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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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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Secure Mobile Access Ensures Business Continuity

Today's business environment is not only technology driven but is also driven by the ever-changing customer demands. Further the aggressive competitiveness in the environment paves way for enterprises to be fully equipped with the world-class technologies and ensure a global presence. Globalization though provides opportunities for business expansion, also challenges enterprises with accessibility of the all-important business data from any location irrespective of the time. The demands for remote access solutions have led to the development of applications which enables mobility for the workforce.

The growing use of smartphones, tablets and other hand held devices ensures that the distantly located project teams and the mobile workforce of the global enterprises have uninterrupted mobile access to the corporate network. Further, the increasing adoption of cloud computing services through enhances the mobile accessibility; enterprises need to ensure security of data while traversing through various networks.

Remote desktop access has off-late become an incredibly valuable component of the IT infrastructure in an organization. However, since business enterprises are faced with challenges of finding solutions for application availability without compromising on security and productivity, the secure access gateways will help organizations in ensuring application performance. As a part of business continuity and planning, (BCP) it helps to improve productivity, save money and drive efficiencies. Further, to ensure uninterrupted business for the global organizations, the leading service providers have worked out secure mobile access solutions.

With technological innovations giving consumers smartphones and tablets with improved features, applications and accessibility, the leading service providers have developed solutions that can securely publish enterprise applications for use on these mobile devices. Irrespective of the device being desktop PCs, laptops, virtual infrastructure or terminal servers which run the application, the mobile access solution enables identity-based access from any mobile device to specific enterprise applications. This helps to improve security and operational efficiency while streamlining user experience.

In the process, the service providers are challenged to allow the mobile workforce to use smart phones and tablets to work remotely or within the premises, enable access to business applications from the mobile devices without risks to the data and corporate network. The service providers on the other hand have worked out solutions which enables remote desktop for workers to access their office PCs, laptops, virtual desktops and applications from any device, develop a proxy architecture and RDP over SSL for anywhere anytime access of the applications without the data leaving the corporate network and scalable appliance-based solution that is easy to deploy, manage and use.

Besides addressing the technology challenges of mobile access, these solutions also handle the business challenges of bring your own device (BYOD) thus, securely and cost-effectively mobilizing operations for enhanced enterprise productivity. Irrespective of the device the mobility solutions provide instant access to enterprise applications without the risk of malicious attacks and data leakage.

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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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Reaping The Benefits Of WAN Optimization Controllers

Though ensuring acceptable and standard application delivery has always been a crucial aspect, historically it was never a top priority for IT enterprises. It underwent a change many years back when the IT organizations started to focus in a dedicated manner on application delivery on a huge part of responding to the performance challenges related to supporting applications that were in turn delay sensitive and supporting huge file transfers between branch offices and headquarters. A major medium through which IT enterprises were responding to these performance challenges was by implementing WAN optimization controllers.

 

In most cases, WAN optimization controllers were deployed as a “stand-alone” hardware-based device. Owing to the mass adoption of Virtualization, IT enterprises today are witnessing a new kind of application delivery challenges. For instance, successful desktop Virtualization is a crucial factor that will compel IT enterprises to support a significant increase in delay sensitive WAN traffic. In order to aid this situation service providers specializing in RDP remote access have introduced WAN optimization controllers with multiple features, that helps in:

 

* Minimizing the remote application response times by up to 95%

* Minimizing the network bandwidth utilization by up to 95%

* Is purpose-built to bring down the impact of network congestion, latency and packet loss that combines to significantly slow end-user response times

* The Application-specific WAN optimization blueprints and specific protocol optimization helps in reducing redundant, chatty protocol traffic

* Stream-based differencing averts transmission of content already in the local data store and the compression techniques minimizes the amount of data on the wire

* Is available in hardware and virtual appliance form factors, that helps to achieve ROI within a less time frame

* Supports 50% more speeded up connections

* The virtual appliances make use of minimal system resource, can stay with other applications and scale linearly with the addition of CPU cores, memory and disks

* Helps in easier management of virtual and physical deployment, transparent addressing, statistical performance dashboard and auto discovery

* Offers centralized provisioning and management by incorporating with Virtualization management systems

 

Furthermore, advanced WAN optimization controllers make use of a combination of application acceleration, packet compression, network acceleration, protocol optimization and caching to speed up the applications and minimize the expense of delivering applications across wide area networks.

 

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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. 

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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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Tablet Access

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

Reasons To Invest In Innovative Load Balancers

If you have been thinking about opting in for load balancing solutions, then apart from its features and advantages it is essential to have an in-depth understanding about the load balancing process itself and the it can be used for web security. Simply put, load balancing the process of evenly disseminating the work amongst various computers. The procedure has the following benefits:

•  Bringing down the load on individual systems
•  Bringing down the response time
•  Increasing the network utilization
•  Helps to enhance reliability 
•  Enables scaling
•  Improves user satisfaction 

An innovative load balancers helps end users and organizations in maintaining a systematic practice of routing the incoming and outgoing HTTP traffic to either of the various servers for managing access to websites. It also comprises traffic scanning for malware, phishing, spyware and other unessential content. Load balancers helps to resolve the following concerns:

• Helps in more seat addition i.e. horizontal scalability
• Helps in balancing the load of one or more local servers i.e. Server Load Balancing or SLB
• Helps in balancing the load across globally-distributed servers i.e. Global Server Load Balancing or GSLB
• Helps to balance across multiple security devices i.e. Firewall Load Balancing
• Fault tolerance
• High accessibility

Top notch service providers of application delivery controllers programs and solution have come up with advanced load balancers that help the end users to leverage parallel multi-core processing to be able to cost-effectively generate industry leading functionality upon a rich application acceleration and load balancing feature suited for unparalleled overall ownership value. Benefits of load balancing appliances are:

* There are global and local server load balancing along with multi-unit clustering for 99.999% application uptime as well as data center scalability

* There is advanced application traffic management for optimized delivery of business crucial applications and other IP services

* There is the offloading of application and Web servers for high efficiency, capacity as well as return on investment

* There is integrated TCP connection multiplexing, high-speed HTTP processing, compression and caching for a 5X improvement in application functionality

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

* There are reverse-proxy infrastructure with an advanced packet-inspection firewall for securing applications without influencing the performance

* There are application-specific criteria and configuration guidelines for quick implementation of optimized configurations

Advanced load balancing appliances help to enhance the overall application performance and speeds up the return-on-investment (ROI) for small and large scale enterprises.

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RDP