Ensure the Secure Running of Appliances with Effective Load Balancers

While dependable internet connectivity has become imperative, it is load balancing that helps in achieving a greater bandwidth. Load balancing helps distribute workload over two or more servers in order to achieve increased redundancy, scalability or security. It has specific significance in busy networks, especially when it is challenging to predict the number of requests that will be issued to a server. While it not only increases the performance of servers, load balancing leads to their optimal utilization while also ensuring that no particular server is burdened.

Load balancing spreads the work of your managed server among two or more servers, optimizing resources, and output and response times. If a server fails in any way, requests are routed to other servers as per a predetermined standard to eliminate downtime. In load balancing, security is always important. Load balancers normally bring with them the added benefit of hiding the network and servers that are behind the scenes doing the actual work for the requested service.

Requesting a map service from one URL (the load balancer) may actually be assembled from many different servers that were behind a firewall. Since only the load balancer is allowed to communicate through the firewall security is increased as there would only be one point of entry. Some load balancers also come equipped with some analysis capabilities to detect denial of service attacks and take preventative measures.

With the increase in the size of an enterprise, there is an increase in the strain on the databases, network servers, and other crucial areas.  Especially effective for organizations that use multiple data centers and server farms, load balancing solutions monitor the workload of servers and help to direct users. Distributing the work load is important but being able to automatically detect and handle the failure and the recovery of back-end servers is crucial. Load balancers offer many different capabilities in this area. While some can only detect if the server is alive and on the network, others have very elaborate methods such as retrieving content from pre-determined web pages.

Depending on the hardware and organizational needs, it's important to speak with a reputable provider about implementing and customizing this solution to your needs. Each network faces different challenges and works within different constraints. Look for a service provider who can leverage parallel multi-core processing to cost-effectively drive industry-leading performance across a rich server load balancing and application acceleration feature set for unmatched total value of ownership.

 

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SSL VPNs

Increase Productivity and Ensure Security with SSL VPNs

In today’s business environment, where consumerization of IT has resulted in the popularity of the concept of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD), employees, partners, customers, contractors and guests want remote access to business applications anywhere at any time. Though ensuring remote access helps enterprises to increase productivity, it is highly necessary that enterprises make sure that security and compliance are equally maintained. With security breaches being a serious issue, enterprises must ensure secure remote access so that authorized personnel can quickly access the resources and applications without compromising on security. That is where Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) come useful.

 

A VPN is defined as “a network that uses a public telecommunication infrastructure, such as the Internet, to provide remote offices or individual users with secure access to their organization's network.” Simply put, VPNs allow organizations to send and receive data across shared or public networks by creating a private or secure network over the public network. That means with VPN, public networks get all the functionalities, security and management policies of the private network but at a much lower cost.

 

Traditional VPNs rely on IPSec (Internet Protocol Security) to establish a secure tunnel between the two endpoints. However, today mostly SSL VPNs (Secure Sockets Layer Virtual Private Networks) are used. This is because apart from offering versatility and ease of use, SSL VPN does not require the installation of specialized client software on the end user's computer. The versatility and granular control for a range of users from any Bring Your Own Device - BYOD and any location is what SSL VPN offers the clientele.

 

Here is a look at some of the benefits of using a best of breed SSL VPN solution.

• Anytime, anywhere browser-based secure remote desktop access, enables increased productivity for employees, partners, tenants, customers, contractors and guests

• Up to 3.2 Gbps throughput, 128,000 concurrent users and 500,000 users on a single access gateway appliance for maintaining security and driving productivity at scale

• 256 virtual SSL VPN portals on a single appliance, customizable to the security and usability preferences of multiple tenants and communities of interest

• Per-user policy engine for identity-based access to URLs, files, networks and applications

• Controlled access from managed and un-managed devices including desktops, laptops, tablets and smart phones

• Cross-platform support for a range of operating systems and browsers

• Range of access methods including Web, Layer-3 and client-server connectivity

• High-performance 1024, 2048 and 4096-bit SSL encrypted communications

• Endpoint security including host-checking, cache cleaning and adaptive policies

• Supports a range of AAA and dual-factor authentication schemes

• No pre-installed clients; eliminates firewall and network traversal issues common to traditional VPNs

• Familiar CLI and WebUI for ease of configuration and management 

Thus, SSL VPN offers greater levels of security, a greater range of access methods, a broader range of device support and the ability to provide differentiated, identity-based access tailored to the needs of multiple communities of interest.

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Importance of Server Load Balancing

The modern day enterprise network today manages greater requirements than before and hence the cost of failure is also heavy. The network is placed at the center of the IT architecture, connecting all storage, server and other infrastructure constituents within the data center and performance or downtime concerns can have profound impacts on the overall business.

 

Server load balancing has been the central point of providing network competency and scalability for over a decade now. Evolving from the initial days of the internet boom where they were used to offer resilience to enterprise web architectures, server load balancers today comprise the enterprise utilities that are essential to assist in critical mission enterprise applications. Today innovative practices such as Virtualization and advanced data centers are putting a greater pressure on the network in terms of reliability, bandwidth demands, scalability and competency with the network managers struggling to keep up the same. The network engineers need better solutions that seamlessly fit into their network infrastructure and are extremely manageable and help them to make efficient and minimize their operating expenses.

 

Network managers need solutions that are scalable and robust that they can be effectively placed into the network core. They are on the lookout for a product with efficient software and hardware performance to cater to the highest scalability and performance needs. Thus server load balancing remains an essential technology to assist these practices and is a basic building block within a data center structure and needs to be involved in any ongoing high-end network service implementation. Today server load balancing has become a basic solution virtually in almost all data centers. However, the modern day application delivery controllers (ADC) represent a great amount of evolution that has taken place from a simple server load balancing. Application delivery controllers provided by service providers comes with a multi-core architecture that supports huge throughput and a higher percentage of concurrent connections for scaling application availability without influencing the application performance.

 

Regardless, of whether you are accountable for a website or a single application, a huge internet property or public or a private cloud, advanced server load balancers offers the required scalability, performance, features and value for needed to pace up your business. Furthermore, it efficiently manages and monitors the health of the servers, evenly disseminates loads all through the servers and retains session persistence and provides for an effortless user experience when any one of the servers becomes overloaded or dysfunctional.

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BYOD

Recent Trends in Tablet Access

With the increasing numbers of tablet computers and e-readers prevalent in the market today, it is difficult to believe that it’s a new technology. Research studies reveal that consumers quickly embrace tablets as they did Smartphone’s, appreciating the technology for its mobility, simplicity of use, instant access to files, books, and the internet. According to Worldwide Quarterly Media Tablet and eReader Tracker that is monitored by the International Data Corporation, global tablet shipment increased by 88.9 percent sequentially and 303.8 percent annually in the second quarter of 2011 to approximately 13.6 million units.

While mobile phone usage has been increasing for years and most Americans’ cell phones became Smartphones by 2012, tablet access is now overshadowing the Smartphone numbers three times with the Apple iPad to iPhone adoption. Hence, one can say that the computing platform along with our individual lifestyles is going away from desktops and even laptops, with users depending heavily on Smartphones and tablet access devices for staying connected with others, sharing information and even doing daily business. Increasingly, the high executives and the mobile workers too are giving up the laptop for a tablet access, Bluetooth keyboard and a suite of applications to get on with the day’s work while being a part of a conference or any other event. The consumer and end user expectations are very high in terms of browsing a website for data purposes, to finish a task and make a donation or purchase. They expect a browsing experience similar to the simple and perceptive navigation that is prevalent in purchasing a book on Amazon or experience the compact visual experience in a social networking site like Twitter or Facebook. On the other hand 16 percent of enterprises had a BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) policy in 2011 as compared to 8 percent in 2010. The modern day employees want tablet access and most forward thinking enterprises are resorting to tablets for the workforce quickly.

Secure Tablet Access for Enterprise Desktop Applications

The security and the absence of native mobile applications for business are two critical hassles in the way of enterprise mobility. Though the native applications for businesses are rising in quantity, the majority of applications still operate in a conventional environment for instance laptops, desktops, terminal servers and virtual architecture. Today service providers of application delivery controllers have come up with tablet access solutions that help to mobilize the desktop applications with a remote RDP access (remote desktop) allowing companies and individuals to implement the solutions and leverage from the present infrastructure.

Advanced tablet access solutions publish the enterprise applications in a secure manner for it to be used on mobile devices. Regardless of whether your applications are functioning on desktop PC’s, virtual architectures, laptops or terminal servers these solutions offer identity-based access from any mobile device to certain enterprise application in a way that simplifies the user experience, enhances the security and functional efficiency.

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Server Load Balancing