From banking to retail, organizations today rely heavily on their branches to provide the best experience possible to their customers. Cisco Wide Area Application Services (WAAS) is a comprehensive WAN optimization solution that accelerates applications over the WAN, delivers video to the branch office, and provides local hosting of branch-office IT services, such as DNS, Active Directory, DHCP and Print Services. Cisco WAAS helps IT departments centralize applications and storage in the data center while maintaining LAN-like application performance, and provide locally hosted IT services while reducing the overall branch-office device footprint by consolidating Windows Servers.

Cisco WAAS enables organizations to accomplish four primary IT objectives:

• Application acceleration: Improve productivity of remote employees
• IT consolidation and WAN optimization: Minimize branch IT costs and maximize the return on investment (ROI) on WAN bandwidth; potentially enabling more applications to be deployed
• Branch IT agility: Respond rapidly to changing business needs
• Simplified data protection: Ease compliance and business continuity