Ensure Information Security with SSL VPNs

For any enterprise, information security is of paramount importance. And in today’s business scenario, where technological advancements have increased BYOD prevalence, ensuring information security becomes very important to protect information from unauthorized access, use, disclosure, disruption, modification, perusal, inspection, recording or destruction. Hence, in the remote access scene, Secure Sockets Layer Virtual Private Networks (SSL VPNs) is gaining great popularity as it ensures secure, controlled and remote access to any application, from any device and from any location. An SSL VPN is a kind of VPN that allows remote users and mobile workforce to access Web applications, client/server applications and internal network connections easily and securely. SSL VPN refers to “a new and fast-growing product category comprised of a variety of technologies, based on the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocol.”

Before SSL VPNs entered the scene, the most widely used VPN was IPSec VPN. It required the installation of a client on the end user device to transport private data across the public internet. However, it was time consuming and made trouble shooting very difficult. With the emergence of SSL VPNs, the remote access scene has become less complicated and simple. It allows restricted network resources to be accessed remotely by means of a secure and authenticated pathway by encrypting all network traffic. Here is a look at some of the advantages of SSL VPNs.

• As SSL VPN requires no client software accessing Web-enabled applications, the deployment, management and administration of SSL VPN is easy and effective.
• SSL VPN provides secure, scalable, easy to use and browser based access to resources and applications
• SSL VPN being clientless makes the provisioning of new users simple and easy
• As SSL VPNs are easy to deploy and use, it leads to reduced support requirements
• AS it provides secure remote access, it ensures business continuity in the event of a disaster, pandemic or business interruption
• SSL VPNs provide encrypted authentication, browser cache cleansing, strong data encryption, endpoint inspection and forced remediation thereby ensuring utmost information security

Thus, SSL VPNs allow employees, partners, customers, contractors and guests to quickly and securely access the resources and applications for which they are authorized through a common Web browser. However, to ensure secure remote access ,users need to deploy best of the breed SSL VPN solutions. The following are some of the benefits offered by a best of the breed SSL VPN solution.

• 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
• Range of access methods including Web, Layer-3 and client-server connectivity
• High-performance 1024, 2048 and 4096-bit SSL encrypted communications
• No pre-installed clients; eliminates firewall and network traversal issues common to traditional VPNs
• Supports a range of AAA and dual-factor authentication schemes

With SSL VPNs facilitating anytime, anywhere secure remote access to business applications, it ensures increased productivity, while at the same time maintaining security and compliance.

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Load Balancers

Application Delivery Networking

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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SSL VPNs

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.

Related Links

Load Balancers

Server Load Balancing

Understanding the Benefits of Load Balancers

Being able to balance workload evenly all through various servers is crucial for resolving time-sensitive scanning issues and challenges. With a gateway HTTP scanning solution, all the internal endpoints that request for external Web content are more probable to have a positive experience in case both their request and the final content are allowed to transparently pass through the network’s web scanning or caching infrastructure.

 

Importance of Load Balancing in Web Security

Load balancing can be defined as the practice of evenly disseminating work across various computers. The method offers numerous benefits, such as:

* It brings down the load on individual system and reduces the response time

* It maximizes the network utilization and increased throughput

* It enhances reliability

* It facilitates scaling

* It enhances user satisfaction

 

Load balancing or load balancers pertaining to web security products and solution is the discipline of intelligently routing the incoming and outgoing HTTP traffic to any one of the various servers that are accountable for controlling the access to websites. It is also responsible for scanning the traffic for spyware, malware, Phishing attacks and other unwarranted and harmful content.

 

Advanced Load Balancers and Their Benefits

Setting up an efficient HTTP scanning environment is a complicated task. There are enterprises that consider an efficient HTTP access essential to business productivity. Furthermore, keeping in mind the industry vertical they might also attach greater importance to it than email. However, contrary to email scanning HTTP scanning has better visible metrics and is considered to be “real time”. Keeping all these aspects in mind solution providers of RDP Remote Desktop Protocol Access has introduced advanced load balancers with a multi-unit clustering for 99.999% application uptime and data center scalability. 

 Other unique features and benefits include the following:

* Offers innovative application-fluent traffic management for optimized delivery of business critical applications and IP services

* Enables offloading of Web and application servers for maximized efficiency, capacity and return on investment

* A well incorporated TCP connection multiplexing, high-speed HTTP processing, compression and caching for enhanced application performance

* There is SSL acceleration for safeguarding data in transit, offloading compute-intensive processes from servers and enhancing application performance

* There are application-specific certifications and configuration guides for quick implementation of optimized configurations

* Offers VMware integration for intelligent command and controlling virtualized application architecture comprising dynamic resource allocation and deallocation

Load balancer service providers with their fault-tolerant solutions offer consistent performance and is time-saving. The applications are up and operating safely with lesser downtime issues.

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SSL VPN

BYOD

DesktopDirect Mobilize Your Business

Array Networks is a global provider of networking solutions that improve application performance, availability and security. Our solutions connect users and applications – providing access for any user, anywhere, on any device to applications, desktops and services in the data center or the cloud.

Mobile devices and mobile working are driving major changes in the enterprise. More users must be able to work from anywhere and more users want to use tablets and smart phones as business productivity tools. The challenge for businesses lies in finding an approach that provides full application availability from remote devices, tablets and smart phones, while making sure that sensitive data never leaves the corporate network.

Desktop Direct addresses challenges faced by enterprise organizations in the areas of tablet access, remote access, productivity and business continuity. Desktop Direct is an on-premises remote desktop solution, capable of extending physical and virtual office desktops to any user on any device anywhere. Moreover, Desktop Direct is fully secure and delivers unmatched ROI as compared to alternative remote and mobile access solutions.

Tablet Access & Bring Your Own Device (BYOD)
• Zero data leakage because “data never leaves the network”
• Access to physical and virtual office desktops from iPhone, iPad and Android devices for full application availability
• Enable BYOD that provides freedom of choice in a secure manner while minimizing the cost of mobile device management (MDM)

 Reduce the Cost, Complexity & Risk of VPNs
• The expense of VPN hardware and licenses, laptops, security software, bandwidth and training does not scale cost-effectively
• Every laptop with sensitive data is a security risk and every VPN connection creates an attack vector to the corporate network
• DesktopDirect is not a VPN; it is a fully secure and cost-effective remote desktop solution that is a better choice for many users 

 Increase Worker Productivity Enterprise-Wide
• Securely and cost effectively enable the majority of office workers to be productive before and after work and on weekends
• Guard against productivity and revenue losses caused by unanticipated occurrences such as a sick child, deliveries, repairs and car trouble
• Address the need for next-gen remote and mobile access from a common platform 

 Mitigate the Impact of Business Disruptions
• Scales to support thousands of concurrent users on a single system with zero IT intervention
• Ensures compliance is maintained during business continuity events and provides a seamless experience for first-time business continuity users
• Contingency license certificates cost-effectively address burst business continuity usage 

 Conclusion
Array’s DesktopDirect™ remote desktop solutions are transforming the way businesses think about remote and mobile access by rapidly and cost-effectively enabling full application availability to any device anywhere without the risk of data leakage. 

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SSL VPN

Load Balancers

Managing Risks with Business Continuity Planning

Every business enterprise is created with the sole aim of gaining profits from the business. However, this legal entity is a risky affair and is prone to disruptions. Business disruptions can come in from various sources including natural ones. In the technology driven world today with radical environmental changes, the risk to the continuity of business is even more. The unplanned events may leave lasting impressions on both small and medium enterprises as well as global organizations. The brave heart entrepreneur and business enterprise thus needs to be always prepared to face the disruptions and keeps options ready to ensure business continuity come what may.

Today, as part of   smart business operations, enterprises opt to have in place strategies for business continuity as part of operations management.  The business continuity planning (BCP) is meant to identify an organization's exposure to internal and external threats and prepare the assets to provide effective prevention and recovery mechanism for the organization, while maintaining a competitive advantage. Wikipedia defines the business continuity plan as a road map for continuing operations under adverse conditions irrespective of this being natural or man-made.

For enterprise that are totally technology dependent any small system errors and bug in the complex programs can bring their entire business to a standstill.  Thus the business continuity strategy works to provide a framework for resilience building and tends to protect the interest of key stakeholders. Traditionally what the business continuity plans looked at is methods to protect the business in face of physical damages to equipment, products and disruption of services. However, with the globalized business world so driven by technology, even the absence of the key staff can cause equivalent effects on the business.

Today the business continuity planning strategies should be one that would help global enterprises face emergency situations without loss of productivity and profit. The technological innovations have paved way for new age enterprises to provide remote desktop  access to their distantly located employees and key personnel. Such remote access solution is best if it can facilitate enterprises with:
 

• Anytime, anywhere access for employees to familiar workstation  and business critical resources

• Real-time and secure access gateways to the corporate network and critical data  for the partners and vendors

• Performance consistency for the entire workforce

• Automated VPN provisioning

• Cost-effectiveness and global redundancy

Enterprises make use of remote access and BYOD solutions to increases the mobility of the workforce and ensure business continuity. But along with the increased mobility they also need to cater for cost-efficient performance of the corporate network infrastructure. Load balancers play a major role in disseminating process requests of the workforce across the wide networks irrespective of the device and location.  The modern day innovative load balancers help enterprises to leverage on the multi-core processing and ensure a scalable business continuity planning through cost-efficient performance. 

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Server Load Balancing

Tablet Access

Business Continuity Planning -Safety In face of Adversities

Every business irrespective of being a small and medium one or a large conglomerate is a profit oriented one. Technological innovations deployed in the business environment aids in globalized expansion of the business and leads to revenue generation and increased profits. However, any disruptions either minor or major may have serious impact on the day-to-day business operations.

Foreseeing business disruptions or the time when disaster strikes in an unknown factor and the globally bound organizations today are faced by the challenge of maintaining business continuity in face of all storm. Business continuity planning is one of the main strategies taken up by the global organization. Spread across geographical boundaries and remotely distant locations, these organizations need to be ready to face any disruptions in the business operations while ensuring that work goes on without any serious impact.

Business disruptions may result from various reasons such as epidemics, transit strikes, cyber-attacks, natural calamities etc. Under such circumstances a detailed remote access strategy and business continuity planning (BCP) will help the global enterprises to deal with emergency situations and help them to avoid loss of productivity or revenue. The remote access solution must be one that would help enterprises with:

* Secure anytime, anywhere access leading to uninterrupted business continuity
* Maximum performance, automated VPN provisioning
* Cost-effectiveness and global redundancy

A continuous delivery of critical services and products, demands that organizations need to have the facility that permits them to recover data, application and assets in a real-time access mode. As Gartner's analyst suggests that the most critical success factor to any business continuity plan is fast re-establishment of business processes. However, if the disaster recovery plans do not include Remote Desktop Access, no amount of technology can save business operations. Hence the real-time access to information will facilitate the employees to continue work from any location, allow business partners and suppliers an uninterrupted access to important information. Such actions will minimize the disruption levels of business processes and applications.

With large number of vendors offering business continuity planning solutions, enterprises need to make the most of the benefits to ensure productivity at all times. The enterprises needs to decide on appropriate ones and service types required for the business environment. The availability of applications from the corporate network and remote desktop access will help mitigate business disruptions. Application availability solutions from leading service provider’s offer load balancers and WAN optimization controllers for any fail-over for WAN links, devices and data centers.

However, the enterprises need to ensure that anytime anywhere remote access to business critical information also poses issues of data and network security. Thus service providers of business continuity planning solutions also need to ensure that the corporate network are equipped with secure access gateways that can support multiple access.


Other Links
Application Delivery Controllers
RDP

 

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

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.

Other Links

Application Delivery Controller 

Tablet Access