OAS - NETSCALER: THE PREFERRED CHOICE FOR APPLICATION DELIVERY SOLUTION
NetScaler as a service
OAS Southern Africa's top NetScaler expert outlines, in the following article, how NetScaler has evolved to offer a comprehensive range of features that go beyond simple application delivery. NetScaler is specifically designed to meet the distinct requirements for rapid and secure application deployment, solidifying NetScaler's position as the global leader in Application Delivery Controllers (ADCs).
NetScaler – features explained
High-performance application delivery
The internet presents a significant blind spot in application delivery that is often beyond any IT department’s control. This limitation can lead to slow application response times, which negatively impacts the end-user experience. As a result, organizations may face reduced workforce productivity, diminished customer loyalty, a compromised brand reputation, and ultimately, lost revenue.
NetScaler Intelligent Traffic Management utilizes both real-time and historical telemetry to deliver insights into the current state of the internet. This capability enables the avoidance of internet bottlenecks by directing traffic to locations with the lowest latency and fewest active connections, thereby ensuring an optimal experience for application end-users.
NetScaler – simplified implementation and deployment
The overall process of ADC can be time-consuming and susceptible to errors, especially when the setup is done manually. Furthermore, ADCs often demand a specific networking skill set from DevOps, which may not always be present. This can result in numerous misconfigurations, potentially leading to significant issues within the network. Organizations have distinct networking needs that necessitate tailored policies.
NetScaler has streamlined the implementation process through its Intent-based application delivery, enabling the automation of the lifecycle management for Application Delivery Controllers (ADCs) based on the specified policies. This declarative approach removes the requirement for programming expertise. Organizations simply need to define their desired state, and NetScaler will handle the rest—such as automatically selecting the optimal hosting location for applications based on individual user requests.
Robust Application and API Security Solutions
Most Application Delivery Controllers (ADCs) primarily concentrate on application delivery and load balancing, which can make the network vulnerable to security threats. As attackers grow increasingly sophisticated, particularly with the rise of AI, many are successfully breaching applications by employing traditional techniques such as DDoS attacks, malware and an array of other malicious forms of intrusive attacks.
NetScaler is designed to detect and stop malicious distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks and other types of malicious attacks before they reach your servers, preventing them from affecting network and application performance. The NetScaler appliance identifies legitimate clients and elevates their priority, leaving suspect clients unable to consume a disproportionate percentage of resources and cripple your site. The appliance provides application-level protection from the following types of malicious attacks:
- SYN flood attacks
- Pipeline attacks
- Teardrop attacks
- Land attacks
- Fraggle attacks
- Zombie connection attacks
Excerpt from NetScaler documentation.
It is essential to emphasize that DNS-based DDoS attacks can be effectively mitigated through NetScaler’s Intelligent Traffic Management. This system provides scalable DNS resolution at the network edge rather than relying solely on the data center, facilitating faster responses to user DNS queries and accommodating up to one million requests per second. Furthermore, NetScaler employs a one-pass architecture for traffic processing, allowing it to execute multiple functions at once, which minimizes latency and enhances performance.
This is especially beneficial for WAF inspection, where the latency for each request can be greatly decreased.
For more detailed information about NetScaler security – click here
Observability
Observability plays a vital role in contemporary software development as it offers profound insights into the complexities of systems. In essence, observability allows teams to "see" the internal processes of their systems, empowering them to make informed decisions and respond swiftly to incidents.
Addressing application performance issues, including downtime and slow response times, can be time-consuming and negatively impact the overall functionality of the entire environment. NetScaler is engineered to improve the overall observability of the environment by utilizing hundreds of network traffic points—an offering unmatched by any other ADC.
This capability allows for precise identification of where issues arise within the network, positioning NetScaler well ahead of competing ADC solutions. NetScaler features integrated capabilities to gather and analyze data regarding application performance, network health, and security.
This functionality offers valuable insights into how applications behave, enabling administrators to proactively identify and resolve issues. By monitoring metrics such as traffic, latency, errors, and security violations across various layers of the application infrastructure, they can ensure optimal performance.
Integrations
One final note: NetScaler integrates with the major public clouds, Kubernetes platforms, and container orchestrators, and the most popular infrastructure-as-code and observability tools.