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5 Primary Business Drivers Pushing WAN Optimization Boundaries

Brendan Reid

According to a recent survey of networking personnel from midsized enterprises and education institutions, 65% of respondents expressed that current WAN optimization solutions are not sufficient to handle the growing complexity presented by networks which increasingly span multiple devices, geographies and cloud infrastructures.

Michael Sharma, CEO for Exinda Networks, noted that his company continues to hear from network managers that it's getting harder to meet user experience SLAs. As more applications, devices, users, locations and activities are flooding the network, Exinda customers have identified five key business problems that their WAN solution must now solve.

Survey results identified five key challenges a WAN Solution must address to meet the demands of the modern network landscape. Respondents reported experiencing the following challenges:

· Ensuring resources for critical applications (69%)

· Enforcing appropriate network use (57%)

· Reducing WAN circuit speed (49%)

· Troubleshooting networking problems (34%)

· Supporting critical IT projects (20%)

The need to address these issues is driving network and IT managers to look beyond conventional WAN solutions which are traditionally delivered as independent tools for traffic acceleration and bandwidth management.

The challenge for network managers today is that traditional WAN solutions tend to be narrowly focused on solving singular problems without regard for the bigger picture - an issue that led nearly 68% of respondents to state that current solutions would soon no longer meet their needs. These changing dynamics within the enterprise network have created the need for a more orchestrated approach to critical IT priorities.

Zeus Kerravala, Principal Analyst at ZK Research, added, "A change in approach is needed to proactively manage today’s network. As a result of increased user and application complexity, solving our most pressing IT problems is becoming a bigger challenge. To pragmatically solve network management issues, IT needs to think beyond traditional WAN solution approaches, which historically have focused on traffic acceleration. Network managers must instead intelligently coordinate all aspects of their WAN environment."

Brendan Reid is VP of Marketing, Exinda Networks.

Related Links:

www.exinda.com

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5 Primary Business Drivers Pushing WAN Optimization Boundaries

Brendan Reid

According to a recent survey of networking personnel from midsized enterprises and education institutions, 65% of respondents expressed that current WAN optimization solutions are not sufficient to handle the growing complexity presented by networks which increasingly span multiple devices, geographies and cloud infrastructures.

Michael Sharma, CEO for Exinda Networks, noted that his company continues to hear from network managers that it's getting harder to meet user experience SLAs. As more applications, devices, users, locations and activities are flooding the network, Exinda customers have identified five key business problems that their WAN solution must now solve.

Survey results identified five key challenges a WAN Solution must address to meet the demands of the modern network landscape. Respondents reported experiencing the following challenges:

· Ensuring resources for critical applications (69%)

· Enforcing appropriate network use (57%)

· Reducing WAN circuit speed (49%)

· Troubleshooting networking problems (34%)

· Supporting critical IT projects (20%)

The need to address these issues is driving network and IT managers to look beyond conventional WAN solutions which are traditionally delivered as independent tools for traffic acceleration and bandwidth management.

The challenge for network managers today is that traditional WAN solutions tend to be narrowly focused on solving singular problems without regard for the bigger picture - an issue that led nearly 68% of respondents to state that current solutions would soon no longer meet their needs. These changing dynamics within the enterprise network have created the need for a more orchestrated approach to critical IT priorities.

Zeus Kerravala, Principal Analyst at ZK Research, added, "A change in approach is needed to proactively manage today’s network. As a result of increased user and application complexity, solving our most pressing IT problems is becoming a bigger challenge. To pragmatically solve network management issues, IT needs to think beyond traditional WAN solution approaches, which historically have focused on traffic acceleration. Network managers must instead intelligently coordinate all aspects of their WAN environment."

Brendan Reid is VP of Marketing, Exinda Networks.

Related Links:

www.exinda.com

Exinda Joins the Vendor Forum

Hot Topics

The Latest

Enterprises are under pressure to scale AI quickly. Yet despite considerable investment, adoption continues to stall. One of the most overlooked reasons is vendor sprawl ... In reality, no organization deliberately sets out to create sprawling vendor ecosystems. More often, complexity accumulates over time through well-intentioned initiatives, such as enterprise-wide digital transformation efforts, point solutions, or decentralized sourcing strategies ...

Nearly every conversation about AI eventually circles back to compute. GPUs dominate the headlines while cloud platforms compete for workloads and model benchmarks drive investment decisions. But underneath that noise, a quieter infrastructure challenge is taking shape. The real bottleneck in enterprise AI is not processing power, it is the ability to store, manage and retrieve the relentless volumes of data that AI systems generate, consume and multiply ...

The 2026 Observability Survey from Grafana Labs paints a vivid picture of an industry maturing fast, where AI is welcomed with careful conditions, SaaS economics are reshaping spending decisions, complexity remains a defining challenge, and open standards continue to underpin it all ...

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In the modern enterprise, the conversation around AI has moved past skepticism toward a stage of active adoption. According to our 2026 State of IT Trends Report: The Human Side of Autonomous AI, nearly 90% of IT professionals view AI as a net positive, and this optimism is well-founded. We are seeing agentic AI move beyond simple automation to actively streamlining complex data insights and eliminating the manual toil that has long hindered innovation. However, as we integrate these autonomous agents into our ecosystems, the fundamental DNA of the IT role is evolving ...

AI workloads require an enormous amount of computing power ... What's also becoming abundantly clear is just how quickly AI's computing needs are leading to enterprise systems failure. According to Cockroach Labs' State of AI Infrastructure 2026 report, enterprise systems are much closer to failure than their organizations realize. The report ... suggests AI scale could cause widespread failures in as little as one year — making it a clear risk for business performance and reliability.

The quietest week your engineering team has ever had might also be its best. No alarms going off. No escalations. No frantic Teams or Slack threads at 2 a.m. Everything humming along exactly as it should. And somewhere in a leadership meeting, someone looks at the metrics dashboard, sees a flat line of incidents and says: "Seems like things are pretty calm over there. Do we really need all those people?" ... I've spent many years in engineering, and this pattern keeps repeating ...

The gap is widening between what teams spend on observability tools and the value they receive amid surging data volumes and budget pressures, according to The Breaking Point for Observability Leaders, a report from Imply ...

Seamless shopping is a basic demand of today's boundaryless consumer — one with little patience for friction, limited tolerance for disconnected experiences and minimal hesitation in switching brands. Customers expect intuitive, highly personalized experiences and the ability to move effortlessly across physical and digital channels within the same journey. Failure to deliver can cost dearly ...

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