IT consolidation as well as virtualization for your branch office, WDS is eliminating underutilized, hard-to-manage servers in remote locations while guaranteeing the same level of performance to those end users. This results in lower capital expenditures to refresh servers and also improves maintenance cycles. IT administrators manage fewer, large servers in a central location as opposed to potentially thousands of remote devices. End users notice little or no change in their daily operations.
• Invest less in disaster recovery – but get more. Today’s businesses require protected data to meet industry and government regulations. But disaster recovery is typically a very expensive process. With WDS, WAN backup and replication is accelerated and uses fewer network resources. That means that data can be backed up more frequently with less investment in the time and infrastructure required to do so.
• Push out network upgrades – by two years or more. WDS fundamentally allows businesses to get more out of the infrastructure they already have. By dramatically cutting utilization of existing bandwidth, routers, and switches, WDS can push out upgrades of this expensive infrastructure by two years or more, according to a number of analyst firms. That means businesses can accommodate more growth and more users without investing in additional networking infrastructure.

Visit our section on industries to learn how WDS can impact your business. Additionally, examine our technical solutions in detail to learn how WDS actually is used in the solutions described above. Finally, visit our products section to learn more details about the technology that Riverbed provides to customers.