Editing Traffic shaping (section)

==Enterprises==
{{Unreferenced section|date=March 2020}}
Most companies with remote offices are now connected via a [[wide area network]] (WAN).  Applications tend to be centrally hosted at the head office and remote offices are expected to pull data from central [[database]]s and [[server farm]]s.  As applications become more hungry in terms of bandwidth and prices of dedicated circuits being relatively high in most areas of the world, instead of increasing the size of their WAN circuits, companies feel the need to properly manage their circuits to make sure business-oriented traffic gets priority over other traffic.  Traffic shaping is thus a good means for companies to avoid purchasing additional bandwidth while properly managing these resources.

Alternatives to traffic shaping in this regard are application acceleration and [[WAN optimization]] and compression, which are fundamentally different from traffic shaping. Traffic shaping defines bandwidth rules whereas application acceleration using multiple techniques like a TCP [[performance-enhancing proxy]]. WAN optimization, on the other hand, compresses data streams or sends only differences in file updates. The latter is quite effective for chatty protocols like [[CIFS]].