Neither here nor there

Centralisation conflicts with demands for faster access to data made by an increasingly dispersed workforce, says James Hall

The Office of National Statistics (ONS) reported a doubling of the number of home-based and mobile teleworkers over the last 10 years to 2006.

The ONS estimates that 3.1 million of these mobile and home workers now exist in the UK - roughly 12.1 per cent of the working population and rising steadily year on year.

Also, demand is increasing for rapid access to data from mobile ‘power users’. For example, construction site managers viewing CAD files from an architect on site increasingly want rapid access to such large electronic files.

Just a few years ago, they would have brought paper plans.

Senior managers working in companies with offices all round the country or around the world these days may require access to their desktop applications and documents at LAN-like speeds, wherever they are.

This goes some way, we think, to explain a surge in demand for WAN optimisation in the last 12 months.

Parallel trends around corporate data storage, backup provision, Software as a Service (SaaS) and desktop virtualisation are creating centralisation of data in ever-larger server rooms.

This can put greater strain on corporate WAN connections and slow data retrieval.

WAN optimisation projects being accelerated even as the economy takes a turn for the worse.

Companies are focusing on extracting greater productivity from fewer people and need to make sure they have fast access to information and applications, wherever they are.

Many companies are consolidating local servers into fewer data repositories – and into off-site datacentres – to cut maintenance costs and are then face larger bandwidth provision costs to deliver LAN-like performance across the WAN.

WAN optimisation solutions can reduce such costs, because data can be stored, accessed and transferred to distributed users more efficiently.

James Hall is marketing director at Teneo