Speed up Office 365 with WAN Optimization – Does it work?

We updated CloudReady for fully testing and monitoring WAN Optimization solutions
Read more about the updates here.

Does Wide-Area-Network (WAN) Optimization speed up Office 365? Many traditional vendors of WAN Opt solutions such as Riverbed, Akamai, Silver Peak and BlueCoat are touting their benefit when it comes to accelerating Software-as-a-Service solutions such as Office 365, SharePoint, Salesforce, Box, ServiceNow and others. While these WAN Opt solutions obviously provided great benefit in accelerating file sharing — its not so obvious how much they help when it comes to online SaaS applications.

Office 365 and other solutions like Workday are rapidly moving to overtake their legacy on-premises predecessors. The traditional approaches of installing appliances like Rivberbed Steelhead® at both ends of the pipe worked well before — but that’s just not possible with SaaS application delivery. Hybrid-WAN architectures that send some traffic through to your datacenter over MPLS and some traffic out over the internet for SaaS can easily have unintended consequences on performance, reliability and cost.

So what are the vendors afraid of you asking?

• Ask the vendors what is the best way to monitor the effectiveness of their solutions?
• How to baseline the before & after performance?
• End-user experience is what’s important. How do you monitor the end-to-end experience?
• What about when the SSL certificates go bad or something breaks?
• When the appliances stop working, how do you know what’s being affected?
• What to do when the SaaS provider is telling you all things are A-OK, but you’re users are complaining?

What our customers are telling us

We have customers that have deployed CloudReady before, during and after the installation or re-deployment of their Riverbed Steelhead® solutions. They have reported mixed results but mostly positive.

The results can vary depending on the application that is being optimized such as SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, Outlook Web App or others. In many cases these customers had already owned the solutions and re-purposed them now that there applications had moved to the cloud.

Monitor what matters

There’s the old adage, “What gets measured is what gets done”. In this case of hybrid SaaS/Cloud delivery of enterprise critical apps – its what gets monitored is what runs well. Monitoring the performance of Office 365, Salesforce, Workday and other cloud/SaaS services is critical to your organization. These solutions are becoming pervasive and your entire business is dependent on them and the network they run on. Monitor them with Exoprise CloudReady.