Excerpt:
In many ways, applications represent the closest intersection between IT and business. No matter what the solution or applications are, IT today depends on ensuring that these applications meet their business goals.
Trends are moving users further away from headquarters; while issues like data center consolidation, security, and regulatory compliance are making applications less accessible to users.
Challenges have made one thing clear: traditional networking, security, and management solutions alone cannot solve problems.
What's needed is an end-to-end application delivery strategy, a strategy that includes infrastructure solutions deployed along the line-of-sight between data centers and end-users. This strategy must make it easier to deliver any application to any user with the best performance, highest security, and lowest cost.
Citrix believes there are four critical best practice objectives to keep in mind:
- Control Application at their Source: an end-to-end application delivery strategy should start with infrastructure products that are deployed in the data center, directly in front of applications. Products that control the initial delivery of these applications must be as close as possible to their source.
- Secure Access to Applications: develop a successful application delivery strategy that will make is easy for users to securely access their applications from any location. Traditional secure access solutions such as virtual private networks (VPNs) are focused primarily on access to networks.
- Optimize Applications Over the Wide Area Network: WAN optimization products address mobility, globalization, and outsourcing by automatically optimizing all application traffic over the wide area network, an approach that can dramatically improve application performance and reduce bandwidth requirements by as much as 75 percent.
- Monitor the End-User Experience: The success of any application delivery strategy also rests on the ability of IT to truly monitor the experience of end users, especially with regards to application performance.
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