Businesses today leverage online services in more ways, for more revenue, than ever. But how reliable and secure are those services?
It’s practically a byword in IT that the only constant is change, and that change has led to disruption in many senses. Customers may expect perfect uptime, yet business services are constantly challenged by both predictable factors (holiday workload spikes, for instance) and unpredictable factors (like a hardware failure in a server farm).
Correspondingly, technical infrastructures have changed. Administrators have taken far more seriously the prospects of an extended outage. And today, they routinely use strategies like load-balancing, workload distribution, realtime and preemptive data analysis, and failover architectures to keep services up and running as reliably as possible.
The emergence and evolution of the application delivery controller (ADC) has been part of the same trend. It’s also based on the same logic — that if time is money, higher service uptime is more money.
ADCs combine load-balancing with application security, compression, sophisticated data caching, quality-of-service network management and other advanced features — all with the overarching goal of boosting application performance. This, in turn, translates into a better customer experience in the form of reliable services that work as expected, which leads in short order to a better bottom line.
Fortinet’s industry-leading ADC family helps enterprises maximize service uptime and security.
However, as always with a competitive IT solutions market, ADCs vary considerably from one vendor to the next. Some offer much broader feature sets than others — for instance, by augmenting application security, not just application performance. After all, even the most high-performing, reliable service isn’t useful to customers if the sensitive data they enter into it isn’t managed in a trustworthy fashion.
That’s a major part of the value proposition behind the ADC solution family offered by our partner Fortinet — a security specialist with deep expertise. The FortiADC D-series offers a powerful range of both application availability and application security capabilities that work in concert to help enterprise clients get the highest business value from every service they bring to market.
How? One answer comes from the quality of service (QoS) features I mentioned before. The FortiADC offerings provide advanced QoS to track and manage the overall priority of different network services relative to business needs. This way, the most important services, with the highest customer expectations for performance, invariably get the bandwidth they need.
Additional power comes from smart local and global server load balancing, to get the most out of all the available servers and if necessary, fail over to backup or offsite servers. The result? 24/7/365 uptime, of course.
Security is just as fundamental. Exceptional protection is provided via both an integrated stateful firewall and web application firewall that constantly looks for application-layer attack signatures and stops recognized threats in their tracks. FortiADC also integrates seamlessly with Fortinet’s email solution, FortiMail, to help assure enterprises that their email is as reliable as it is secure.
Bringing your customers up to speed on these issues is half the job of closing the sale. As the #1 Fortinet distributor worldwide, Fine Tec is exceptionally well positioned to help you achieve exactly that — and we’d love to hear from you. Have a question? Email us at marketing@finetec.com or visit us at finetec.com.