Expand Networks is a pioneer and innovator of WAN Optimization technologies. It’s
solutions enable accelerated delivery and guaranteed performance of business critical
applications and services within virtualized WAN environments and across distributed
enterprise infrastructures
As organizations look to rationalize their IT infrastructures through initiatives
such as server consolidation – re-trenching servers from the branch office back
to the datacenter – there is still a need for server based functions such as print
and file share services. Expand’s WAN Optimization solution with its integrated
‘virtual server’ technology enables complete server consolidation by replacing the
need for an additional branch office file server.
By creating a ‘Virtual Proximity’ experience Expand solutions deliver a superior
end user environment, closing the user/application ‘proximity gap’ and putting the
user in ‘virtual proximity’ of applications and datacenter services.
Cost savings and concerns over data security have made server consolidation a top
priority in IT. Eliminating servers at the edge of the network and consolidating
them in the datacenter significantly lowers management and monitoring costs. Having
a single repository of data within an organization that can be controlled in a central
spot simplifies data security and meets regulatory requirements
Infrastructure consolidation and virtualization is no longer a trend, but a business
imperative for providing improved ROI, hardware utilization, and management. Companies
are collapsing, leveraging virtualization, and migrating edge servers, software,
and IT resources at record rates. When successful, consolidation leads to solid
returns, but when challenged by wide area network constraints consolidation projects
regularly fall short. No matter what approach to consolidation you choose, Expand
Accelerators deliver the true experience of server and application proximity to
physically distributed enterprises over the WAN.
Today, organizations of all kinds are increasing their reliance on wide area networks
(WANs) to provide their employees, partners and customers with better access to
information and applications. Delivering access to applications over the WAN is
now an essential aspect of any IT strategy, a way to reduce Total Cost of Ownership
(TCO) and improve Return on Investment (ROI) — for example, through server-based
computing and server consolidation strategies that remove servers out of the branch
offices to consolidate and centralize them in the datacenter, usually based on a
virtualization infrastructure.
SMB signing was designed to prevent “man-in-the-middle” attacks.
Almost any network conversation can be the target of “man-in-the-middle” (MITM)
attacks. The usual tactic is for the attacker to position between the client and
the server and proxy all communication between them. From this perspective, the
attacker can observe and record all transactions. The attacker can proxy this communication
by means of a program that appears to be the server to the client, and conversely
appears to be the client to the server. Maliciously, the attack may be used simply
to read the messages, or even more insidiously, this proxy position could enable
the attacker to modify communication before retransmitting them.
Dangerous not only to the organization that is directly attacked, MITM attacks can
also make victims of any other parties to the communications or transactions. Consider
the case of a client system and a server system exchanging information and an attacker
intercepting the transactions passing back and forth. It is just as easy for the
attacker to modify messages designated to the client as it is to the server – the
server system could receive completely legitimate communication, while the client
systems’ communications are altered without the knowledge of the server system.