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.

 

Related Links

Application Delivery

SSL VPNs

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.

Related Links

SSL VPNs

BYOD

Ensuring Enterprise Mobility with BYOD Strategy

The arrival of IT consumerization has brought with it tech savvy consumers with a multitude of new age devices and equally adept at handling the latest technologies. Further, the growth of Internet led social media has also made the employees closer to their mobile devices. Armed with smartphones, tablets and new-age laptops, today’s employees demand greater mobility and prefer to use their personal devices at work. Enterprises need to embark on such ventures and provide employees with the freedom at work.

The BYOD (Bring your own device) concept is simple as it sounds. However, allowing employees to use personal mobile devices at work, the organizations face a number of challenges. Being in a technologically enabled and cybercrime filled business environment, the enterprises need to enable access to business applications without exposing the corporate network and avoiding any data leakage. Further, enterprises also need to make the changes in the existing infrastructure and applications to provide employees availability and access to business applications.

In an attempt to provide a cost-effective BYOD strategy, enterprises will need to work out RDP solutions enabling easy access to their remote desktop through any mobile devices chosen by the employees. Further, with the help of proxy architecture and RDP over SSL, enterprises can allow for anytime anywhere access to the applications and also ensure that data will not leave the corporate network. Such solutions developed by the leading service providers will enable seamless mobilization of the applications used by the enterprise and will also eliminate the chances of data leakage.

Reports from the online business community Entrepreneur Country claims that a simple strategy as BYOD at work can boost employee morale. Further, based on a poll of more than 300 CEO’s of small and medium enterprises showcased an affirmative response to RDP remote access and BYOD as a means to position their organizations as a flexible and employee friendly one besides being an effective business continuity planning solution. With technological growth enabling mobility and accessibility to business critical data and native applications across the enterprise with smartphones or any other devices irrespective of the location the enterprises are at risk of overloading of the corporate network.

While the use of load balancer distributes the load over the network, the appliance-based solution which is enterprise owned takes full control of the IT infrastructure and ensures closure of corporate network to third-parties. However, connectivity to personal devices is encrypted over SSL and the secure proxy architecture eliminating data leakage and potential attacks.

The innovative appliance based remote desktop access solutions have paved way for BYOD to make significant inroads into the business world. Today, with large number of employees across the global environment already using their own technology devices at work, has provided enterprises solutions that supports mix physical or virtual desktops and applications thereby maximizing the ability of the existing infrastructure while reducing complexities.

Related Links

Load Balancing

SSL VPNs

Load Balancers And Their Role in Global Environment

A technological innovation over the period has facilitated the business enterprises with digital workspaces. The corporate offices work through highly networked environment and use large number of software applications for the day-to-day operational requirements. Further with globalization, these enterprises have also expanded globally with distantly located regions. However, real-time connectivity between all the far-off offices and remotely working project teams are maintained with the help of dedicated servers.

The technological enhancements further made it possible for the offshore teams, outsourced vendors and remote workforce to access the corporate network irrespective of the distance and device. Such anytime anywhere access to the various applications, files and folders from the office workstation and business critical data and information taxes the servers and the network when loaded with increasing demands. Added to this the BYOD apps available only increases the load on the servers and clogging of the network leading to reduced speed and performance. Under such circumstances, load balancers help the enterprises in easing out the situations.

Load balancers are generally used in heavy traffic laden computer networks like the Internet and corporate networks of multinational companies. Defined as a computer networking methodology load balancing helps to distribute the workload across multiple resources to achieve optimal utilization with maximum throughput, and minimum response time. , and avoid overload. Dedicated hardware, software and servers carry on these functions. The software program helps to track the front-end client’s access services and forwards requests to the back-end servers to enhance website performance as well as reduce the burden of a particular server.  

Further with most of the global enterprises having distantly located project teams working either in offshore locations or forms a part of the mobile workforce, providing them with remote desktop access and to the corporate data becomes very important. Networks of large corporate houses or small and medium enterprises or data centers with vast amount of data and application storage and transfer resort to use of load balancers.

For the new age enterprises load balancers  offers essential benefits such as:

●  Minimized load on individual systems with reduced response time
●  Maximum network utilization
●  It enhances reliability and improves user satisfaction.

However, with issues relating to web securities, the load balancers intelligently routes the hypertext transfer protocol traffic to servers which are involved in controlling access to websites. Besides these also scan the traffic for any spyware, phishing attacks and malicious components entering the network thus ensuring an efficient system of business continuity planning. 

Other Links

Server Load Balancing

SSL VPNs

Reasons to Consider a BYOD Strategy

BYOD also known as Bring Your Own Device has been a latest buzzword in the IT landscape. However, prior to implementing it is essential to understand the reason behind supporting it. Most common BYOD business objectives revolve around minimizing mobile expenses or enhance the overall organization productivity or perhaps both. In the recent times, many companies have shared their case studies on BYOD best practices that help other organizations pick up necessary guidelines.

However, if minimizing mobile expenses are your sole BYOD business aim, then you need to convince your employees to pay not only for their own devices but also include some other elements of voice and data service expenses, even though those services are used for other business purposes. Though it might just appear unlikely for business workers to accept employee pays BYOD model, the fact remains that such an arrangement can and does work. There have been instances where enterprises have replaced 100’s and even 1000’s of company owned Blackberry devices with BYOD iOS and Android devices, all of it with an “employee pays” approach.

This apart, it  is also crucial to respect employee privacy. It is a must for the success of any BYOD program, but more so if a company is opting in for the “employee pays” mode. Not unlike customers’ experiences and expectation revolving around the use of laptops. PC’s and broadband services for work causes, an “employee pay” approach actually works. However, it might face complexities if the enterprise expects to monitor and limit what they can do when they are operating in a “personal” mode. Today the most security-conscious and regulated and government agencies too can broadly assist BYOD and cater to their data loss prevention, security and compliance requirements and at the same time ensure employee privacy.

Today's top notch solution providers have come up with remote desktop access solutions for tablet access as well as BYOD. As opposed to the SSL VPN’s this solution allows the employees to access the virtual and physical office desktops from any remote location while keeping remote devices of the network. Irrespective of whether the user is at home, a meeting, at a client seminar hall or on the site, or on their android, iPhone or iPad device they can operate just as easily as they would if they were in an office having access to all the required documents.

Today employees wish to have tablet access to business applications for their personal devices so that they can balance work and home. Innovative, Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) service providers with their innovative solutions offer an effective, meaningful and cost-efficient method to assist tablets in the organization while averting data leakage and offering complete application accessibility.

Other Links

IT Help Desk Software

Mobile Workforce and BYOD, the Newest Trends in the Industry

The influx of new communication devices and solutions in the corporate environment resulted in the workforce becoming increasingly mobile. Take for instance, remote desktop access and SSL VPNs, which has made it possible for the workforce to make the choice with respect to location and time. Similarly, very many technological innovations have made the concept of office obsolete. The concept of 9 to 5 job is outdated, since it is no longer practicable in an environment that is highly competitive and volatile. Today employees do not need an office atmosphere to be productive. It is the era of mobile offices where the employees choose the office location, which can be their home, library, coffee shop, public Internet kiosk, airport lounges so on and so forth.

One of the important advantages of mobile officing is greater productivity. Employees who are part of the mobile workforce are ready to put in extra hours, as mobile officing helps them to maintain a healthy balance between personal and professional lives. Moreover, as employees can take their office wherever they go they succeed in managing their workloads more efficiently. They are productive to such an extent that they are ready to use their own personal devices for work resulting in a new trend termed as Bring Your Own Device (BYOD).

BYOD or rather BYOT (Bring Your Own Technology) as employees use not only their personally owned hardware devices but also the software used on the device for their office work, is rapidly catching on as more and more companies are embracing it. Adopting BYOD is definitely an added advantage for companies that already have a mobile workforce. Let’s see how.

Reduced Expenses

With a mobile workforce, companies are already enjoying reduced capital cost for offices and reduced infrastructure costs. And with BYOD, companies get to enjoy reduced operational and maintenance costs since embracing BYOD have relieved them from the responsibility of providing employees with latest computing equipments. Hence, there is no worry about IT provisioning.

Increased Productivity

Mobile officing increases the productivity of the employees as they put in those hours that would have otherwise spent on commuting. Moreover, there is low absenteeism. And with BYOD, employees get to work with the most modern technological devices that help to get their work done quickly and efficiently. BYOD also helps in managing multi site projects as it facilitates easy collaboration and communication between team members.

The concept of mobile workforce, BYOD was unimaginable 10 years ago. However, today it is the reality.

Other Links

RDP

iPad Remote Desktop

Efficient Remote Desktop Solutions to Meet the Needs of All Enterprises

In today's competitive global environment, every second lost for decision-making can result in huge losses for the organization. A number of employees have the option of working remotely, given the change in today's work environment. This has led to organizations looking for innovative and cost effective ways of increasing the productivity of their workforces. One of the innovations of modern day technology is the ability to access the desktop through a remote access method. Deploying remote access solutions to access the workspace desktop or to the corporate network anytime for information and data retrieval can work out wonders both for the organization and in personal sphere.

In today's e-commerce environment, traditional business houses find the restrictions of physical locations already giving away. Further, with development of mobile devices and the growth of mobile workforce changing the face of the business continuity of every enterprise, users now look in for remote desktop access through even the handheld devices such as tablets and smartphones. Due to this, businesses are faced with challenge of ensuring conveying safe data without the critical data leaving the corporate network.

With remote access appliances and the desktop environment are provided to you anytime, anywhere without any restrictions. Remote Desktop Services (RDS) makes it possible to remotely run an application or an entire desktop in one location but have it controlled and managed in another. The goal of RDS is to provide users and administrators with robust, secure access to your company's files, software and applications wherever they may be. This is an era of bring your own device mechanics where you experience uninterrupted and secure connectivity and can carry on your business operations through your remote device.

Though there are number of enterprises providing remote access solutions, the leaders in the service sector provide efficient solutions to face the challenges of data access through tablets and smartphones while also ensuring business continuity. With the help of appliance based remote desktop access solutions, desktop access are provided through a secure network and they are very simple to use and easy to deploy with single a sign-on from any URL or mobile application. Besides supporting the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) approach, such solutions are also simple to install, manage and use.

Invest in solution that is cost-effective and fully secure and also provides a greater degree of control while also meeting the specific needs of the enterprise.

Other Links

Load balancers

SSL VPNs

Prevent Data Leakage with the Best Remote Access Solutions

Wireless technologies have advanced with great speed in the past few years. Not only have the capacity and performance of wireless communications systems improved by great leaps, but so has the range of information and services that can now be accessed using mobile devices. It has facilitated remote access and is driving corporate success by increasing employee productivity.  By providing remote access for all employees, businesses can without a doubt achieve a competitive advantage by mitigating business disruptions, completing work on time, making better decisions more often and strengthening customer loyalty.

VPN access has been the only way to serve the non-mobile workforce until now. As the business world is becoming faster paced and more globalized, there are many teams working together across multiple time zones and countries. This increased use of mobile devices to store large amounts of data for remote access also carries a risk of loss or theft, which can compromise the security of information. Although many organizations are assessing their alternatives for tapping the potential of mobile access as well as supporting the broader requirement for increased remote access, they are left with the finding these  challenges to be costly and convoluted. What organizations need today are solutions that provide RDP access and are also secure, flexible, cost-effective, easy to deploy and compatible with the wide variety of configurations found in the wild.

It is therefore good to invest in an efficient remote desktop access solution that solutions provide an efficient, cost-effective means to support tablets in the enterprise while preventing data leakage and providing full application availability. The solution must be application based and must enable workers to access physical and virtual office desktops from any remote location. Installing a successful remote access solution in the corporate network and can help integrate with Active Directory to establish adequate user credentials for a secure access.

It must be a cost-effective solution that is fully secure and fully under IT control while also providing full application availability. Invest in the right solution that can enable employees to use all their existing Windows, Windows-based and proprietary applications and increase productivity without compromising on security or costs. Leveraging scalable technologies, such a solution will increase employee productivity and allow laptops and desktops to be powered down at any time.

With the right solution, remote desktop access to business applications can be made more secure. Allowing users to log into their office desktops from any remote device, anywhere, an efficient solution has the ability to not only ensure remote access for productivity but also ensure business continuity at all times.

Other Links

Load balancers

SSL VPNs

Enabling Bring Your Own Device – BYOD solutions at work

The concept of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) that has given the employees the ease and flexibility of using their personal devices at work is gradually attaining prevalence inIndia. This growth is mostly generated by the youth and enterprises who are willing to foster an “anytime anywhere” office culture. As per the Cisco Connected World Technology Report, which includes surveys conducted amongst more than 2,800 college candidates and young professionals from 14 different countries, including India, gathered that 81 percent of people questioned wanted to attain money from their respective organizations to purchase the device of their own preference or bring their own device.

With the consumerization of IT workers today aim for tablet access to business applications often from personal devices. For IT, this presents uncharted waters for a wide range of organization applications and a new range of devices to assist and secure. Leading service providers with their tablet access and BYOD solutions offer cost-efficient, effective means to assist tablets in the enterprise while preventing data leakage and offering complete application accessibility.

These service providers also offer remote desktop access solutions for BYOD and tablet access. As opposed to the VPN’s remote desktop solutions helps workers to avail the virtual and physical office desktops from any place and at any time. Irrespective of the fact, whether they are at home, at work, at a client meet, seminar or they are using iPad, iPhone or Android devices. With the help of this solution they can work just like they are operating from office.

In order to enable tablet remote access to personal Android and iPad remote desktop, RDP appliances are installed in the corporate network.  In this case, either physical or virtual office desktops can be registered for users. This process can be attained by the administrator manually or by using a data base or end user. Remote desktop solutions from eminent service providers are an innovative appliance-based solution that is owned and operated by an enterprise. As opposed to managed services, this is under the total control of the enterprise and does not open corporate network to third party networks.

Tablet remote desktop connectivity from top notch service providers to the end-user Android and iPad devices is encrypted by using SSL. Due to the fact, that these tablets and remote devices are “off-network” security and compliance policies on office PC’s are expanded and retained. The data therefore never leaves the network and does not get mixed with personal data. Furthermore, it never exists on remote equipments as well. 

Other Links

SSL VPNs

Load Balancers

Application Delivery Networking: Functions of application delivery controller

In this technology driven business environment, data centers have become the lifeline of every organization, irrespective of its size. The concept of electronic data storage and transfer has been prevalent since the birth of the computers. However, with the advent of technology, the size of the machines reduced drastically with an increase in computing powers. These developments like a chain reaction led to the wider use of the technology in the everyday functioning of large business houses and global organization, leading to use of technology driven machines in a networked environment.

Data centers, with their efficient computing services in a networked environment and a safe and secure storage system for the mission critical data were made up of large rooms or multiple floors of a building and housed servers, storage devices, telecom and application delivery networking systems. The application delivery network is nothing but a suit of technologies that ensures application availability, security and visibility throughout the network, irrespective of the location or device. Prevalent in most data centers catering to a global organization, such networking systems are a combination of wide area networking and application delivery controllers.

Application delivery controller also known as web switch or a content switch is loaded with a number of useful functions. As an advanced traffic management device in a networked environment, this helps to distribute specific applications to a number of geographically distant servers and sites. Being placed between the router or firewall and a web farm it also facilitates load balancing of the website traffic at times when there is a mix of applications over a wider network. Having evolved from layer 4-7 switches, the application delivery controllers facilitates content manipulation, advanced routing strategies and also monitors the configurable server health.

Though application delivery controller in all networking systems offer a number of features like compression, cache, connection multiplexing, application layer security, SSL offload, content switching along with server load balancing, the application delivery networking is being separated for a general network optimization and application specific optimization. Other functions that the ADC’s are capable of are TCP offload and acceleration capabilities in branch networks and integration of malware and DDOS protection on web application through firewall protection.

Other Links

Access Control

SSL VPNs

Choose the Best Remote Desktop Access for Efficient Business Continuity Planning

Business continuity planning has become an imperative in today's businesses. Unanticipated business interferences can take many forms. Regardless of the nature of disruptions, there is a possibility of a calamity arising that has the potential of preventing an employee from getting to their place of work. It is usually too late to implement a business continuity solution by the time disruptive events occur and that always results in a loss of productivity and revenue.

Over the last several years, remote access has become not just a beneficial feature, but a necessary one. It is a tool to increase the productivity and efficiency of companies and their employees, as well as a key element in successful business continuity and disaster recovery plans. An effective BCP with a detailed

remote desktop access strategy makes it easy to deal with these disruptions thereby avoiding loss of productivity and revenue. The majority of these losses can well been avoided with effective BCP strategies that needs to take into account the probability that employees throughout the organization might need to work remotely. BCP must be dealt with proactively, not reactively as devoid of protective measures in place, businesses will inescapably lose important productivity and significant revenue.

Adequate Measures of BCP
Regulatory compliance and government mandates require many companies to have secure, auditable access to key information, even during unanticipated events. Even if an organization is working under less than ideal conditions, mandates like Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA and others remain in ef­fect. Compliance is one of the main reasons why government agencies now mandate realistic BCP implementations. Besides compliance, there is also competitive pressure that usually does not allow any company to let stormy conditions hold back its ability to respond to customers, suppliers and other partners. Companies can find themselves expending unnecessary cycles and resources without a BCP implementation.

Remote Desktop Access for Efficient Business Continuity Planning
It is best to therefore choose a BCP remote access solution specifically for office workers. It can provide simple, secure access to desktop environments, and also provide ease-of-use with straightforward and simple architecture. Choose a solution that delivers full application transparency even in a highly available clustered hardware platform, and can provide an easy login process without the need of any technical training.

No matter what type of secure remote access solution you choose, it is a superior business tool used to increase productivity by enabling easy file access during commutes, travel, after-hours work, business meetings and more. The flexibility of remote access allows for a mobile workplace has made it an essential part of business continuity. 

Other Links

Business Continuity Planning

SSL VPNs