Applications are the lifeblood of enterprise operations as these are required for human resources, customer relationships, resource planning, accounting, collaboration, communication and a wide variety of additional business-critical processes. Whether hosted in the data center or in the cloud, these applications must cost-effectively scale without sacrificing reliability or the end-user experience. This is because in today’s competitive business environment, applications need to be fast, available, and secure otherwise it can lead to loss of reputation, revenue, and business. Hence, here is a look at some of the solutions engineered for application performance and thereby accelerate business.

Load Balancers
A front-end function for application and Web servers, load balancing refers to the distribution of requests to reduce the burden on individual servers. Since it is not possible to predict the number of requests that will be issued to a server, load balancing ensures that no single device is overwhelmed. If one server gets flooded, requests are forwarded to another server with more capacity. Thus, load balancing ensures persistence for sessions and transactions and maintains sessions in the event when servers become unavailable. Load balancers that come integrated with application performance functions such as SSL offload, caching, compression, connection multiplexing and traffic management enable application services that are fast, available and secure.

WAN Optimization Controllers
Wikipedia defines WAN optimization as “a collection of techniques for increasing data-transfer efficiencies across wide-area networks.” WAN optimization controllers use a combination of application acceleration, network acceleration, packet compression, caching, and protocol optimization to accelerate applications and reduce the cost of delivering applications over wide area networks.

Application Availability
Application availability means that business-critical processes continue to run and users continue to experience uninterrupted access in the event of planned and unplanned circumstances. Today businesses face disruptions that range from equipment failures and network outages, to minor events such as sick days, to major events such as extreme weather and natural disasters. Application availability solutions help businesses to ensure that core systems are up and running and workers have access to the applications and resources essential for accelerating business 24/7.

Thanks to technological advancements, today enterprises have access to solutions that accelerate the performance of their applications as well as business.


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