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Enterprises today compete in a highly dynamic environment. They must boost user productivity, encourage cost-efficient collaboration, and streamline existing business processes by extending their applications to employees, partners, suppliers, and customers. Enterprises are leveraging the Internet infrastructure to deliver remote application access, considering the enormous cost-cutting potential of using public networks.
Today, Internet-based applications change everything about business. They enable direct user access to information resources, rather than depending on intermediaries. The benefits of Internet applications are clear and unambiguous.
Enterprises, while installing infrastructure to support these requirements, are beginning to look at broader networking capabilities. Enterprises must ensure that their applications and data are delivered with the desired end-user performance and still maintain highest level of protection.
Key requirements include secure networking environment, with high performance delivery of business critical applications and data, all while requiring minimal administration and cost.
Who Deploys Data Centers?
Here we will discuss some of the key segments that are using Internet as a key transacting medium, and their requirements of networking technology.
Enterprises have increasingly begun to use the Web to deliver business critical applications and data. This situation warrants a secure data-sharing environment where users have quick and continuous access to business applications and data.
One of the most significant segments at this point of time is the BPO practice. BPOs are growing by leaps and bounds in India both in terms of size and sophistication. With India gaining importance as a global BPO hub, there is the necessity to have access to business critical information effortlessly and continuously.
The third segment to be discussed is the banking and financial segment, whose trade and transactions over the Web have to be absolutely secure and at the same time, with instant response. This is an absolute requirement with online transactions in banking and finance fast gaining importance.
Fourth, there are universities and educational institutions. The potential of deploying the Web for various processes is immense-registrations, results and score sheets, personal data of students, research information, all of which are sensitive and confidential information. It is therefore necessary to completely secure the transacting environment, while still ensuring quick and easy response.
The government is the fifth segment. Various state governments have introduced e-governance projects, to use technology to bring various schemes and benefits to the grassroots by providing easy access. Now the most up to date and authentic information is easily accessible. Here too, to ensure the effectiveness and success of these programs, a completely secure and easily accessible online environment is necessary.
The sixth segment is the online reservation process, not just for travel but more significantly for events, games, music shows, plays and concerts. The seamless implementation and increased practice of buying tickets online will eliminate the time consuming process of travel and endless lines.
What to Look out For
After analyzing the needs of each of the segments, pertaining to networking requirements of their data centers, we can conclude that the three key components are:
- Foolproof security.
- Seamless accessibility of business applications and data.
- Reduced network management complexity and cost.
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Success Stories
ShopNBC
Challenge: Improve customer performance, increase infrastructure reliability and improve security
Solution: Perform SSL acceleration, TCP offload, compression, DDoS, consolidated logging
Results
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RoI = >9 months
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Improved application performance: consistent 47 per cent compression
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Reduced server load by over 33 per cent
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Lower TCO-reduced multiple WebTrends and SSL licenses to one
Ticketmaster
Challenge: Not able to scale servers to meet ongoing demand for USA-wide box office openings; many lost transactions
Solution: Perform TCP offload, Layer 7 switching, and DDoS protection
Results
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ROI = >9 months
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Improved application performance: consistent 47 per cent compression
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Reduced server load by over 33 per cent
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Lower TCO-reduced multiple WebTrends and SSL licenses to one
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What organizations need is an effective solution that helps enterprises meet the overwhelming demand for cost-effective, continuous, secure delivery of business-critical applications over the Internet. Organizations must deploy a single, unified solution, replacing the medley of point products used. The networking solution should offer the following essential elements to meet this challenge:
- 100 per cent secure delivery of all application requests
- Continuous application availability in the face of attacks and legitimate surges
- Significant reduction in cost of operations
- Maintaining end user responsiveness
The application delivery system must enable enterprises, e-commerce vendors and service providers to optimize their networks for the continuous, secure delivery of all business-critical applications. It should overcome the inefficiencies of existing infrastructure products and Internet protocols and in turn, offer application protection enabling secure delivery without compromise.
The system must provide employees, partners, and customers access to applications and content anytime, anywhere. The system should require no additional client or server software, allowing remote users to gain access from any browser. Whether at home, or on the road, both via wireless LAN and from behind the firewall of another company, remote users have secure access to business-critical applications and content they need.
By boosting the efficiency of existing site assets, the application delivery system must reduce the number of servers and software licenses required to serve the same application to the existing user base and eliminate the need for point products such as SSL accelerators, TCP offload devices or DoS attack protection systems. With this kind of ideal system in place, excess servers can be redeployed or eliminated altogether. Furthermore, central Web logging considerably streamlines the indispensable Web traffic log collection for demographic analysis by eliminating file transfer and sort-merge steps in the process.
Essential performance functionality must be carefully woven into an integrated platform to enhance the end-user experience.
Plans to deliver business-critical applications over Internet should not be derailed by concerns over application availability, security, cost of operations, or poor performance. The new breed of network infrastructure systems should combine the essential elements of application protection, security and optimization with robust traffic management functionality. The result is that for the first time ever enterprises, e-commerce vendors and service providers can enable continuous secure delivery of business-critical applications without any compromises, simultaneously, reducing ongoing operational and bandwidth costs, and simplifying network management.
Rakesh Singh
The author is GM, Asia Operations Application Networking Group, Citrix Systems
vadmail@cybermedia.co.in
Source: Voice&Data
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