By Andreas M. Antonopoulos
Network World Data Center Newsletter, 12/21/04

As data center consolidation continues rapidly across all industries, the distance data has to travel to reach its end user is increasing. Nemertes’ research has shown that, on average, more than 80% of enterprise employees access the data center remotely. That means IT managers must take an end-to-end view of security, performance and availability as they deliver applications across a WAN.

Maintaining the security of a corporate data is no longer simply a matter of building a hard perimeter around the data center; most of the end users will be outside the perimeter. Data-center security depends on all three components of the application delivery - the servers, the desktops/laptops/PDAs and the WAN transport in between. Enterprises are increasingly adding security controls directly onto the desktop, in the form of personal firewalls, VPNs, intrusion-prevention systems and malware protection.

Like security, performance is meaningful only from an end-to-end perspective. The end-user experience needs to be measured and then optimized by identifying potential bottlenecks across the WAN. Performance is also determined by the state of the end user’s desktop - spyware and other undesirable software can slow down or even crash a desktop or laptop. Another potential source of problems for application performance is the WAN, where excessive latency can make interactive applications painfully slow.

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