Application Delivery & Protection
Today, most organisations see the Internet as an opportunity to make substantial cost savings, benefit from competitive advantages, and open new revenue opportunities. To take advantage of this opportunity, organisations have started deploying more powerful and increasingly complex Web applications. However, to truly benefit from this strategy, organisations first need to address a few challenges!
The first challenge is to ensure that application user experience is always positive! This means that the Web applications are “always on”, fast, and ultimately very scalable to meet performance requirements. This is where Application Delivery Controller (ADC) and Load Balancer products can help. They allow organisations to scale and distribute their IT infrastructure by distributing traffic load among multiple physical, virtual or even cloud-based servers. ADC products can load-balance traffic for a wide variety of server applications, including Web, Database, E-Mail, DNS, streaming media, and even VoIP. In addition, ADCs include capabilities such as SSL Offloading, content caching and compression, content routing and connection pooling to ensure faster application delivery of Web application content.
The second challenge that organisations need to address is application security! Unfortunately, by opening network applications to the Web, organisations often introduce new vulnerabilities and allow criminals to easily bypass conventional protection systems. As a result, most Web-based applications have become a relatively easy target for application-layer attacks such as SQL injections (SQLi), Cross-Site Scripting (XSS), Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF), rate-based Application Denial-of-Service (DOS), and parameter manipulation.
In order to protect against these attacks, organisations are increasingly considering Web Application Firewall (WAF) products! The primary role of a WAF is to protect Web application from sophisticated Layer-7 threats. However, advanced WAF products also enable administrators to create granular access control policies (AAA), and include an integrated XML firewall to protect Web servers from typical XML attacks such as WSDL Poisoning. Furthermore, in addition to inbound traffic, WAF products include Data Loss Prevention (DLP) capabilities and can inspect outbound content to prevent data leakage by masking or blocking traffic that contains sensitive information such as credit card numbers. This makes it easier for organisations to comply with regulations such as PCI DSS and HIPAA.
LOOPHOLD provides a variety of Application Delivery and Protection solutions for both the SME and Enterprise markets. Product range: Barracuda Networks and SonicWALL
