Today, IT organizations are increasingly squeezed by competing demands. They must support more distributed users who demand greater availability and performance. They must protect their digital assets with far more robust security. And they must do it all while gaining far greater control over cost. Distributing IT resources increases management, hardware, and software overhead, but centralizing IT can worsen application performance. There is a solution to this quandary: Cisco application acceleration and WAN optimization technologies that permit IT to safely centralize distributed IT resources, meeting user performance expectations without replacing existing network infrastructure.