ADNs accelerate and secure distributed traffic

Corporate data consolidation and the adoption of Web-based application models such as software-as-a-service are driving the need for application-level intelligence and control for the distributed network. Application Delivery Network (ADN) solutions address this need by providing an application-focused layer of infrastructure that significantly reduces a business’ vulnerability to performance and security problems.

When enterprises consolidate data centers, branch office employees must traverse WAN links to reach applications and data. These links are prone to congestion and latency, making application performance unpredictable. At the same time, the proliferation of Web-based applications — and the fact they’re often implemented by users within business units — has created a tremendous burden on IT to ensure their performance and security.

When a user complains that an application is sluggish, IT has a difficult time verifying the problem or pinpointing the cause because traditional network devices and tools operate at the packet level, with no visibility into application flows. IT can’t distinguish between business-critical applications, malware and recreational traffic such as iTunes, let alone tell if SAP is being starved of bandwidth in the Boston office by users watching YouTube over the WAN link.

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Corporate data consolidation and the adoption of Web-based application models such as software-as-a-service are driving the need for application-level intelligence and control for the distributed network. Application Delivery Network (ADN) solutions address this need by providing an application-focused layer of infrastructure that significantly reduces a business’ vulnerability to performance and security problems.

When enterprises consolidate data centers, branch office employees must traverse WAN links to reach applications and data. These links are prone to congestion and latency, making application performance unpredictable. At the same time, the proliferation of Web-based applications — and the fact they’re often implemented by users within business units — has created a tremendous burden on IT to ensure their performance and security.

When a user complains that an application is sluggish, IT has a difficult time verifying the problem or pinpointing the cause because traditional network devices and tools operate at the packet level, with no visibility into application flows. IT can’t distinguish between business-critical applications, malware and recreational traffic such as iTunes, let alone tell if SAP is being starved of bandwidth in the Boston office by users watching YouTube over the WAN link.

ADN is an application-focused layer of infrastructure that enables IT to see all applications on the network, accelerate performance, optimize bandwidth, and secure the distributed enterprise against malware and misuse. ADN solutions combine three technologies to make the network application-aware:

Visibility technologies classify and monitor network traffic at Layers 4-7+, giving IT a complete picture of what applications are running, along with a real-time view of network and application utilization and performance. Leading ADN solutions can analyze more than 600 applications, giving IT insight into URLs and external sites within HTTP traffic, for example, as well as SSL-encrypted applications.

Visibility data includes traffic per application and site, bandwidth consumption per application, user response times, and jitter, delay and loss for voice and video applications. Once IT knows how applications are actually behaving, ADN gives them the tools to define and enforce policies that govern that behavior.

Click to see: Diagram of an application delivery network

Acceleration technologies enable IT to optimize everything from internal databases and file access to SaaS applications and IP telephony calls.

Acceleration mechanisms include QoS controls such as bandwidth allocation, bandwidth limiting and traffic priority for VoIP, video and other real-time applications; application-specific compression techniques; and protocol optimization. Object- and media-level caching, as well as byte caching, also ensure that rich media, Web 2.0 and other business traffic is optimized while recreational traffic is constrained.

Security technologies are crucial in today’s Webified world, where even trusted sites can be infested with malware. ADN solutions, with their focus on WAN and Internet communications, provide security capabilities that include filtering Web requests and content, Web virus scanning, malware detection and containment, content validation, certificate validation, data-leak prevention, SSL traffic inspection and control of instant messaging, peer-to-peer and streaming traffic.