he Cisco Wide Area Application Services (WAAS) Network Module for the Cisco Integrated Services Routers (ISR) is a powerful WAN optimization and application acceleration solution that enables branch office server consolidation, improves performance for centralized applications, and provides remote users with LAN-like access to applications, storage, and content across the WAN. Distributed organizations face significant challenges in the deployment, management, and protection of remote office infrastructure, while at the same time needing to deliver increasingly rich application content and services to remote users. While performance and scalability constraints imposed by the WAN directly impact the ability of a remote worker to maintain productivity, there is a conflicting pressure to centralize distributed application and file services infrastructure into corporate data centers. Cisco WAAS enables organizations to centralize applications and services in the data center and to control the explosive growth in bandwidth requirements generated by new applications and business processes, while improving throughput and responsiveness for existing applications in a transparent manner. This enables collaborative applications, reduces costs, and helps organizations meet regulatory compliance requirements, while leveraging current infrastructure and IT resources. The Cisco WAAS Network Module belongs to the Cisco Wide Area Application Engine (WAE) family of network modules and appliances that host the Cisco WAAS Software. The Cisco WAE platforms deployed with Cisco WAAS overcome performance barriers created by the WAN through a sophisticated combination of application acceleration and WAN optimization techniques that mitigate application and transport latency, improve throughput, and minimize WAN bandwidth consumption for any TCP based application. The Cisco WAAS Network Module simplifies deployment and management by physically integrating with the Cisco ISR as an add-on module and logically through the transparent integration of Cisco WAAS with the existing network, allowing preservation of existing network policies, automatic discovery across any network topology, and end-to-end application traffic visibility for ease of monitoring, control, and troubleshooting. The Cisco WAAS Network Module combined with the Cisco ISR offers customers a WAN optimization and application acceleration solution that significantly lowers total cost of ownership (TCO), dramatically improves application performance, optimizes WAN utilization, and simplifies data protection in an easy-to-deploy package.