It is beginning to dawn on many ICT managers in schools that that traditional networking, security, and management solutions alone cannot solve this problem. In most cases the infrastructure they rely on to deliver applications to end-users simply was not designed with modern application realities in mind, leading to:

• Massive over-provisioning
• Buying too much bandwidth
• Adding too many servers
• Refreshing PCs on an increasingly short lifecycle

All just to keep up with growing application requirements.

What is needed is a new approach that delivers an end-to-end application delivery strategy.
This will make it easy to deliver any application to any user with the best performance, highest security, and lowest cost. A strategy that utilises products that work well with your existing infrastructure, removing the need for substantial new investment.

4 steps to successful application delivery

The best way to do this is to employ a four stage approach:

1.Control applications at their source - An end-to-end application delivery strategy should start with infrastructure products that are deployed in the datacenter, directly in front of applications - products that control the initial delivery of these applications as close as possible to their source. These need to allow for the different types of applications that now exist - Web applications, Windows applications and the Windows desktop

2.Secure access to applications - A second key consideration in developing a successful application delivery strategy is making it 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. Next generation SSL VPNs are typically much easier to install and are specifically designed to provide application-layer access to the exact application resources each user needs

3.Optimise applications over the WAN - Traditional networks were never designed to deliver the kind of application traffic they are expected to handle today, especially with applications like voice and video over the network. WAN optimisation products address this problem by automatically optimising 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

4.Monitor the end user experience - The success of any application delivery strategy also rests on the ability of ICT to truly monitor the experience of end users, especially with regards to application performance. Giving ICT management visibility into exactly what the application experience feels like for end-users makes it much easier to maintain service levels and spot bottlenecks before they become issues, and quickly diagnose problems when they do occur

This new approach to delivering applications will ensure that every type of application that exists today can be successfully, securely and consistently delivered to your users, no matter where they are located.