Increasing Enterprise Application Performance with Route Optimization

For enterprises in performance-intensive industries, the ability to ensure fast, uninterrupted access and availability for key applications and content is critical. Disruptions and lags can impact everything from business performance and revenues to customer loyalty and satisfaction. This is why tens of thousands of enterprises are running multi-homed (aka "multi-carrier") networks — to try to increase the likelihood of better speed and availability for their business-critical apps. The problem is, manual management of multiple carrier networks is complex, costly and time consuming.

The next step for these enterprises is to overcome the inherent performance limitations of the Internet's “best effort” standard routing technology, Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). Both software-defined WAN and route optimization use software to improve routing decisions across a wide area network. As a core component of an SD-WAN framework, route optimization simplifies network management and ultimately maximizes reliability, availability and performance. In this slideshow, global hosting provider Internap walks through the shortcomings of BGP, the ways route optimization can lead to better-performing applications, and the use cases that can benefit most from this switch.