As a provider of data center managed services and technology solutions, Xand’s customers require secure, high performance, highly-available infrastructures for its mission-critical environments. Since, distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks can inflict costly and destructive downtime on hosted applications and resources, Xand needed a solution to protect its customers cloud systems and comprehensively guard against user data breaches.

OSRAM, a leading global lighting manufacturer, maintains more than 45 websites in 38 languages, including a SAP-integrated sales extranet, MyOsram.com. The company required a solution to ensure continuous, high-speed Internet access for their partners, resellers, and customers to successfully drive and increase revenue. The company’s employees are connected via a worldwide Wide Area Network (WAN), Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) network, and several Virtual Private Networks (VPNs). MyOsram.com, a fully SAP-integrated sales extranet, provides OSRAM customers with the ability to place expedited orders around the clock. Uninterrupted Internet and application access are critical to the company’s day-to-day operations. However, achieving network consistency has been a challenge for OSRAM.

The largest wholesale bank in New England began offering financial services via the Internet and provided additional critical business applications for its members, processing millions of dollars per week. Its goal was to have near 100% uptime for these critical e-commerce applications and to provide fast, consistent Internet access. The Bank’s network and Internet access had to provide its members with the appropriate security to protect crucial data and information that was being processed through its web site. The Bank was also planning to expand its member base and would have to plan its network and Internet availability to support this growth. It wanted to implement Internet load balancing between the primary Boston site and its Disaster Recovery (DR) site to enhance its e-commerce performance and reliability, as well as add an automatic failover to the DR site in the event that its Boston site was unavailable.

Audiovox, a major player in the marketing of cellular telephones, mobile security, entertainment systems, and consumer electronics products, was facing a challenge with their existing network. The company, which is one of North America’s largest sellers of wireless products and CDMA handsets, relies heavily on their network for revenue generation and providing productivity services to in-house employees and salespeople in the field. They host their own website, which serves both informational and e-commerce roles. However, they realized that their existing network would not enable them to be accessible at all times, to both customers and employees, and therefore revenue and productivity were at stake. They were also aware of their vulnerability to attacks on the Internet.

The financial institution, being the third-largest bank in Europe, was facing a significant increase in encrypted traffic. This surge was slowing down the bank's network infrastructure and creating application latency. The bank's existing Web Application Firewalls (WAFs) lacked the capacity to decrypt, inspect, and re-encrypt large volumes of traffic. Moreover, the use of WAFs for encrypted traffic inspection often resulted in increased latency, negatively impacting application performance. The bank needed a solution that could handle high volumes of inbound encrypted traffic, work with global ciphers, adapt to new encryption technology, and have enough processing power to accept traffic, decrypt it, inspect it, and then re-encrypt it leveraging a low-level cypher.

Produban, one of the largest banks in Mexico, was facing a significant challenge as their business expanded. They needed an on-demand solution for computing resources and processing power. They required a flexible application delivery solution to deploy their online banking business and provide load balancing capabilities in the data center. While cost was very important to Produban, the solution also needed to provide a quick install with minimal service disruption for its clients. Internet banking is one of Produban’s most important business channels, handling more than 1.5 million transactions per hour and 300K concurrent users. In order to eliminate these challenges and ensure application availability for their customers, Produban pursued solutions from some of the industry’s top security companies.

The Orange County Teachers Federal Credit Union (OCTFCU) offers retail banking services online, at ATMs and in 24 branches spread across the southern-California county. With concurrent sessions as high as 6,000 users per day with $150,000 changing hands every hour, the credit union’s online portal had to be fast, secure, reliable and available around the clock. Simple load balancing between its Web servers became inadequate to this task; seamless failover was needed. The credit union’s server farm had needed load balancers for its backend servers and initially, it had used Cisco’s Local Director and Content Services Switches. That went some way toward keeping applications responsive, but when its banking services went online to the public, the credit union needed something far more reliable: It needed to be able to detect a server’s imminent failure and divert traffic to another server while the faulty server was taken out of the farm for scrutiny. All this had to be done without interruption to its online service, and without customers feeling any “glitch.”

QuadraNet, a full-service data center provider, was facing an increasing frequency and virulence of DDoS attacks. Their previous security solution identified network threats by observing traffic patterns and volume, null-routing affected customer IP space when attacks exceeded the customer’s uplink capacity. This resulted in downtime for targeted customers. QuadraNet needed an automated DDoS attack mitigation system that could eliminate downtime and keep customers running without disruption. They sought a solution that could protect customers quickly, effectively, and with extremely low false-positive rates.

In June 2015, Hexatom, a leading Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) Managed Service Provider (MSP) in France, took on a new client in the gaming industry and experienced its first major attack. The attack significantly affected not only the gaming company targeted, but also neighboring clients in the data center. Equipped with only a rate-based solution provided by its carriers, Hexatom needed an in-house, comprehensive and automated attack mitigation solution to protect its infrastructure and ensure such an incident did not happen again.

The bank faced a number of challenges, including network expansion, increased dependency on web applications and an increase in the number of cyberattacks. With 400 million users dependent on the bank’s applications to access accounts and related services, the bank must provide high application performance 24x7 for over 180 applications to keep customers satisfied. Due to high network traffic volumes, its existing load balancing solution couldn’t handle the connections per second. Another challenge for this bank is scaling its network to manage international business. Internet banking spans various individual banking divisions, including retail, corporate and consumer, each of which has its own applications and requirements. The bank, which also has to handle large traffic loads from consumer and enterprise customers, was looking for a scalable solution to manage traffic and applications for more than a dozen departments across two data centers. The third challenge for the bank is application security to maintain service availability. Protection of mission-critical application is critical to stay in business. The majority of network traffic that the bank receives is encrypted, which necessitated having the ability to inspect that traffic for attacks.

VimpelCom, one of the world’s leading integrated telecommunication operators, was facing an escalating number of network attacks. As one of the largest Internet service providers and business entities in Russia, the company was witnessing a surge in DDoS attacks. Legacy defense systems were not only failing to prevent these attacks, but often became the target themselves. The company needed a solution that could provide full automatic protection against these attacks in seconds.

Computershare, an online financial service provider to listed companies, investors, exchanges, and other financial institutions, was determined to eliminate any downtime while providing the fastest content delivery and transaction processing to their clients worldwide. With more than 90 million shareholder accounts to handle for over 14 thousand corporations around the world, it was imperative that Computershare’s customer requests are accommodated in the quickest and most efficient manner. The challenge was to ensure local and global server availability and accelerated application performance.

The financial services company was facing an increased rate of cyberattacks and required a new on-premise DDoS mitigation platform at its primary data centers in addition to protection from encrypted network attacks to protect web applications. In recent years, financial services has become one of the industries most targeted by cyberattacks. In addition to facing an array of attack vectors and threats, including hacktivist-backed campaigns and ransom-motivated assaults, it is also overcoming a hodgepodge of various network and application security challenges, including migration to the cloud, application exploits and encrypted traffic management. The bank required a new on-premise DDoS mitigation platform at its primary data centers that could protect them from DDoS attacks without negatively impacting legitimate traffic. In addition, with the percentage of encrypted network traffic increasing, the bank required a solution that could protect their web applications from encrypted floods.

The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) is the primary infrastructure in the United States providing clearance, settlement and information services for equities, corporate and municipal bonds, government and mortgage-backed securities and over-the-counter credit derivatives. With the changing nature of the financial services industry, technology is driving new ways of doing business. The time it takes to settle trades is being reduced to minimize risk, and trading volumes continue to escalate almost exponentially. To stay on top of the game, DTCC had to develop a vast scalable network of Web-based standardized, automated and centralized solutions that promote speed, connectivity, efficiency, lower risk and resiliency. Through this interconnected network, customers would be able to access all of DTCC’s Web-based applications over the Internet.

Pappas Automobil AG, Austria's largest Mercedes distributor and a nation-wide operator of service garages, had an online ordering system that enabled its many branches to order cars and parts. However, the company faced challenges in providing secure, high-throughput real-time intrusion prevention and DoS protection to guarantee continued high availability and secure service provision. The company's initial firewall protection was unable to provide the required security. The company’s network traffic needed to be protected from worms, viruses, and DoS/DDoS attacks, including SYN floods, while ensuring prompt response times and delivery of business critical applications. Continuous disruptions to the network were causing large losses as branches were unable to place orders for spare parts or locate a suitable repair destination – leading to unhappy customers and lower revenues.

Traveltainment, a leading IT service provider in the leisure travel market, relies heavily on its online database for business operations. The company's peak hours are early evening until midnight and from early afternoon until midnight on the weekend. During these times, they can have between 120,000,000 and 150,000,000 impressions per day and 250,000 concurrent connections with up to 8,000 new connections per second. Due to their large market penetration and well-known customers, they are constantly being targeted for intrusion attempts. Since Traveltainment provides booking facilities for its customers and handles cardholder data; intrusion prevention, maintenance of data integrity, and protection against injections and zero-day vulnerabilities is imperative to the company’s success. Any type of attack would lead to profit loss, customer dissatisfaction, and damage to the company’s image. It has been calculated that one hour of downtime for Traveltainment can lead to 180,000 Euros lost. Furthermore, by operating two separate data centers in different locations, incoming traffic reaches the data centers from 5 different Internet uplinks and causes strain to their customers service availability.

Hewlett-Packard, the world’s largest technology company, was in need of a solution that could reduce application infrastructure costs, support higher application SLA, and improve application quality of experience. With a large product and service portfolio serving billions of customers, the company required a solution that was cost-effective, advanced, and comprehensive. The challenge was to find a solution that could handle the scale of HP's operations and provide a high level of service to its extensive customer base.

Complutense University of Madrid (UCM), Spain’s biggest university system, required a highly available and scalable networking solution to ensure critical services are provided to nearly 100,000 students and staff members in its centers in Spain and throughout the world. The university’s networking environment includes two data centers and a total of 232 physical and virtual servers of multiple types (Microsoft Windows, Linux, UNIX and VMS). Services such as a university-wide intranet, an enrollment system, virtual campuses, email, directory services, ERP, proxy services, and multiple varied business applications are all critical to day to day operations and learning. During peak usage times, there are more than 55,000 concurrent users connected to the network. In order to meet the needs of such an extensive and complex international network, Complutense University needed a reliable load balancing solution that would integrate the different critical services and allow for greater degrees of scalability and availability, enabling it to resolve various complex topological issues that several of the services had. UCM also needed a scalable solution that would offer the flexibility to add new servers as necessary.

Just Group, a major Australian fashion retail company, was facing a significant challenge with its seven ecommerce sites. With up to 100 million monthly page visits, the company needed a robust and efficient solution to replace its old load balancing solution and ensure optimal performance for each site. The company was experiencing a 10+ second load time for its web pages, despite attempts at web application code optimization. This was a significant issue as research shows that 57% of users abandon pages that take longer than 3 seconds to load, and are measurably less likely to convert from browsing to buying. Just Group needed a solution that would not only minimize page load time but also offload the optimization work from the site’s programmer.

Buypass AS, a Norwegian supplier of secure solutions for electronic identification, electronic signatures and payment, was looking to upgrade and consolidate its Application Delivery Controller (ADC) hardware devices without compromising the resiliency or performance power of its application delivery. As a service provider delivering identity management as a service, security is always a primary concern. There is simply no room for security gaps or performance drops. With aging existing technology and a fast-growing customer base, the company required a secure, high-availability solution that would deliver better performance. It also needed a flexible, scalable solution that would ensure continuity for its services and enable it to bring new personal electronic ID applications and services to market faster.

The European manufacturing company had a complex, globally-distributed network comprised of data centers, remote offices and cloud-hosted applications. Each asset type had different requirements and faced different threat profiles. Traditional DDoS mitigation vendors did not have the flexibility or scope to offer full, cost-effective protection for all asset types. The company's previous security vendors had suffered a major breach the previous year. The company was looking for a solution that could provide protection for all its assets, including four globally distributed data centers running mission-critical applications, 150 cloud applications hosted on a large public-cloud provider, and three-dozen remote sales offices spanning the globe.

Groupama Seguros, a leading European insurance firm, needed a geo-dispersed, balanced web platform that would deliver top-rate performance while ensuring communications privacy and protection against attacks. The company’s web applications are used every day by approximately 7,000 employees, partners and customers located in multiple countries. They conduct a number of activities that all require a seamless, fast and reliable connection, 24*7. Local and global visitors processing online transactions need continuous connectivity. They furthermore need to be directed to the most suitable site that will provide optimal service and have a record of their relevant data. In June 2008, Groupama Seguros began searching for ways to provide a better user experience. As the company is responsible for large volumes of confidential data, including customer accounts and personal information, customers required a secure platform to perform their online transactions. This meant that network attacks and unwanted malware such as worms, viruses, reconnaissance, Trojans and VoIP attacks needed to be intercepted.

The Conservation & Liquidation Office (CLO), a subsidiary of the California Department of Insurance, is tasked with the conservation of insurance companies and the management of their affairs for the benefit and protection of policyholders. This involves taking over the entire operations of the company, including all policies, accounts, claims, and personal information of insured individuals. This information is subject to increased risk during the takeover procedure when the CLO establishes connectivity with the insurer’s network and IT infrastructure. The CLO previously relied on traditional firewall protection methods to secure its network and IT infrastructure. However, these methods provided insufficient protection to safeguard the crucial data and information the CLO was managing. The CLO needed a solution that would stop any attack from any entity, at headquarters as well as the regional insurance companies.

AccuWeather, the world’s largest online commercial weather service, serves an average of 5 to 6 million users a day. However, when regions across the globe are hit with severe weather conditions such as hurricanes and snowstorms, traffic volume increases to 15 million hits a day. This surge in traffic presents a significant challenge for the company as it needs to ensure 24/7 information availability under these conditions. Therefore, Accuweather required a solution that would allow them to dynamically scale and add server capacity to handle the increased traffic. The company also needed to maintain customer satisfaction by providing exceptional weather service capabilities 24/7. It was crucial for AccuWeather's network to be available and optimized for web access 24/7 for critical weather information.

In the fall of 2009, AutoAnything was preparing for Black Friday. They aimed to create a premium shopping experience that would minimize cart abandonment and yield high conversion rates. To achieve this, they needed to create an image-rich website with fast-loading pages and reliable performance. Despite already using a content distribution network (CDN), AutoAnything knew they could be even faster. The site’s home page took up to 10 seconds to load, which was far too slow by the performance standards of the time. With a small engineering team and site traffic of over 2 million unique visitors each month, it was crucial that the company partner with a vendor who could deliver easy implementation.

PenTeleData, a strategic partnership of cable and telephone companies, was facing issues with its legacy security solution. The old system often resulted in application disruptions, connectivity disruptions, and security threats to PenTeleData’s infrastructure. The company required a new solution that could consistently protect its infrastructure and that would be able to integrate with DDoS detection from Kentik Technologies’ cloud-based NetFlow analytics solution. Moreover, PenTeleData was seeking to use this new security offering as the foundation for launching a new DDoS mitigation service it could sell to its customers, allowing them to stay operational during a cyber-attack.

TeraGo Networks, a company that owns and manages a national IP network across 46 major markets in Canada, was in need of a market-leading DDoS detection and mitigation solution. This was to protect its own infrastructure and to offer its customers a new suite of security services across its telco, data center, and cloud hosting environments. The company had previously deployed remotely-triggered black hole (RTBH) filtering to protect its IT infrastructure against attacks. However, this method had its drawbacks as legitimate traffic could be blocked and TeraGo customers experienced slower response times. Moreover, a volumetric DDoS attack against either TeraGo or one of its own victims could have a trickle-down effect whereby multiple TeraGo customers could be impacted, resulting in dissatisfied customers and increased customer attrition. Lastly, RTBH filtering could not be commoditized, preventing TeraGo from launching a suite of DDoS mitigation services that hit at the heart of what customers were requesting.

CCS, a major provider of data access cards in the Czech market, needed to ensure its network was continuously available to service several thousand transactions daily. The company's profits are derived from the number of transactions completed, so uninterrupted access to data is integral to its business relationship as a service provider to its partners and customers. In 2002, floods in Karlín revealed a weakness in its existing Internet connection: Availability. CCS decided it must have two Internet providers to handle unexpected events and interruptions caused by natural disasters. The company created two pipelines for service: One at 34 Mb/s and the other at 7 Mb/s. These pipelines would provide availability for essential services such as customer service, e-mail communication with customers and partners, and communications with partners from other business chains to exchange transaction files and payment card blacklists.

Broadvoice, a leading provider of telecommunications, faced several denial of service attacks and an increasing amount of background noise threats. As a VoIP service provider, Broadvoice ranks security and compliance as a top priority. The organization understands the level of disruption that a DDoS attack could cause on a telecommunications business and the importance of guaranteeing service to customers. After suffering several denial of service attacks, Broadvoice needed a solution to proactively defend against impending threats and attacks.

Religare Securities Limited (RSL), a leading Equity Brokerage Firm in India, was facing challenges in providing reliable and secure online trading services to its customers. The company was dealing with network performance and availability issues, as well as security breaches. The main concern was to implement a solution that would not cause user interference and could assure cost-effective scalability to support future business growth. The company has thousands of customers utilizing its services for online trading purposes at any point in time. Therefore, Religare was concerned not only with providing complete availability and accelerated performance for such high volume traffic but also assuring the traffic is appropriately protected from worms, viruses and DoS/DDoS attacks such as SYN floods while maintaining its ability to assure timely execution and response time for its numerous, business critical applications.