Human Kinetics Boosts Website Performance, Security, and Innovation with F5 Solution
Customer Company Size
Mid-size Company
Region
- America
Country
- United States
Product
- F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)
- F5 BIG-IP Application Security Manager (ASM)
Tech Stack
- Content Management System
- Web Application Firewall
- Load Balancing Device
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Productivity Improvements
- Customer Satisfaction
- Cost Savings
Technology Category
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - API Integration & Management
- Cybersecurity & Privacy - Network Security
Applicable Functions
- Sales & Marketing
- Business Operation
Use Cases
- Cybersecurity
- Supply Chain Visibility
Services
- System Integration
- Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
About The Customer
Human Kinetics (HK) is a publishing company based in Illinois that specializes in producing print, online, and multimedia materials related to kinesiology. The company hosts its own e-commerce website and nearly 40 other educational and storefront sites, which together attract about half a million unique visits per month. HK had been custom-building and individually supporting the websites it hosts, but decided to deploy a content management system to build and support sites more efficiently. The new system also allowed users to upload content, necessitating the need for HK to protect its systems and users from potentially harmful content.
The Challenge
Human Kinetics (HK), a publisher of kinesiology-related materials, was facing significant challenges with its third-party network solution. The system had become unstable, inflexible, and difficult to support, leading to significant downtime. The solution was also impairing performance, which led to customer complaints and lost revenue. HK's previous solution could not track users' IP addresses, which was crucial for applying the correct currency to a user's order. This led to a flood of customer complaints as orders couldn't be processed without the correct currency information. The updates from the third-party vendor caused high latency and system instability, leading to frequent crashes and up to four hours of downtime per week.
The Solution
HK replaced its existing system with two F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager Application Delivery Controllers and the F5 BIG-IP Application Security Manager web application firewall module. The F5 solution provided a new level of system flexibility, adapting to HK's network topology rather than requiring the network to adapt to the devices. The F5 devices also provided more granular information, making them more flexible and configurable. The F5 solution has not had any outages related to the devices since deployment, effectively reducing downtime to zero. The solution also improved security by enabling deep packet inspection, allowing HK to determine the exact cause of an error and how to fix it. The F5 solution also enabled HK to assign role-based access control, allowing different groups to make changes to their sites.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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