rdp

Work Ease & Increased Productivity with BYOD Results

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 06:38:23 +0100

The deployment of BYOD requires being an iterative procedure-support for BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) for certain commodity enterprise technology such as email and collaboration systems that can set up the very base for shifting on to a mission-specific, diverse applications and an expanded scope of organization offerings. The access can be facilitates with the help of applications that are native to the device, installable or downloadable applications or a web browser. The public and private sector entities that have resorted to BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) solutions have reported of being able to allow their employees to use mobile devices of their own for accessing company information. This in turn has resulted in maximized employee productivity. However, the devices needs to be managed and configured with data assurance controls corresponding with the sensitivity of the underlying information as an aspect of the total risk management structure.

Once when the main objective was to manage and secure individual devices, with the help of BYOD access organizations of all types and sizes can reconsider what mobile security entails. The objective of several IT teams today is not to lock down its own devices, but rather to safely implement business applications so that the end users can work securely using the business information from anywhere and anytime.

The new focus has resulted in new mobile security concepts termed as containerization. Containerization refers to a solution that sets up an encrypted data store or container on a device. Availability to data in the container needs safe authentication that is independent of any other device limitation or settings. The outcome of this is that even on an equipment with zero unlock pass code and no whole device encryption and security regulations, the contents is inaccessible until the sanctioned user keys in the valid credentials.

Keeping all these aspects in mind, service providers specializing in load balancing solution has introduced innovative BYOD, appliance-based remote desktop solution that helps the workers to access the virtual or physical office desktops and applications from any location and anytime. Irrespective if the users are operating from home PCs, or are on a laptop at a customer or in a partner site or on an iPhone, iPad or Android device, they are able to carry on with their work exactly the way they would by sitting in the office without any hassles of data leaving the network. The appliance is easily installed on the official network with the present identity management solutions to set up the user credentials. The virtual or physical office desktops and applications are registered for mobile and remote access by the users or IT or get done automatically through a database.

Related Links

Server Load Balancing

Load Balancers

Accelerate your Business with Load Balancing Solutions

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 09:25:39 +0100

The practice of distributing workload across multiple components or resources to optimize resource utilization, maximize throughput, minimize response time, and avoid overload is referred to as Load Balancing. In today’s competitive business environment, where achieving the highest levels of application performance is of critical importance to any enterprise, it is the load balancer solutions that help enterprises optimize servers, network connections and tuning applications and thereby deliver a superior experience for a broad range of end-user profiles. The following are some examples of how load balancer’s come useful.

Load balancing solutions offload CPU-intensive connection management tasks onto dedicated appliances, allowing servers to spend a greater number of cycles processing client requests.

In handling social media, legacy protocols and other chatty applications, connection multiplexing is capable of aggregating millions of client connections into fewer, longer-lived back-end connections that improve server efficiency by 50% or more.

Processing SSL consumes a massive number of server cycles because of intensive bulk encryption and decryption, a burden that will only increase as businesses migrate from 1024-bit SSL to the more secure and computationally intense 2048-bit SSL standard. Offloading SSL from servers to dedicated Array appliances, businesses can do more with less while maximizing their ability to support secure applications, transactions and Web content.

Load balancers support a massive throughput and millions of concurrent connections for scaling application availability without affecting application performance. Besides, integrated traffic management and application acceleration functions including SSL acceleration, adaptive compression, dynamic caching, connection multiplexing, content routing and quality-of-service also provide unparalleled control over application traffic and the ability to significantly improve application performance. Here is a look at some of the benefits of a best of breed load balancing solution.

Local and global server load balancer with multi-unit clustering for 99.999% application uptime and data center scalability
Advanced, application-fluent traffic management for optimized delivery of business critical applications and IP services
Offloading of Web and application servers for increased efficiency, capacity and return on investment
Integrated TCP connection multiplexing, high-speed HTTP processing, compression and caching for a 5X improvement in application performance
SSL acceleration for securing data in transit, offloading compute-intensive processes from servers and improving application performance
Reverse-proxy architecture with a stateful packet-inspection firewall for guarding applications without impacting performance
Application-specific certifications and configuration guides for rapid deployment of optimized configurations
IPv6/IPv4 dual stack support for addressing IPv4 depletion
High-performance 2048-bit SSL encryption for alignment with NIST and certificate authority security requirements
Extensible XML-RPC for integration with proprietary and 3rd party data center management and monitoring products
Familiar CLI and intuitive WebUI for ease of configuration and management

Thus, whether you are responsible for a single application or Website, a large Internet property or a public or private cloud, server load balancing delivers the performance, scalability, features and value essential for accelerating your business.

Related Links

Tablet Access

Application Delivery

Load balancers And The Wide Corporate Networks

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 08:58:11 +0100

Globalization led expansion of enterprises across geographies results in increase in functions,number of workforce, customers, volume of database, IT infrastructure and network servers besides its size. To cater for increase in the data that needs to be stored and processed for the proper functioning of their widespread offices, enterprises make use of multiple data centers and server farms. However, these expansions and accessibility to the corporate networks challenges global organizations to maintain a secure and functional environment ensuring business continuity.

Enterprises with such multiple data centers and servers farms make use of load balancers to monitor the workload on servers. Load balancing is a methodology that helps to disseminate workload across numerous servers, computer cluster, disk drives, central processing units and network links. With the use of dedicated hardware and software the appliances carry on the functions of tracking the front-end clients access services and forwards requests to the back-end servers to enhance website performance as well as reduce the burden of a particular server.

The technological enhancements having enabled the distributed project teams, vendors and remote workforce to access the corporate servers through their BYOD applications, leads to an increase in the work load and clogging of the corporate network. It thus becomes imperative that the enterprises must make use of technology that will help servers to attain optimal resource utilization, reduce response time, increase throughput while averting overload. The load balancers ensures that the resources are not overloaded and enables consistency and enhanced network performance.

For global enterprises that provide remote desktop access to their distantly located workforce, load balancers benefits them with

Minimized load on individual systems with reduced response time
Maximum network utilization
Enhanced reliability and improved user satisfaction.

Further, for issues related to web securities, the load balancers routes the incoming and outgoing web traffic to servers which are involved in controlling access to websites. Besides, these also scans through the web traffic for any spyware, phishing attacks and malicious activity on the network thus ensuring security and business continuity even in the wake of adversities.

Depending on the organizational requirements and the availability of infrastructure, load balancers go through a series of steps to allocate tasks. However, this vary greatly for different networks and organizations .Advanced server load balancing appliances however, utilizes technology that is effectively executed with every network. The large enterprises often use custom built hardware-based load balancers, while smaller organizations usually makes use of virtual load balancers.

Leading application delivery networking service providers have developed innovative load balancers that leverages on parallel multi-core processing to cost-effectively drive industry-leading function. With the changing technological scenario, these devices are made available on application delivery controller hardware and are engineered for virtual platforms like cloud and modern data centers. Further by enhancing application function this paces up the ROI for both small as well as large enterprises.

Related Links

SSL VPN

Scale Application Performance, Availability and Security with ADC

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 09:29:59 +0100

In today’s hypercompetitive business environment, responding to business requirements as quickly as possible is the secret to business success. With applications being the lifeblood of today’s businesses, ensuring application deliveryin a timely manner should be the top priority of any business enterprise. Today enterprises have multiple responsibilities to meet namely enhancing business processes, boosting employee productivity and improving customer experience. Hence, enterprises need a comprehensive application delivery solution that improves the availability, performance and security of applications so that the IP network across which the applications are delivered can respond to IT and business needs effectively.

With the advent of virtualization, public and private clouds, the explosion in mobile traffic and the move towards new standards including IPv6 and 2048-bit encryption, enterprises need a solution that provides performance and scalability in line with the demands of mobile and cloud computing and the agility to extract maximum efficiency and ROI from application infrastructure. This is possible with application delivery controllers.

Wikipedia defines an Application Delivery Controller (ADC) as “a network device in the datacenter that helps perform common tasks done by websites in an effort to remove load from the web servers themselves.” Since some ADCs provide load balancing, it is referred to as next generation load balancers.

According to Gartner, “ADCs provide a set of functions to optimize enterprise application environments. The market evolved from the load-balancing systems that were specifically developed to ensure the availability and scalability of websites. Enterprises use ADCs to optimize reliability, end-user performance, data center resource use and security for a variety of enterprise applications.”

The following are some of the features and benefits of a best of breed Application Delivery Controller :

* L4/L7 server load balancing, Link load balancing (LLB) , Global server load balancing (GSLB)

* Highest performance ADC appliances on the market (up to 60Gbps)

* Industry-leading HTTP and HTTPS throughput, concurrent connections, connections per second and SSL transactions per second

* Superior performance within every market segment from the mid-market to the enterprise to the service provider , lowest-cost L7 requests per second, lowest-cost L4 connections per second, lowest-cost SSL transactions per second and lowest-cost SSL megabits per second

* Green 1RU and 2RU space-saving designs with the lowest power consumption requirements available on the market

* Proven 6 month average time period to achieve ROI for enterprise organizations , application-specific certifications

Thus ADCs, which combine cutting-edge performance and scalability with transformative features, provide an agile point of control for the data center and cloud, enabling enterprises and service providers to scale applications without sacrificing availability, performance or security.

Related Links

Bring Your Own Device

SSL VPNs

Increase Productivity and Ensure Security with SSL VPNs

Tue, 05 Mar 2013 11:38:50 +0100

In today’s business environment, where consumerization of IT has resulted in the popularity of the concept of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD), employees, partners, customers, contractors and guests want remote access to business applications anywhere at any time. Though ensuring remote access helps enterprises to increase productivity, it is highly necessary that enterprises make sure that security and compliance are equally maintained. With security breaches being a serious issue, enterprises must ensure secure remote access so that authorized personnel can quickly access the resources and applications without compromising on security. That is where Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) come useful.

A VPN is defined as “a network that uses a public telecommunication infrastructure, such as the Internet, to provide remote offices or individual users with secure access to their organization's network.” Simply put, VPNs allow organizations to send and receive data across shared or public networks by creating a private or secure network over the public network. That means with VPN, public networks get all the functionalities, security and management policies of the private network but at a much lower cost.

Traditional VPNs rely on IPSec (Internet Protocol Security) to establish a secure tunnel between the two endpoints. However, today mostly SSL VPNs (Secure Sockets Layer Virtual Private Networks) are used. This is because apart from offering versatility and ease of use, SSL VPN does not require the installation of specialized client software on the end user's computer. The versatility and granular control for a range of users from any Bring Your Own Device - BYOD and any location is what SSL VPN offers the clientele.

Here is a look at some of the benefits of using a best of breed SSL VPN solution.

Anytime, anywhere browser-based secure remote desktop access, enables increased productivity for employees, partners, tenants, customers, contractors and guests
Up to 3.2 Gbps throughput, 128,000 concurrent users and 500,000 users on a single access gateway appliance for maintaining security and driving productivity at scale
256 virtual SSL VPN portals on a single appliance, customizable to the security and usability preferences of multiple tenants and communities of interest
Per-user policy engine for identity-based access to URLs, files, networks and applications
Controlled access from managed and un-managed devices including desktops, laptops, tablets and smart phones
Cross-platform support for a range of operating systems and browsers
Range of access methods including Web, Layer-3 and client-server connectivity
High-performance 1024, 2048 and 4096-bit SSL encrypted communications
Endpoint security including host-checking, cache cleaning and adaptive policies
Supports a range of AAA and dual-factor authentication schemes
No pre-installed clients; eliminates firewall and network traversal issues common to traditional VPNs
Familiar CLI and WebUI for ease of configuration and management

Thus, SSL VPN offers greater levels of security, a greater range of access methods, a broader range of device support and the ability to provide differentiated, identity-based access tailored to the needs of multiple communities of interest.

Related Links

Secure Access Gateways

Load Balancers

Improve Security and Enhance Operational Efficiency with Tablet Access Solutions

Fri, 22 Feb 2013 10:08:55 +0100

Thanks to the consumerization of IT, BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) is a concept that is getting popular these days. Since today technology progresses from customers to organizations, more and more employees want to work with mobile devices that they are comfortable with. BYOD is here to stay and is not a passing trend as it is believed to be. As per Juniper research, the number of mobile devices used in the enterprises worldwide will increase and may be it will be more than double at the end of the year 2014. According to them, the number will reach up to an approximate 350 million in the year 2017.

Many organizations are in support of Bring Your Own Device as it benefits them primarily in two ways. On one hand it helps to increase the satisfaction level of the employees while on the other hand, it helps to reduce the IT equipment acquisition costs considerably. According to Gartner, by 2014 approximately 90% of organizations will support corporate applications on personal devices.

Today Smartphones and tablets are in huge demand among the employees and therefore there is the need for Smartphone and tablet access solutions to securely publish enterprise applications for use on mobile devices. It enables identity-based access from any mobile device to specific enterprise applications in a manner that streamlines the user experience while improving security and enhancing operational efficiency.

Security is an important factor that makes organizations hesitant in embracing the concept of BYOD wholeheartedly. However, with the new generation tablet access solutions, enterprises can ensure security and protection as these solutions guard against attack and data leakage by leveraging a reverse proxy architecture that keeps mobile devices off the network. Here is a look at some of the features of a best of breed tablet access solution.

* Mobilize any application

The solution enables tablet access enterprise-wide, without the need for additional hardware, software or application licenses.

* Eliminate Data Leakage

Proxy architecture and RDP over SSL helps to prevent the tablets from connecting directly to the corporate network. Since the tablets are kept "off-network", it not only maintains the security and compliance of office resources but also eliminates the potential for attack. Thus, the data never leaves the corporate network, never exists on tablets and never mixes with personal data thereby fully eliminating the potential for data leakage.

* Reduce Complexity

It reduces complexity by being an ideal complement to existing native mobile app solutions and supports any mix physical or virtual desktops and applications. This helps to maximize existing infrastructure, minimize the need for additional hardware and software and expand investments in native mobile apps and virtualization in an intelligent and cost-effective manner.

Thus with a good tablet access solution, enterprises can embrace BYOD securely and efficiently.

Related Links

Mobile Access

Remote Access

Benefits Tablet Access can bring to an Enterprise

Mon, 11 Feb 2013 09:24:33 +0100

Today Tablets have almost taken over the consumer market and are expanding at a fast rate that it is estimated approximately 153 million consumer tablets would be sold in 2013. However, the question remains about the plausibility of the use of tablets within an enterprise. An enterprise and general consumers use tablets to cater to various functions.

Tablet access and work on the go

Within an organization, the tablet devices are used 67 percent of the time working remotely. This indicates that the workforce expects fast, shareable access to the content related directly on the subject they are working. It is essential to note that tablet provides an unparalleled interface, i.e. PDF's, text, image and heavy documents becomes easier to navigate, read and edit on the bigger tablet screens.

With tablet access individuals do not get limited to working at their desks. Rather tablets in an organization will enable in high productivity as it is simple to use, mobile and the enterprise-grade applications are designed for an enterprise work purpose.

Adoption of Tablet access in an organization

Even if some organizations are not in favor of use of tablets in the workplace, they will continue to pop up. Back in 2011, approximately 57 percent of the IT managers managed concerns with consumer tablet devices at work irrespective of the company policies. Some enterprises by now have become a bit more functionally flexible where though they haven't completely accepted the use of tablets as a necessary part of the enterprise, yet they are not completely against it. On the other hand 16 percent of enterprises had a BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) policy in 2011 as compared to 8 percent in 2010. The modern day employees want tablet access and most forward thinking enterprises are resorting to tablets for the workforce quickly.

Industry solutions for Tablet Access

Safety and lack of native mobile applications for business are two biggest issues to organization mobility. Though native applications for businesses have been growing in number, most organization applications still function in a more conventional platform for instance laptops, desktop PC's, virtual infrastructure or terminal servers. Today service providers of RDP solutions (remote desktop) with their ability to mobilize these desktop applications have introduced tablet access solutions making the most of the present infrastructure.

Other than mobilizing the organization desktop application, tablet access solutions also secures against any unwarranted attacks or data leakage leveraging a reverse proxy infrastructure that keep the mobile equipment's off the network. As mobile devices connect to the RDP appliance, the data always stays in the corporate network than residing on Smartphone's and tablets. Advanced tablet access solutions securely publish applications for using on mobile devices. Regardless whether your applications operate on laptops, virtual infrastructures or terminal servers tablet access solutions provides identity-based access from any mobile device to certain enterprise applications in a way that simplifies the user experience while enhancing functional efficiency and security.

Related Links

SSL VPNs

Business Continuity Planning

BYOD solutions Ensure a Rapid & Cost-Effective Path to Mobility

Thu, 07 Feb 2013 08:24:06 +0100

Consumerization of IT is transforming the traditional IT landscape of organizations and the way employees use technology. As if mobile devices weren't enough of a constant in our everyday lives, several studies predict that they might be even more prominent in the coming years. Today, with advances in consumer technology, mobile applications, affordability of smart and powerful mobile devices, organizations are more challenged than ever to incorporate them into the enterprise IT architecture. Workers want tablet access to business applications, often from personal devices. IT departments are understandably concerned about the security and data privacy risks that accompany the BYOD movement, as well as the increased support costs.

The BYOD trend holds immense potential to transform business, enable agility and encourage innovative ways of interacting with customers and business partners. The acceptance of the "bring your own device to work" trend can bring major cost-savings for enterprises, although it shouldn't be adopted without the right safeguards in place. While using personal devices can help employees stay more productive and eliminate the need to spend on devices, there are major security risks if BYOD is handled incorrectly.

Without safeguards in place, users staff could be putting important information at risk. When an employee opens a file on their personal device, that document is now in the hands of their personal security settings. Personal devices can be insecure and more open to hacking and theft than company devices, or an employee could lose a device with important information and put the company at risk.

Enterprises generally have several applications, and the security and cost implications of mobilizing every application can be extremely formidable. The newness of the BYOD movement, combined with rapidly changing mobile capabilities, can make it difficult to have have safeguards in place. But the right solution can enable tablet access for employees, and enterprises can get a cost-effective answer. Such a solution needs to be fully secure and fully under IT control and at the same time provide complete application availability, supporting the bring your own device (BYOD) strategy. An effective solution enables seamless ‘mobilization' of any enterprise application to any personal device.

The "bring your own device" movement compels organizations to strike the right balance between employee freedom and corporate control over technology. Employee-owned devices equipped with enhanced mobile access services allow employees to collaborate in real time and finish their tasks efficiently by responding quickly. With Virtualization, ubiquitous connectivity, anywhere access to corporate data, and innovative mobile apps, the opportunities for collaborative ways of working have grown immensely. Invest in the right BYOD solution to ensure a rapid, cost-effective path to mobility that does not expose the corporate network and fully eliminates data leakage.

Solutions that Accelerate Application and Business Performance

Thu, 31 Jan 2013 11:59:49 +0100

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.

Related Links

BCP

BYOD

Tackling Business Disruptions With Effective BCP Solutions

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 09:21:24 +0100

Unplanned business disruptions come in many forms and sizes resulting in tremendous losses. With enterprises becoming increasingly reliant on technology to conduct their business, BCP has gained all the more importance. As it is usually too late to implement a BCP solution when a disruptive event occurs, there is always a loss of productivity and revenue. The ability of an organization to recover from a disaster is directly related to the degree of BCP [Business Continuity Planning] that has taken place before the disaster. Business Continuity Plan solutions are critical to the transparent and continuous operation of all types of businesses.

Business Continuity Planning is a proactive planning process that ensures critical services or products are delivered during a disruption, and it must include plans, measures and arrangements to ensure the continuous delivery of critical services and products, which permits the organization to recover its facility, data and assets. By implementing a Business Continuity Plan your business will increase its recovery capabilities dramatically. And that means you can make the right decisions quickly, cut downtime and minimize financial losses. Addressing the business continuity needs of office workers is important. These employees work at their desks, and when they work outside of the office they are usually without remote access to corporate resources.

While data protection and disaster recovery are key components of business continuity, business continuity must incorporate a full array of critical functions to keep your literal and virtual doors open for business. With a good BCP, there is no disruption of business in the event of an emergency, for both SSL VPN users and remote desktop access as well. As there are significant “hidden” losses caused by these mundane disruptions, it is important to have an effective solution in place.

Creating and maintaining a BCP helps ensure that an institution has the resources and information that needed to deal with any emergencies. Effective business continuity planning solutions are reliant on both the competence and appropriate levels of expertise from within the organization. There is also an improvement in overall organizational efficiency and in the identifying the relationship of assets and human and financial resources to critical services and deliverables.

No matter what type of remote access solution you choose, it is a superior business tool used to increase productivity by enabling easy file access during commutes, travel, after-hours work, business meetings and more. The flexibility of remote access allows for a mobile workplace has made it an essential part of business continuity.

A properly funded, well-prioritized BCP solution combined with a regular program of testing and disaster recovery drills, can help to safeguard an organization.

Related Links

Exchange 2010 Load Balancing

Application Performance