Cisco WAAS is centrally managed by a scalable, secure, and simple function called the Cisco WAAS Central Manager that runs on Cisco WAE appliances. The central manager can be configured for high availability by deploying a pair of Cisco WAEs as central managers; configuration and monitoring data is automatically shared by the two central manager WAEs. The central manager provides a centralized mechanism for configuring features and reporting and can manage a topology containing thousands of Cisco WAE nodes. The central manager can be accessed from a Web browser, allowing management from essentially anywhere in the world. Access to the central manager is secured and encrypted with Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), and users can be authenticated through a local database or a third-party authentication service such as RADIUS, TACACS, or Microsoft Active Directory. Within a Cisco WAAS topology, each Cisco WAE runs a process called central management system (CMS). The CMS process provides SSL-encrypted bidirectional con