WAN optimization controllers (WOCs) in the enterprise WAN enable application centralization by mitigating latency effects and reducing bandwidth costs through the use of bandwidth reduction algorithms, network-level optimization, and other application layer protocol spoofing and optimization techniques that may compensate for lossy links. SoftWOCs provide these benefits to individual devices. WOCs are used for data-center-to-data-center WAN links for data replication to support business continuity/disaster recovery (BC/DR) requirements.