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Table of ConTenTs
ExEcutivE SuMMAry ......................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 3
This Ebook Describes: AccElErAtinG trEnDS ............................................................................................................................................................... 4
chAptEr 1 two Accelerating trends: Why Application Delivery Requirements are Changing ................................................................................................... 5
chAptEr 2 How Globalization and the Consumerization of IT Create New Application Delivery Challenges ...........................................................................................................................14
chAptEr 3 Why Existing Hardware and Virtual Appliance-Based Application Delivery Solutions are Unsuitable for Delivering Applications Over the Internet ............................................................................................................................................................ 20
chAptEr 4 What to Look for in an Internet-based Application Delivery Solution ................................................................. 24
chAptEr 5 Benefits of a Modern Application Delivery Solution Designed for Internet and Cloud-based Applications ............................................................................................................................... 35
chAptEr 6 Best Practices .................................................................................................................................................................................................... 38
concluSion ...................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 42
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IT organizations increasingly rely on Internet and cloud-based technologies to support their distributed operations. This has spawned a host of new application delivery challenges that, hand-in-hand with the industry trends of globalization, growing cloud adoption, and Bring Your Own Device (BYOD), mean that IT often has little to no control of either end user devices, network connections, or the applications they access while remaining responsible for application delivery quality. To make matters more complex, existing hardware or appliance-based application delivery solutions, designed for networks owned and managed in-house, are often insufficient to address the unique challenges posed by Internet and mobile delivery.
Delivering enterprise applications that operate with high availability, excellent performance, and strong security to customers, employees, partners, and suppliers in a distributed environment has always been challenging.
IT organizations managing Wide Area Networks (WANs) have had to overcome network latency, bandwidth constraints, packet loss, chatty protocols and applications, and more. These challenges were traditionally addressed using technologies such as WAN Optimization Controllers (WOCs) and Application Delivery Controllers (ADCs), which evolved from earlier load balancing solutions. Unfortunately, these traditional solutions aren’t equipped to sufficiently handle the modern methods of application delivery. Your business needs a solution that’s purpose-built to bring the performance, availability, security, and visibility of WAN-based application delivery solutions to Internet and cloud-based applications and a guide to what it should look like.
ExEcutivE SuMMAry
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aCCeleraTing Trends: Why application delivery requirements are changing
How globalization and the consumerization of iT create new application delivery challenges
Why existing Wan-based solutions are typically unable to address application delivery over the internet
What to look for in an application delivery solution for the internet
benefits of a cloud-based application delivery platform
application delivery and optimization best practices
1
This ebook describes ACCELERATING TRENDS:
2
3
4
5
6
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Enterprise Application Delivery:Why Application Delivery Requirements are Changing
Years ago, as more enterprise employees began working in a variety of facilities, such as branch, regional, and home offices connected via WAN links, IT organizations began to focus on ensuring their private network was able to support acceptable application delivery to those users. After all, if the applications and the networks that support a business
process don’t run with high performance and availability, the business process will grind to a halt. With variations in global connectivity speeds, large enterprises have always been sub-ject to variations in WAN performance. For this reason, WANs have long included solutions that improve WAN performance and reliability.
ChApTer1
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NOT AT ALL SLIGHTLy MODERATELy VERy ExTREMELy
Optimizing the performance of a key set of applications that are critical to the success of the business
1.2% 4.3% 11.2% 45.3% 37.9%
Ensuring acceptable performance for VoIP traffic 3.1% 5.7% 15.1% 42.8% 33.3%
Optimizing the performance of TCP 3.7% 8.1% 33.5% 33.5% 21.1%
Improving the performance of applications used by mobile workers
5.6% 10.6% 28.8% 33.1% 21.9%
Optimizing the performance of protocols other than TCP; e.g., HTTP and MAPI
4.4% 13.8% 33.8% 31.3% 16.9%
Optimizing the transfer of storage between different data centers
7.3% 11.3% 23.2% 36.4% 21.9%
The Importance of KEy OPTIMIzATION TASKS
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Why Application Acceleration is necessary for WAn-Based ApplicationsMost IT departments currently employ Application Delivery
Controllers (ADCs) and WAN Optimization Controllers (WOCs)
(described in more detail later in this eBook) to address WAN
performance challenges that include:
• Network latency — The time it takes for data to go from
the sender to the receiver and back. WAN latency is directly
proportional to the distance between the sender and receiver.
• Bandwidth constraints — WAN users incur monthly recurring
charges for bandwidth provisioned. Because high costs mean few
companies provision their private WAN to support peak loads,
most WANs have bandwidth constraints that lead to packet loss.
• Packet loss — This occurs when packets traveling over the WAN
fail to reach their destination.
• Chatty protocols and applications — A chatty protocol is
an application or routing protocol that requires a client or server
to wait for an acknowledgement before it can transmit again.
When the acknowledgements must travel long distances, which
is often the case with a WAN, latency can be high. Extended
wait times degrade the quality of service dramatically.
two trends changing Application Delivery requirementsToday, two rapidly growing trends have meant that, while
organizations continue to rely on WANs to communicate within their
branch office users, the Internet is playing a far greater role in delivering
enterprise applications. These trends are globalization and the
consumerization of IT.
Globalization
Globalization in the business arena has been expanding
for decades as organizations attempt to:
• Reach new customers worldwide.
• Leverage low cost suppliers regardless of location through offshoring.
• Take advantage of the best resources regardless of location.
• Accommodate a global workforce.
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An increasingly Global Workforce
Organizations worldwide are suffering from a lack of available
skilled talent. Globally, 34 percent of companies had difficulty filling
jobs in 2012. With skills shortages, global mobility of talent and
knowledge is critical to driving growth and innovation. This has led
to a dramatic increase in virtual working arrangements. In 2012,
the overall market for online work was more than US$1 billion and
the top companies in the space (oDesk, Elance, and Freelancer.com)
grew at 60-100 percent per year. Not only does a virtual workforce
give organizations access to necessary talent, it also significantly
reduces costs, improves workforce flexibility, and enables them to
operate 24/7.
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SourcE: (10 Key Trends to Watch for 2014, Global Trends) http://www.globaltrends.com/monthly-briefings/60-monthly-briefings/198-10-key-trends-to-watch-for-2014-trends-1-to-5
implications of Globalization on Application Delivery
Global organizations are taking advantage of technology to
support collaboration with customers, suppliers, partners, and
remote employees. Indeed, businesses are increasingly looking to
move to all-digital, self-service interaction to give customers and
collaborators a way to work with the company on their own terms,
at their convenience. For example, customers can learn about the
company’s products by browsing the product website, place an
order via the company’s mobile phone app, or check the status of
a transaction by logging onto the company’s customer portal. These
web applications will also need to be able to work with the wide
range of mobile devices that partners, suppliers, customers, and
mobile employees use to access the web.
However, it can be expensive and logistically prohibitive for an
organization to give business partners, suppliers, customers, and
home-based employees around the world full access to their private
WANs. It’s faster, easier, and cheaper for organizations to deliver
business applications over the public Internet, and take advantage
of the ubiquity, global scale, and cost efficiencies offered. As we’ll
discuss later in this eBook, delivering applications over the Internet and
accommodating mobile devices presents application delivery challenges
above and beyond those that occur on a WAN.
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More Distributed partners
“Twenty to thirty years ago, auto companies turned to tool designers
located in Detroit,” said Brian Apley, Strategist, Automotive and
Manufacturing Industries, Akamai. “Hundreds or thousands of tool
and die makers could be found nearby. Geography mattered. That
doesn’t exist anymore. Automakers today want the person who’s
truly the best at what they do. Any barriers that would prevent
business from going elsewhere have melted away.”
SourcE: Quote from Brian Apley
the consumerization of it
Historically, central IT organizations controlled IT usage within their
firms, choosing or approving of systems and services for employees.
But with the growth of the Internet and the rise of SaaS apps, people
began to see that consumer IT offerings based on a simple Internet
browser could be viable alternatives to traditional on-premise business
computing solutions. Over time, employees began to blur the lines
between their work and personal lives and began demanding the
flexibility to use the same technologies and applications at work that
they use on their personal time—often referred to as BYOD
With the ready availability of cloud-based applications—where a
service provider handles the installation, management, and mainte-
nance of hardware and software and makes solutions available on a
subscription basis—employees and departments are taking the idea
of the consumerization of IT to the next level. Not only are they using
their own personal devices at the office, employees and departments
are increasingly adopting enterprise applications and IT services on
their own without consulting with their company’s IT department.
Mobility and Bring your own Device (ByoD)
Employees’ desire to use their personal devices (e.g., mobile devices,
tablets, and phablets) anytime, anywhere has led to the trend of BYOD
Global Acceptance of it consumerization
• 56% of respondents to a recent survey said yes to ByOD
• The US led this innovation with 75% allowing ByOD
• In Japan 36% of companies allow ByOD
• 59% of German companies allow ByOD
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SourcE: Consumerization Survey Report: The Consumerization of IT, Trend Micro, 2012.
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Most Employees use Mobile Devices
to Access Business Data and ApplicationsThe vast majority (98 percent) of employees use a mobile device daily to access business-related data and applications from an external site.
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SourcE: “2013 Application & Service Delivery Handbook,” Webtorials, by Dr. Jim Metzler and Ashton Metzler & Associates.
becoming mainstream in the enterprise, where employees expect to
access corporate applications on their personal devices. In the early
stages of BYOD, organizations provided access to email and the cor-
porate directory from outside the office. Now employees expect to be
able to access all enterprise applications required to do their jobs, from
ERP to CRM to HR.
In the future, Forrester Research suggests that organizations will
develop “increasingly sophisticated mobile apps that enable contin-
uous engagement with customers and employees, data capture and
access at the point of engagement, context aware applications, and
engagement analytics that optimize processes, effectiveness, and
customer intimacy.”
The challenge of BYOD for IT organizations is that it leaves IT without
control over the devices people use to access their systems. Since
the mobile market is highly fragmented (as this eBook will describe
in more detail later), IT must ensure that enterprise applications work
seamlessly and are secure across a wide range of devices with widely
varied characteristics.
SourcE: “Rolling Out the Mobile Workplace in Europe: The Recipe for a Strategic Approach,” Forrester Research, October 18, 2013.
Mobile Adoption in EuropeCompared to Americans, Europeans feel a greater sense of urgency to deploy a mobile strategy. More than one in five respondents to a recent survey said having a strategy is critical, compared to 13 percent of their North American counterparts. This difference hints at a more rapid European mobile enterprise deployment.
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SourcE: “Rolling Out the Mobile Workplace in Europe: The Recipe for a Strategic Approach,” Forrester Research, October 18, 2013.
Mobile Adoption in Asia pacificOverall mobile traffic is expected to grow to 15.9 Exabytes per month by 2018, nearly an 11-fold increase over 2013. Asia-Pacific will show a 67 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) and 13-fold growth by 2018.
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SourcE: Cisco
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cloud Adoption in the u.S. - Ninety four percent of organizations surveyed are running cloud-based applications or experimenting with infrastructure as a service, while 87 percent of organizations are using the public cloud.
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SourcE: Cloud Computing Trends: 2014 State of the Cloud Survey—Rightscale.
cloud Adoption predicted to continue to Surge in the u.S. The cloud market is predicted to surge by 25 percent in 2014, with an ever increasing share of enterprise IT moving to the cloud within the next five years.
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SourcE: Enterprise Cloud Economy Driven by 10 Market Forces in 2014, eWeek, Chris Preimsesberger, 2/28/14 Slide 8.
Drivers for cloud Adoption - The biggest drivers for cloud adoption according to respondents of a recent survey are:
• Cost reductions and predictability — 32 percent• Accessibility to technology with less friction — 31 percent• Scalability to meet resource demands — 22 percent• Agility to meet changing requirements — 15 percent
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SourcE: “Cloud Adoption Tops List of 2014 IT trends in CompuCom Poll of IT Professionals,” March 4, 2014.
cloudConsumerization of IT goes far beyond personal technology
choices and BYOD. Ultimately, it means that workgroups, line-of-
business managers, and entire business units are making technology
decisions—often without seeking guidance or approval from IT.
These groups are able to make these technology decisions due
to the increasing prevalence of cloud services and software-as-
a-service (SaaS) applications, which are readily available and easy to
use. Users can access many of these services on a self-service basis
with the push of a button.
Cloud/SaaS apps provide business users with benefits that
typically include:
• time to value. Cloud solutions can be deployed quickly
because all necessary components are already up and running
at the cloud service provider’s site. Users needn’t install and test
software or provision servers; they simply access software over
the web—anytime, anywhere.
• lower upfront costs. For the applicable solution, businesses
no longer need to buy software or hardware, purchase expensive
maintenance contracts, or undergo costly deployment projects.
They simply pay for the services they use as they go.
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• Easier maintenance and administration. Cloud service
providers operate, maintain, and upgrade the software so
business users don’t need to rely on internal IT teams.
• Scalability. Cloud computing allows clients to easily scale
their IT resources up or down as necessary to support business
requirements without costly hardware purchases.
Employees and departments are using cloud-based SaaS for an
ever-widening range of business applications—from CRM to ERP
to ITSM and much more.
IT departments are also taking advantage of these cloud benefits.
They are adopting SaaS for some applications and are moving other
corporate applications, such as storage and business continuity/disas-
ter recovery, to the cloud using Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and
Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offerings.
Because public cloud services are typically delivered to end users
over the Internet, the greater the rate of cloud adoption, the more
application delivery occurs on the web.
the top cloud Services - Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and cloud storage ranked as the top two public cloud services that enterprises and small to medium sized businesses currently use, with SaaS employed by 62 percent and cloud storage by 56 percent. In addition, collaboration software is used by 42 percent of respondents, IaaS by 42 percent, and Disaster Recovery by 39 percent.
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SourcE: “Cloud computing survey reveals buyer trends for 2014,” TechTarget Feb 4, 2014.
cloud Adoption in Europe - European respondents are allocating an increasing percentage of their IT budgets to cloud computing. In 2012, 58 percent of European respondents were expecting to allocate more than 5 percent of their IT budget to cloud in the next 12 to 24 months. In 2013, the percentage had risen to 78 percent.
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SourcE: Ovum—Cloud Services Business Trends Survey 2013: European Results.
the Asia pacific cloud Market - The Asia-Pacific Cloud Computing Market Forecast is forecasted to grow by a 21.2 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) between 2010 and 2016 with an aggregate $28.5 billion over the same period.
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SourcE: “The Future of Virtualization, Cloud Computing and Green IT – Global Technologies & Markets Outlook – 2011-2016”, Market Info Group, Jim Matthews.
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the implications of Globalization and it consumerization for the WAn Globalization and IT consumerization are not new, and have
been growing in prevalence for a number of years, but analysts
agree that these trends have reached a tipping point in terms
of the implication that these trends have on how organizations
architect their application delivery strategies. Applications must
be delivered over the Internet to meet the demands of globalization
and IT consumerization; therefore, the private WAN is no longer
the predominant network service for delivering applications to
distributed organizations. Today, the Internet is a critical piece
of every organization’s extended network fabric. Organizations must
consider and address the inherent challenges that come with using the
Internet for delivery, including performance, reliability, and security.
cloud Services Definitions
Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS): IaaS offers compute and/or
storage resources combined with network resources and associated services
via the cloud, usually from a virtualized environment.
Platform-as-a-service (PaaS): PaaS provides a platform that makes
it easier to develop and run applications, which will be delivered via
the cloud, using programming languages and tools supported by
the PaaS provider.
Software-as-a-service (SaaS): SaaS combines application functionality
delivered via a web browser and open published APIs with data encryption,
transmission, access, and storage services.
Outsourced private cloud: The use of a third-party service provider such
as a systems integrator or IT outsourcer to deliver services via a cloud-computing
model either as part of an IT outsourcing contract or as a managed service.
Public cloud: The use of a standard third-party, hosted cloud service
such as Amazon Web Services or Salesforce.com.
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# 1 Users accustomed to
high levels of usability and
performance from their
consumer applications have
very high expectations for
enterprise applications as well.
THIS MEANS THAT:
• Performance must be blazing fast
• Downtime is unacceptable
• User experience must be exceptional on any device or applications won’t get used
ChApTer2
how Globalization and the consumerization of it create new Application Delivery challenges
Globalization and the consumerization of IT have significant implications for IT departments
as they struggle to deliver applications. In particular, they lead to thrEE iSSuES:
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Because IT doesn’t control the data center
where many of their applications are
hosted, they cannot guarantee application
reliability, security, or server performance.
SLAs associated with public cloud
computing services are often weak and
delivered on a best-effort basis. Most SLAs
for public cloud computing services don’t
contain a goal for end-to-end performance
of the service. Moreover, IT is unable to
instrument the cloud provider’s data center
in such a way as to achieve the same level
of visibility into availability and performance
that they’re accustomed to with their
on-premise applications in the past. This
means IT may be unaware of performance
and availability problems before they
impact end users.
Additionally, variability in mobile network
performance and a multitude of browsers
and device types add another layer of
complexity to the scenario. BYOD means
that IT is struggling to impose standards
for end user devices in a highly
fragmented market.
# 3 even as globalization and the
consumerization of iT mean higher
end user expectations and less
control, these trends increase the
technical challenges that iT must
overcome to deliver applications
with high performance,
availability, and security.
These technical challenges include issues specific to the Internet, as well as those resulting
from the consumerization of IT, as described in the following sections.
# 2 When cloud is combined
with bYod, iT no longer has
control of the data center or
the user device. Yet iT remains
responsible for the overall
end user experience.
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technical challenges Due to internet Delivery The use of the Internet creates delivery challenges above and
beyond those experienced over WANs controlled by IT.
these include:
• Poor performance due to high latency. Internet latency is
typically higher than the latency in a private WAN.
• Availability challenges. Application availability can be uncertain.
The Internet is comprised of thousands of interconnected networks.
If a link or piece of equipment fails, routing protocols update the
routing tables on all the routers on its network within seconds.
The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) exchanges this information
between networks. After a failure, the size and complexity of the
Internet as well as BGP characteristics mean it can take several
minutes for all the routing tables to be updated. The impact
depends on the application. A brief outage may have no effect
on a static website while it can cause an application using the
UDP protocol to fail. Application availability over the Internet can
also be impacted by malicious Internet attacks (e.g., denial of
service attacks) and congestion due to peak demand.
• Packet loss. Internet users experience more packet loss than those
on a private WAN due to the way BGP makes routing decisions.
• Performance issues due to TCP. The TCP transport protocol
retransmits lost packets until the connection times out. A
misconfigured timeout parameter can cause unnecessary delays
or additional congestion. The TCP slow start algorithm can also
impact performance. Part of TCP’s congestion control strategy, this
parameter initially constrains the data transfer between devices,
and then increases the data transfer rate if no communications
problems arise. The slow start algorithm is also applied in situations
in which a packet is dropped.
• Chatty Protocols and Applications. Both WAN and Internet
performance can be impacted by chatty protocols and applications
that require a client or server to wait for an acknowledgement
before it can transmit again. But greater Internet latency makes
chatty protocols a bigger issue on the Internet.
• Visibility. Because the Internet is a network of networks, it is
difficult if not impossible for an IT organization to get detailed
visibility into the end-to-end performance and user experience
of the applications they’re delivering over the Internet.
• Security. As data travels over the public Internet, IT needs to
ensure privacy and security.
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Mobile performance is SlowCompuware Gomez’s industry benchmarks show that even among top U.S. brands, many of whom have mobile-optimized sites, the end user experience is roughly four times slower on mobile versus the desktop.
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SourcE: Innovating at the Pace of Mobile
technical challenges Due to the consumerization of it While the Internet itself delivers less reliable performance and
availability for applications than a private WAN, the consumerization
of IT only adds to the challenges. Consumerization of IT means that
IT must deal with rich content, mobile/BYOD devices, mobile
networks, and lack of visibility into end user devices when
delivering applications.
Rich ContentIn an effort to drive adoption, applications delivered over the
Internet are incorporating rich, dynamic content to become more
like desktop applications delivered via a web or mobile browser.
Sophisticated graphics, sounds, images, videos, application logic,
and data sets create large payloads and complex renderings that can
negatively impact application performance. Web architectures must
incorporate solutions to speed delivery of rich content.
Mobile/ByOD DevicesAs end users look to access content using their own devices,
IT must develop a strategy that makes it possible to accommodate
the increasing prevalence of mobile networks and devices. This
requires IT to take into account the following characteristics of
mobile devices:
•15% extremely important
•38% very important
•27% moderately important
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SourcE: “2013 Application & Service Delivery Handbook,” Webtorials, by Dr. Jim Metzler and Ashton Metzler & Associates, Page 12
the importance of optimizing Mobile Applications
•71% of mobile users feel sites should be as responsive on their mobile devices as to their desktops, and
•74% refuse to wait more than 5 seconds for a mobile site to load.
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SourcE: Innovating at the Pace of Mobile
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• Fewer hardware resources. Mobile devices
have only a fraction of the CPU power, mem-
ory, and storage space of desktop devices. This
can affect page and application response times.
• Market fragmentation. Differences among
mobile devices that can impact the end user
experience include operating system, proces-
sor speed, screen size and resolution, browser
capabilities, and supported technologies such
as Flash and JavaScript and protocol support.
These variations make delivering high-quality
mobile experiences particularly daunting.
• Rapid advances. Mobile technology is
evolving rapidly and consumers upgrade
their devices regularly. IT has to keep pace
with these advances.
• Lack of security. Mobile devices experience
the same malware and network intrusion
attacks as PCs, but they typically lack mature
products for malware protection (anti-virus
software) and network intrusion protection
(personal firewall).
Bottlenecks in Mobile Site and Application Delivery
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Mobile networksMobile networks were not designed for web traffic. Mobile users
accessing Internet applications often experience more performance
and reliability issues than those working with websites over the
standard Internet. While mobile sites and applications must overcome
the same first and middle mile bottlenecks as traditional websites for
their desktop clients, the last miles on mobile networks have much
higher latency and packet loss than broadband fixed line networks.
Latency is impacted by signal strength, cell tower capacity, network
operator, type of carrier, and users moving from one area of
coverage to another.
The problems are compounded when delivering apps or websites to
mobile browsers because each application page is typically comprised of
numerous requests. While each individual request from a mobile device
suffers from increased round trip time (RTT) compared to a desktop
machine, overall page performance degrades exponentially. Volatile
conditions found across cellular networks can also wreak havoc on
the performance of the TCP and HTTP communications protocols.
Standard TCP, for example, is designed to provide reliable transport
at the cost of performance. It’s not tuned to work well under scenarios
with high loss, high latency, or high variability—all common in
mobile networks.
visibility constraintsWhile IT has difficulty gaining visibility into the performance and
availability of applications operating over the Internet, consumerization
of IT exacerbates the issue. Most IT organizations cannot load
management agents onto BYOD devices used by company employees
nor can they host their management software at a SaaS provider’s
site. The result is a near total loss of visibility into the performance
of business-critical applications accessed over the Internet. This makes
proactive management impossible and significantly increases the time
it takes to reactively manage the network.
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Why Existing hardware and virtual Appliance-Based Application Delivery Solutions are unsuitable for Delivering Applications over the internet
Application Delivery Controllers (ADCs) and WAN Optimization
Controllers (WOCs) have long been a critical component of
IT architectures to optimize application delivery over the Private
IP WAN. These solutions evolved from local load balancing
solutions that balanced traffic across servers and intelligently
sent application requests to the most available server to maxi-
mize server efficiency, application availability, and performance.
ADC and WAN solutions evolved to accelerate application
performance using techniques such as compression and
caching and provided incremental security. Today, WOCs
and ADCs include the following characteristics:
3ChApTer3
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Woc SolutionsWOC solutions are designed to accelerate and provide QoS for traffic over private networks. They’re deployed symmetrically, meaning that administrators install the WOC solutions “dual ended” in data centers and in branch offices in order to locate one box near the application and one near the users. The goal is to optimize the back and forth between the branch offices and the main data centers.
WOCs include capabilities that improve the performance of protocols such as TCP or CIFS. They also employ optimization techniques to mitigate application specific inefficiencies that sometimes occur when these applications communicate over a WAN. Capabilities include data reduction to mitigate insufficient bandwidth; protocol acceleration and mitigation of round trip time to address high latency; Forward Error Correction (FEC) for packet loss; and QoS for data contention.
While WOCs are effective at accelerating applica-tions on a WAN, they have characteristics that make them unsuitable for delivering web-based
applications globally.
Data Center
Core
Backup
WAn optimization at Work
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• Firewall functionality to ensure data integrity and provide application-specific security
• Offloading computationally intensive tasks such as processing of SSL traffic
• Switching, accelerating, and securing XML apps and web services
• Support for server virtualization
While ADCs do a great job of load balancing local traffic and
preserving the performance of servers in the data center for end-users
located within the private network, they don’t address the increasing
amount of Internet-based end users. As applications traverse the
Internet, a new set of bottlenecks and security concerns can thwart
effective delivery to employees, business partners, suppliers, and
customers across the globe. When the organization deals with the
large number of potential users on the internet, it is prohibitively
expensive to install an ADC device at every end user endpoint.
Therefore, when delivering applications over the Internet, the
QoS benefits of WOC solutions are not able to be leveraged, and
the performance and load balancing capabilities of ADC solutions
are only able to be leveraged asymmetrically. This means that
ADc SolutionsADC solutions are designed to load balance and manage
the delivery of applications. ADCs are deployed asymmetrically.
In other words, administrators install the ADC solutions “single
ended,” on the data center side, and not on the side where the
end users are located. These ADC solutions sit inside the data
center, in front of a server farm, receive requests from clients,
and load balance the routing and delivery of end user requests
for applications to the most appropriate servers. They also offload
computationally-intensive communications processing from servers
as well as perform other tasks. When deployed in a private
network, ADCs work in concert with WOCs located in the branch
office locations to optimize application delivery symmetrically, thus
having a positive impact on application performance for those
users located within branch offices on the private work.
Specifically, ADC solutions improve the performance of applications with capabilities that include:
• Server load balancing to maximize application scalability and availability
• Layer 4-7 switching to direct application queries to the most appropriate server
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Clients
ADC
WebServers
ApplicationServers
DatabaseServers
the ADC only controls one-end
of the application delivery, the end
closest to where the application is
hosted. There is nothing at the other
end where the end-user is located.
This is a flawed strategy and results in
poor performance, spotty availability,
and an increased risk profile.
Arranging your Application Delivery
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4What to look for in an internet-Based Application Delivery Solution
Private Networks and Private IP WANs aren’t going away any time
soon. However, as a result of Globalization and Consumerizaton
of IT, the WAN is becoming a smaller component of the extended
enterprise network fabric. The Internet is becoming an increasingly
large and critical component of the extended network fabric. That
means WOCs and ADCs will continue to play an important role in
your IT infrastructure for the portion of the your application delivery
that is still contained within your private network environment. At
the same time, the growing importance of the Internet means you
need a strategy to extend the same enterprise-class performance,
availability, scalability, security, management, and control that
currently characterize a WAN environment to the Internet.
chapter4
What characteristics should you look for in a web-based application delivery solution?
The following are key considerations:
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WAN / MPLS
Akamai Intelligent Platform
Data Center / HQ / CampusStore / Branch 1 to n
ISR-AX withAkamai Unified
Performance ASR1000-AX
A holistic solution accelerates application delivery on the WAn and extends those capabilities to the internet.
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“Service providers have levels of scale, utilization,
and engineering talent that individual enterprises
cannot usually achieve. In many areas of technology,
these factors can drive down service costs by a significant
amount and the company can avoid many of the
disruptions and risks associated with both periodic
refresh cycles for on-premise equipment and the
operational perils of obsolete technologies.”
— John parkinson
Affiliate Partner, Waterstone Management Group in Chicago writing in CFO Magazine
is it a managed service?
Accelerating application performance for large numbers of
customers, suppliers, partners, and remote employees requires
many points of presence, in order to always be very close to
wherever your applications are hosted and very close to wherever
your end-users are located. Attempting to manage the deployment
of an application delivery infrastructure designed to support Internet-
based users and applications would be prohibitively complex and
costly. Not only would IT need to purchase the application delivery
devices themselves, it would also need to install, manage, and
upgrade them all over time. If your organization wanted to sign
up a new supplier or partner, you would need to work with
their IT team to install an application delivery device to improve
collaboration. By working with a managed service provider that
offers a truly globally distributed and on-demand solution, you
can eliminate the capital expense and complexity of deploying and
managing hardware and software yourself. And you can add new
application delivery services as necessary, paying only for the services
you need, when you need them.
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Are the optimizations highly distributed to deliver a natively symmetrical solution?
To truly maximize performance of Internet-based applications,
the optimization needs to occur as close as possible to both
the data center and to the end user. Optimizations located
near applications and end users are able to fully optimize the
end-to-end delivery and minimize latency and enhance the user
experience. Look for a managed service provider that can make
available to customers a network of hundreds or thousands of
application delivery devices in every country where your users
may be located today or tomorrow to ensure that these devices
are no more than a network hop away from most users.
Does the service provider offer a single platform that provides comprehensive management for all of your externally delivered applications and services?
IT organizations need to manage performance, availability,
and security for a wide range of externally facing applications—
from web applications to various cloud-based and SaaS
applications to end user apps. They need to make these
applications available to a wide range of external users
(customers, suppliers, partners, remote employees)
look for an internet acceleration solution that has enough optimization devices that they can be close to both the data center and the end user.
• End user requests www.originserver.com (origin server) in the browser
• End user browser receives content from the optimum server
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through a wide range of devices (PCs, laptops, smart-
phones, tablets, phablets, and so on). IT must deliver
these services with high performance and availability.
Complexity and cost render it impossible to meet these
demands using a plethora of point solutions. You need
a common, Internet management platform that gives
you visibility into performance and availability for all
externally facing applications delivered over the Internet
to any device anywhere and one that allows you to
proactively manage the customer’s experience.
how easy is it to integrate your applications into the solution?
An Internet application delivery solution should integrate
quickly and easily with your applications. Look for a
solution that requires no changes to the applications
themselves. A solution that uses DNS or network-based
routing to integrate applications with the service allows
you to move all your services to the acceleration platform
at the network layer without making modifications
to the enterprise.
routing your internet Application Delivery
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how easy is it to port your applications to different virtualized and cloud environments?
Organizations modernizing their infrastructure may want to move
their applications from their in-house data center to a public IaaS
cloud environment. Look for a solution that allows you to easily
apply and instantly migrate configuration rules regardless of
where the application is running.
how flexible is the solution?
Different applications have different use cases and different
demands. The solution should deliver the flexibility to tie rules to
applications in ways that meet those demands. For example, the
solution might allow you to configure rules that vary the level of
image compression used in delivering content to a specific mobile
device to optimize performance.
What is the total cost of ownership?
When purchasing a solution, many systems architects look at
the price of the hardware but fail to consider the total cost of
ownership (TCO). When comparing TCO of an ADC and WOC-
based solutions to that of a managed service, be sure to
consider all of the factors involved in delivering the service.
These factors include the cost of the acceleration devices or
virtual appliances themselves—and to ensure redundancy and
availability, IT typically purchases two to four devices per location.
Expenses also include rack space, power, applications, and the IT
staff required to manage and support the service.
how does the solution optimize application performance?
The Internet is inherently slow and inefficient in transporting
data between end users and the applications they’re accessing,
regardless of whether it’s a web application or a SaaS service.
The challenge becomes even more pronounced as the end users
of a given application become farther away from the physical
location of the data center. To optimize application performance,
the solution should offer route optimization, connection opti-
mization, and a globally distributed network in order to be able
to symmetrically optimize the application delivery regardless of
where the application and user may be located.
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Route optimizationAdvanced Internet routing that identifies alternative paths to those proposed by BGP will improve connection perfor-mance or provide failover if a direct path is congested or unavailable. The solution should also optimize the path between the application server and the acceleration device, based on actual response time data for users accessing applications over the Internet.
Connection optimizationThe acceleration device should be close to the end user since proximity naturally reduces latency. After it estab-lishes a connection, the device should perform optimizations such as prefetch-ing of content to reduce round trips between the user and the server or implementing rules that predict what content the end user is likely to request next and pre-loading that content close to the user.
the solution should be able to optimize the path between the origin server and the end user.
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how does the solution optimize presentation to end users, particularly over mobile devices?
Many variables impact application delivery to end users over
the Internet. Many applications are now atomic services built
by small developer groups with various levels of expertise. These
developers may not know how to create high performing web-
based apps. End users access these applications with a wide array
of devices with different screen sizes, OSs, and other capabilities.
Applications are delivered over networks with widely varying
performance characteristics.
The solution should make optimizations with an awareness of
these variables and tune the page for each situation. Capabilities
that enable this tuning include:
• Adaptive image compression varies the level of compression
for .jpg images based on real-time network conditions to allow
pages to load quickly even under poor network conditions.
• Device characterization allows the platform to decipher
characteristics of the requesting device and use them to
respond intelligently to a particular request.
• Support for the SHUTR (Suppressed Headers for Uplink Traffic
Reduction) extension to the HTTP protocol can reduce the
amount of data necessary to perform a web transaction to
mitigate the challenges associated with network latency and
packet loss and improve the user experience.
• Detection and redirection capabilities allow the platform to
evaluate incoming HTTP requests to determine specific device
characteristics and then redirect devices to the appropriate site,
dramatically improving response times. For example, many
organizations create sites specifically for mobile devices.
how does the solution ensure availability?
Whenever a web or cloud-based application goes down, it is likely
to lead to lost revenue, unproductive users, and negative impact on
the brand. While problems in the data center cause some outages,
they can also occur due to Internet connection issues between the
end user and the data center. These issues include malicious Inter-
net attacks, congestion due to peak demand, network equipment
failures, and/or network outages.
A solution that delivers dynamic global load balancing and traffic
management alleviates connection issues to ensure availability
of mission critical applications. Global load balancing and traffic
management balancing can be used to manage the routing of
traffic across multiple data centers with a higher degree of control
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and assurance than is possible with DNS based
global traffic management solutions. By combining
robust HTTP request management capabilities with
the ability to maintain information about a data
center’s load and availability, global load balancing
and traffic management balancing capabilities
ensure that every request goes to the best data
center and that no request is dropped or unfulfilled
when a data center is unavailable.
Does the solution scale application delivery over the internet?
Many organizations work with cloud services
providers to make it easy to scale their application
and infrastructure resources dynamically. But
working with these providers doesn’t scale appli-
cation delivery from the data center out over the
Internet to end users located all over the world.
To improve scalability of application delivery over
the Internet, a solution should provide reliable,
robust, and scalable DNS capabilities to dependably
direct end users to applications.
cloud Balancing
INTERNET
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Does the solution deliver the visibility necessary to monitor and control internet-based application delivery?
Maintaining visibility across web applications and application
hosting platforms to understand the “real” user experience is
extremely difficult. IT teams want visibility into application perfor-
mance over the Internet within their existing management and
monitoring tools.
The application delivery solution should allow you to monitor
all aspects of transactions in a granular fashion as they traverse
the Internet. It should collect (and make available to your exist-
ing management tools) meta data about every transaction. For
example: Was the application served from the cache or not? What
type of device was used? Where was the end point? The solution
should track this information across all services, not just from the
data center but from third-party SaaS providers.
A solution that monitors transactions as they traverse the Internet
provides a complete picture of every transaction. This enables you
to accurately gauge the customer experience and greatly facilitates
troubleshooting if something goes wrong. For example, if the data
center isn’t responding, this data would allow you to determine
that the request came from the customer and wasn’t delivered.
how does the solution provide web security?
Protecting applications from threats and keeping data safe are
critical aspects of every organization’s IT strategy. A solution that is
globally distributed provides a natural defense against web-based
security attacks. For example, if a distributed denial of service (DDoS)
attack targets a particular server, the vast size of the network absorbs
the load and prevents the attack from overwhelming that server.
In addition, the solution should integrate access control
functionality with existing authentication solutions to control
which users can view application content. Communications with
applications should be protected with SSL. The service provider
should provide enough capacity on its infrastructure to handle
SSL content, and the infrastructure should meet robust levels of
physical, network, software, and procedural security. Application
delivery servers should be located in data centers specifically selected
for high levels of security, in locked cabinets with cameras and
other intrusion detection devices. In addition, servers should be
continuously monitored and audited.
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Use 3 Services
Use 1 Service Difference
End-to-end service authorization 50% 29% 1.7 times
Integrated availability and performance management
40% 22% 1.8 times
Accelerated software development 44% 28% 1.5 times
Identity management 44% 25% 1.8 times
Single sign-in to enterprise and cloud apps
39% 24% 1.6 times
Backup and recovery 48% 34% 1.4 times
Service level management across cloud and non-cloud components
42% 19% 2.2 times
Ability to switch between different cloud service providers
44% 26% 1.7 times
Cloud migration assistance 36% 23% 1.6 times
the more cloud services organizations use, the more important management solutions become.
Capabilities They Need to ensure Cloud Success
60%
50%
40%
30%
20%
10%
0%1 year 2-3 years 3-4 years 4+ years
The more companies use the cloud. the more they recognize the need for greater enterprise control over the cloud.
end-to-end service automation
Service level management across cloud and non-cloud components
Ability to switch between different cloud service providers
Identity management
Management needs mature as cloud deployments mature.
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Benefits of a Modern Application Delivery Solution Designed for internet and cloud-based Applications
Application delivery solutions developed specifically for the Internet provide your web and SaaS applications with high
performance, availability, security, and visibility. By obtaining these services from a managed service provider that provides
application acceleration and security over the Internet on a global scale, your organization can drive down IT costs,
reduce IT complexity, and increase end user productivity.
ChApTer5
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The majority of customers using a managed application delivery solution for the Internet:
•Reduced IT infrastructure costs by 5% or more
•Improved application performance by 50% or more
linK }
SourcE: 2014 TechValidate Research of Akamai Customers
An S&P 500 consumer products company reduced the amount of time IT and R&D resources spent managing and troubleshooting Web site and application delivery by 15% to 20%.
linK }
SourcE: 2014 TechValidate Research of Akamai Customers
Drive Down it costs By leveraging a service provider that delivers application delivery
acceleration and security at a global scale, your organization can greatly
reduce your need to purchase and support additional infrastructure to
host and deliver applications to globally distributed end users. You can
reduce the number of support tickets associated with poor application
performance and degraded end user experience. Your organization can
also take advantage of the service to allow more of your applications to
take advantage of the ubiquity, global scale, and cost efficiencies of the
Internet to deliver all your business applications.
reduce it complexity With a standard solution for delivering all business applications
over the Internet, your organization eliminates the need to implement
separate hardware-based point-solutions that address only certain
aspects. As a result, your organization can lower IT costs, reduce
IT complexity, and deliver a consistent level-of-service across the
entire application portfolio.
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Customers using a managed application delivery solution for the Internet improved application and website performance by 130%+.
linK }
SourcE: 2014 TechValidate Research of Akamai Customers
21% of organizations using a managed application deliver solution for the Internet experienced improved end user productivity.
linK }
SourcE: 2014 TechValidate Research of Akamai Customers
improved customer Experiences Employing a managed Internet application delivery solution improves
online interactions with customers and partners by furnishing better
performing web applications and sites. As more and more B2B
transactions are conducted online, you can make it frictionless
and easy to do business with your organization.
increase End user productivity Employees are your organization’s most valuable and most expensive
asset. Internet application acceleration solutions enable end users to
get more done in less time by improving the usability of the applications
they rely on every day to do their jobs. Your organization can
also optimize application delivery to mobile device users dynamically
and in real-time, so that end users can be their most productive
when working on any device, from anywhere in the world.
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6ChApTer6
Best practices As your organization supports an increasingly global workforce and responds to demands for
the consumerization of IT by implementing mobile and cloud initiatives, you need to ensure the
technical and business success of these initiatives. The following best-practices can help:
For Mobile usersAs IT organizations adopt BYOD policies, they lose control of
end user devices yet they’re expected to deliver information
to those devices effectively and with good performance, despite
a dizzying array of device characteristics. IT must also ensure
secure data access despite the fact that these devices lack the
security capabilities typically found on desktop and laptop
systems. Most IT organizations have responded to the growth
in mobile devices by making a limited set of applications and
data accessible to mobile devices.
A best practice to improve support for mobile employees is to develop
a mobility strategy based on rethinking how employees will leverage
a growing set of devices to share and consume information from any-
where, at any time. Implement solutions that address mobile device
delivery holistically and that dynamically adapt to ensure end users have
a positive user experience accessing the business applications they rely on
to do their jobs, regardless of the device or connection type they may be
using today, and in the future. In addition, the mobile strategy should be
architected to accommodate the reality that devices evolve continually.
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For cloud computingWhen an IT organization takes advantage of a public cloud solution,
it is neither able to guarantee data center reliability or security—nor does
it have its accustomed visibility. At the same time, the solution is subject
to the performance limitations of the Internet. Yet, IT remains responsible
for the overall user experience.
Cloud monitoring provides real-time access to granular levels of
information about all application activity and performance, across a
customer’s application portfolio, regardless of what cloud environment
a given application is hosted in. The data insights included with cloud
monitoring include metrics on complete request/response cycles as
well as origin response times. With this real-time performance
information (as well as knowledge of characteristics such as cost and
geographic location of the user), organizations can then use cloud
balancing to intelligently load balance user traffic and failover across
multiple data centers.
Cloud balancing can involve any number of public cloud and/or
corporate data centers. If it is done correctly, cloud balancing maximizes
the user experience by ensuring that the applications that users are
requesting are 100 percent available and that they are accessing the
most appropriate computing environment based on
their unique device, geographic location, and network character-
istics. Another important advantage of cloud balancing is that it
enables companies to build an infrastructure that supports the
average traffic load and use public cloud services to handle peak
loads, seamlessly and automatically.
For Application ModernizationMany organizations are modernizing their existing applications.
Their goal is to reduce costs by retiring legacy application
infrastructure and network equipment, create new business
value from existing applications, and gain the ability to deploy
applications instantly to anyone anywhere. Two of the ways
that IT organizations are modernizing their applications are by
implementing web-based user interfaces or by leveraging public
cloud services, either moving the application to an IaaS provider
or replacing the application with an equivalent from a SaaS
provider. These efforts drive more of the organization’s traffic
onto the Internet.
A best practice when modernizing applications is to do a thorough
risk/reward analysis prior to starting the project. Quantify the specific
benefits that the project will produce and identify the challenges that
the project will likely create. For example, if the project demands the
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use of additional services from a public cloud provider, identify
the associated performance, reliability, and security challenges, and how to proactively address them. The analysis should also identify ways to mitigate the risk associated with the increased use of the Internet as a core component of the organization’s overall IT delivery platform.
For optimizing Application Delivery over the internetAs you begin to implement new initiatives and support emerging
business models, such as the consumerization of IT, analyze a variety of
service delivery models. Find a trusted third-party provider during the
planning stages and leverage their expertise in helping design and archi-
tect a strategy that positions your organization to leverage the Internet
and ensure the success of your IT initiatives. Continue to engage with
these experts throughout the project lifecycle. For example, rather than
follow a “set it and forget it” approach to using third-party services,
regularly using reporting functionality to make changes to the service
will maximize the benefits of the service. Once the strategy is devel-
oped, take advantage of capabilities of the service provider’s platform
to maximize performance.
Examples include:
• SlAs. Investigate and take advantage of the service provider’s
guaranteed SLA.
• route efficiently. A platform that chooses the end-to-end
path with the least delay and the least packet loss will improve
performance and availability of the Internet by circumventing
outages, peering inefficiencies, or congestion.
• Minimize round trips. Take advantage of content and object
pre-fetching. Designate the most likely next pages that users will
visit and start the process of gathering content, making web service
calls or doing database lookups and pre-fetching them close to users
before they request it to reduce delay when the requests are made.
Object pre-fetching minimizes the time it takes for a browser/client
to load and render an application. Cache non-personalized content
wherever possible or realize that some pages can be personalized on
the client side with java script based on simple cookie values.
• offload content. Offload static content out of the data center to
caches in the application delivery device and persistent, replicated in-
cloud storage facilities to reduce the time it takes to access this content.
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• Differentiate dynamic vs. personal content. Application servers generate dynamic content to respond to end user requests. In some cases, the response is valid for a period of time and should be cached and reused. In contrast, personalized content can only be served to satisfy a single request.
• consolidate personalization into groups. If database access is
required for personalization, a best practice is to aggregate the
personalization into one area of the page and treat the rest of
the page as cacheable.
• optimize the front-end. Some service providers offer capabilities
that make a web page download and render faster by recognizing
the device type that the end user is employing to access the application and then making real-time optimizations to the delivery of that application for that specific device.
• timeout idle connections. Set timeouts so that idle connections do not consume resources.
• use net storage for large files. Net storage services available from some service providers offer highly scalable, highly available, geo-graphically distributed, mirrored storage regions that are optimized for performance.
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Organizations will need to continue
to take advantage of WOCs and ADCs
to accelerate those applications that need
to be delivered over the Private IP WAN.
Even though the traffic load of applications
delivered over the Private IP WAN continues
to decline year-over-year, organizations
will likely continue to use those Private
Network Infrastructure deployments
for the foreseeable future.
But private ip WAns are no longer the only game in town.
With globalization and the consumerization
of IT having reached a tipping point, the
Internet is playing an increasingly important
role in delivering mission critical applications
to suppliers, customers, partners, and
remote employees. Your organization
needs a solution developed specifically to
ensure that the Internet delivers the same
performance, availability, and security that
end users experience accessing applications
over a WAN. By using a managed service
provider that specializes in delivering
applications over the Internet on a global
scale, your organization can:
• Drive down IT costs by taking advantage of the service provider’s global infrastructure
• Reduce IT complexity by eliminating the need to implement separate hardware based point solutions
• Save IT time spent on hardware maintenance and downtime
• Improve online interactions with partners and customers
• Increase end user productivity by improving the usability of applications they rely on every day
• Ensure security at the edge of the Internet
concluSion
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