Avoiding WAN Acceleration

Many organizations deploy multiple sites that are separated by wide area network (WAN) connectivity with limited bandwidth, and work to deploy WAN accelerator devices that help optimize the traffic by compressing network traffic. WAN accelerators work only if both sides of a network contain the same device that can compress and then unpack the traffic identically.

Unfortunately, the connections used by Lync servers and clients are completely encrypted, so the accelerator devices are unable to efficiently compress the traffic. WAN accelerators can even negatively affect an audio stream or persistent TLS connections between servers in different sites. A best practice is to exclude all Lync server IP addresses from any form of traffic optimization devices.