A general lack of support for Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) traffic acceleration has slowed the penetration of WAN optimization appliances into enterprise infrastructures. For enterprises that make heavy use of SSL connections over WAN links, recent announcements indicate that widespread WAN optimization support for SSL is imminent.

The Need for SSL Traffic Acceleration

The WAN optimization market has been growing at a tremendous rate, as more enterprises invest in appliance solutions to boost application performance between sites. These appliances typically utilize a number of traffic optimization techniques to boost WAN performance, including caching and compression, TCP acceleration and application-specific data prediction and queuing schemes. However, WAN optimization appliances have generally lacked support for SSL traffic acceleration, and for enterprises using Web-enabled ERP and CRM applications that rely on SSL encryption, this deficiency has significant drawbacks.

Considering the continued growth of enterprise Web services and increasing volumes of SSL traffic, SSL traffic acceleration is quickly becoming a requirement for many enterprises. Because of the method of encryption...