Understanding the Business Benefits of Application Delivery Controller

Understanding the Business Benefits of Application Delivery Controller

With usage rapidly multiplying, delivering applications in a cost-effective manner aligned with revenues and
productivity has become a business imperative. CIOs and IT must support secure, real-time connectivity between
applications and any user, anywhere, on any device to meet the growing demands of customers, employees and
partners. Many common web and network enabled application platforms are fragile and unstable and suffer from
performance problems despite the best efforts of application developers. Application Delivery Controllers (ADCs)
have arisen from the need to enhance the performance and reliability of traditional web applications. Application
Delivery Controller deploys a number of different features to improve the performance, reliability, security and
ease-of-management of networked services and help manage your infrastructure.
There are many benefits of application delivery controllers. Some of them include,

Upgrades Performance
An application deliver controller can boost the capacity of service by load balancing traffic across a number of
servers in a controlled way. To ensure that applications are not designed to be clustered, session persistence
tracks user sessions, and load balancing directs each request to the fastest server at that instance.

Enhances Reliability
An application delivery controller can enhance reliability of the network through monitoring and traffic
inspection. In the event of a server failing, the ADC can identify the same with the help of a built-in monitor.
Once detected, the ADC will not send any traffic till the problem in the server is rectified. With deep traffic
inspection ADCs can be programmed to inspect every response. A request can be retried against a different
server to ensure that it will give a more correct response in case anything problematic indentified. With an ADC
the service will continue to run even if several machines were to fail completely.

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Improved security
The application delivery controller is a single entry point to all applications and its acts as a gateway. An ADC
can apply simple as well as sophisticated policies. It can not only check if protocol messages are formed well,
but also filter out attack signatures and validate requests against known problems with the back-end
infrastructure. The ADC filters and authenticates responses as they pass through the network.

Facilitates Simple Management
With the Application deliver controller acting as a gateway, it is aware of all the happenings in the network. All
the information that is vital to the management like the response time of the servers, the failing servers, kind of
traffic levels, etc., is known. When the time comes to upgrade the infrastructure, this management information
is crucial.
Application delivery solutions enable organizations to simplify management of applications at remote sites. The
real goal is to improve application performance so workers can get more done in a shorter amount of time.
Related Links: Remote Desktop, Secure Remote Access

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