Today’s dispersed workforce requires responsive access to a wide variety of centrally managed applications. IT managers and network administrators therefore need to be able to predict, optimize, and troubleshoot how these applications perform over the wide-area network.

However, because application performance can be highly sensitive to bandwidth, latency, loss, and other WAN impairments, testing on the local network generally fails to identify critical issues that impact the end user experience.

Fortunately, a new generation of network simulation appliance makes it simple and affordable to test applications in the lab under real-world conditions, ensuring smooth roll-outs of new applications and helping to optimize the performance of existing applications.