Load Balancers for the New Age Corporate Environment

The business world today makes use of every available technology to withstand the aggressive competition prevalent in the environment.  With the growth in the use of various applications, across corporate environment, the IT departments have explored the possibilities of using dedicated servers. These are computer systems which are part of the corporate network and are kept apart for specific jobs so as to fasten the access and processing time. However, with the increasing demands on the part of the customers and business, every application adds up to more loading of the servers.

As technology moved ahead to provide the globalized business world anytime anywhere access to the corporate network through BYOD options, the possibility of the servers being overloaded only increased.  Such overloading of the servers would lead to  network getting clogged leading to reduced  speed in  performing the functions with a reduced access rate to the entire systems in the network.  This calls for the need of load balancers with a specific significance for busy Internet services wherein a software program helps tracking the clients access services and forwards requests to the "back-end" servers thus enhancing the performance of the website.

Wikipedia defines load balancing as "a computer networking methodology that distributes workload across multiple computers or computer clusters, network links, central processing units, disk drives, or other resources, to achieve optimal resource utilization, maximize throughput, minimize response time, and avoid overload. This increases the performance of servers and  leads to optimal utilization while  ensuring  that no particular server is burdened. Corporate networks of global enterprises, with vast data and application storage and data transfer activity,  small and medium business enterprises  and e-commerce websites resort to  load balancers.

In an era of technological innovation with remote desktop access available to increase the mobility of the workforce,  load balancers are an important element in a network and helps in evenly disseminating service or processing requests across numerous devices within the  network. Dedicated hardware, software and servers carry on these functions.

Depending on the factors such as speed of the network and server response time, load balancers requires work distribution between two or more dedicated servers. The new age load balancing solutions offered by leading service providers helps organizations leverage on the parallel multi-core processing with cost-efficient performance. Further these appliances offer the client organization a number of advantages which include :

• Aids in global and local server load balancing with  datacenter scalability.
• Facilitates swift implementation of optimized arrangements with application specific configurations and certifications guidelines
• Provides a  high-end application compatible  traffic management while catering for optimized delivery IP services and crucial business applications
• Safeguards applications without influencing performance with the help of firewalls and proxy designs.

The new age server load balancing appliances  which are designed for the modern data center, cloud and virtual environments help to boost application performance for both small and medium enterprises as well as large service providers.

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Application Delivery Controller 

Tablet Access

Ensure Complete Secure Remote Access with SSL VPN Solutions

Quickly gaining popularity as serious contenders in the remote-access marketplace Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) Virtual Private Networks are driving corporate success and increasing employee productivity and remote connectivity. As a remote access tool, it provides remote workers with a secure access to enterprise resources via the Internet by encrypting all communications between company networks and remote user machines. As VPN is the easiest place malicious attackers to get into a network, it is therefore important to have an effective VPN security policy to protect your company's critical technology assets.

Prior SSL VPN, remote desktop access needed administrators to install, configures, and maintains special software on the users’ computers. With VPNs being expensive and complicated to operate, remote access was only offered to a few corporate employees earlier. With SSL VPN all the limitations and concerns of remote access were done away. Offering security and control with unmatched safeguards for taking care of business-critical information, SSL VPN allows any computer with a Web browser to be used for remote access, with the SSL VPN technology

How it works

The next generation of VPN service, SSL VPN (Secure Sockets Layer Virtual Private Network) is available primarily for system administrators. SSL VPN functions to a great extent like traditional VPN, but adds additional connectivity and compatibility, utilizing the same encryption technology used by web sites to protect sensitive information. SSL VPN transmits data through an encrypted tunnel to a VPN concentrator, giving the appearance that the user is on the local network, regardless of the user's actual location. With integrated compression, connection pooling and hardware-accelerated encryption, there is fast performance for each user, even under the heaviest load.

Secure Remote Access

A secure RDP remote access VPN extends the perimeter of your network to the remote endpoints. An SSL VPN has been an entry point for security threats to enter the network. The ubiquity, versatility, and clientless nature of the SSL VPN provide significant business benefits and cost savings. With VPN or virtual private networking, there is a safe way for mobile workers to connect to the company's local area network to access their essential resources.

SSL VPN provides secure, protected access to resources, and ensures that the only traffic that goes through the encrypted tunnel is traffic that is approved by system administrators. The SSL VPN technology facilitates easy migration and makes it easier to deploy remote access solution than IPSec. Its balance of flexibility and function makes it exceedingly competitive.

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BYOD 

Tablet Access 

Unplanned PTOs- Ensure Business Continuity with Remote Access Solutions

When most enterprises talk about business disruptions, they equate it to major-scale events or catastrophic disasters such as H1N1 outbreak, earthquake, volcano, hurricane, power failures, or terrorist attacks. Hence, they engage in a form of business continuity planning (BCP) to protect against interruptions that disrupt continuous business operations. Even IT system crashes, communication failures and supply chain problems are included in the list of business disruptions. However, what these enterprises fail to surmise is that even events considered as minor and mundane can result in losses. Bad traffic, seasonal snowstorms, and even employees taking the occasional unplanned PTO (paid time off) are often categorized as mundane events. However, these mundane disruptions cost businesses money – a fact that even enterprises are not aware of. Let’s look at the impact of a mundane event like unplanned PTO on an enterprise’s bottom line.

PTO or Paid time off is a bank of hours that an employee uses at his/her discretion. Employees take unplanned PTOs in order to take care of an issue at home such as a sick child or waiting for a delivery or contractor. Here employees take PTOs to deal with some personal issues. However, there are situations where employees are forced to take PTOs for no personal reasons. Take for instance, seasonal snowstorms, bad traffic, transit strikes and so on where employees have no option but to be away from the office and work. These are events that can (and do) happen on any given day and prevent employees from getting to the office.

Unlike planned PTOs informed in advance and accounted for in the budget, unplanned PTOs affect an enterprise badly. These unplanned PTOs result in losses, which are greater than most would imagine. This is because employees take PTO without prior notice and therefore it may not be possible to adequately back fill their role. This results in neglected tasks and delayed critical business processes. Hence, what enterprises must do is not only develop business plans for critical as well as minor events but also deploy RDP remote desktop access solutions to ensure business continuity. Such a move would help save revenue by allowing employees to get to work, even when they cannot get to the office.

In the absence of remote desktop access solutions, the so-called ‘mundane’ events are not so mundane at all.

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BYOD

Mobilize All Applications with Advanced Desktop Solutions for BYOD

In this technology driven environment, many workers want tablet access to business applications, often from personal devices. Apps have become quite important in the last few years, making our work and life much simpler and easier. Enterprises may have numerous applications, but the security and cost implications of mobilizing every application can get daunting.

Many organizations are exposed to problems such as security gaps, compliance issues and rising IT complexity without proper solutions in place. To enable tablet remote access to personal iPad or Android devices, enterprises need a RDP solution that can be installed in the corporate network and integrates with Active Directory or similar to establish user credentials for secure access.

With a good appliance solution you can have Remote Desktop access that will make you more productive and generative, allowing an employee to work from anywhere and at any time. Deploying such a solution will enable tablet remote access for employees, and also allow enterprises to get a cost-effective solution that is fully secure and fully under IT control and at the same time provides full application availability, supports a bring your own device strategy and is simple to deploy, manage and use.

The BYOD phenomenon can make a tremendous difference and along with a good appliance solution that facilitates Remote Desktop access, employees can be more productive. These bring your own device solutions provide an efficient, cost-effective means to support tablets in the enterprise while preventing data leakage and providing full application availability. 

The appliance-based solution that you invest in must be enterprise owned and operated and not open the corporate network to third party networks. It must allow Tablet remote desktop connectivity to the end-user iPad and Android devices using SSL. A conventional PC work environment must be allowed to all employees unlike server-based computing. All employees enterprise-wide must be provided with complete application availability without any need for new hardware or software, licenses or application environments.

As tablets and remote devices are “off-network”, security and compliance policies on office PCs must be extended and maintained. This way data never leaves the network, never mixes with personal data and never exists on remote devices. It must leverage the existing desktop, application and security infrastructure. Look for a solution that is cost-effective and can be set up in as little a few hours and is capable of achieving ROI in the time it takes to set up alternate solutions.

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Server Load Balancing