Radware

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.

LuckyVitamin.com, an online distributor of health and wellness products, was facing challenges in optimizing performance across its dynamic and complex website. The company was aware of the importance of web performance and had spent years manually optimizing their pages. However, this process was time-consuming, never-ending, and required highly specialized work from some of the best developers in the company. The company was looking for an automated solution that could deliver faster pages consistently and reliably across their entire site.

As a leading provider of home media entertainment, Yes Satellite wanted to enhance their services and provide over-the-top content to customers. In order to provide services like video on demand (VOD), Yes Satellite needed a global load balancing solution with low latency. Their main priority was to secure a solution that provided load balancing and integrated security with one management system.

Ipgarde, a service provider based in France, hosts corporate customers’ servers and network devices in a virtualized environment. The company was using an open source solution for load balancing, but it could not fully guarantee easy configuration and migration, and 24/7 connectivity. The company was also facing challenges in testing server availability and load balancing, guaranteeing the availability of customer websites without disrupting the existing infrastructure and servers. The company’s existing open source solution did not support one-leg configuration. As servers were not being used optimally, another challenge was to reduce the number of public IP addresses used, by creating just one IP address which in turn would manage the flow of information to additional IP addresses, decreasing the overload on the CPU. Additionally, Ipgarde has been experiencing some DoS attacks, particularly from customer websites due to insufficient firewall protection.

Switch’s SUPERNAP data centers required protection from all forms of DDoS threats via a security solution that provided a wide breadth of protection, thereby allowing the company to maintain 100% uptime and business continuity for its customers, even in the face of an attack. The new solution would need to be capable of mitigating DDoS attacks of up to 300Gbps and 220 million packets-per-second from a single device.

P&Tluxembourg, the leading postal and telecommunications services provider in Luxembourg, was looking to transition into a cloud service provider. The company wanted to provide isolated private cloud environments for its customers. They needed a solution that was scalable, easily managed, and would provide a high quality of experience (QoE) for users. The company sought a cost-efficient, virtualized solution that would provide very clear isolation between customers. High quality of experience (QoE) for customers was a top priority, in order to ensure that users could access content quickly and efficiently. Also, scalability was needed to ensure P&T would be able to add new services and customers, without requiring a forklift upgrade.

deltathree, a leading provider of SIP-based Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) solutions for service providers and consumers worldwide, was looking for a network solution that would deliver a reliable IT infrastructure to optimally support its growing number of Hosted Consumer VoIP Solution and Reseller customers. The company’s main technical issue was to find a load balancer for both SIP and HTML traffic that would support high load traffic and provide seamless redundancy. Their focus was on sustaining 100% uptime for customers and continuing to build its business through this maintained reliability. In addition, deltathree required that any solution chosen would also provide help with IT infrastructure maintenance and upgrade procedures as well as reduce the need for manual configuration.

Ace Hardware Corp., the largest global retailer-owned cooperative, needed to enhance both the customer shopping experience and employee responsiveness to customers through increased reliability of their CRM and ERP applications. With over 4,800 stores located in 50 states and 70 countries, Ace Hardware's global operations depend on the full availability, highest performance and complete security of networked applications across all store locations. The company needed a comprehensive availability, performance and security solution for their server farm infrastructure.

Play65.com, a leading online, skill-based gaming platform provider, was looking for an integrated solution to optimize and secure its network performance. Any network faults would cause Play65.com immediate revenue loss in tens of thousands of dollars per hour and damage to its reputation. Therefore, Play65.com was looking for an application-level solution to assure network availability, performance and full security for the more than 2 million hits a day on its servers. Web-based services are an integral part of Play65.com’s business model. The company provides an online skill-based gaming platform for players from all around the world and its business revenues are derived from a fee it charges winning players. Network performance is therefore a pivotal concern for Play65.com since it’s the backbone of its revenues and is densely trafficked on a regular basis. Play65.com conducts nearly 18 million games a month and therefore holds more than 2 million hits a day on its servers. From a business profitability point of view this means that if the company’s network went down, it could stand to loose approximately about $20,000 per hour.

Over a three month period, Xittel experienced 200 multi-vector DDoS attacks on a daily basis, ranging from 1 to 45 attacks per day. Each attack lasted 60 to 120 minutes and completely overwhelmed the company's communication links with illegitimate traffic, making it impossible to transmit information. The call center went from 1,000 to 6,000 calls per week and some clients didn’t even have phone service to contact the company. Xittel discovered that one specific hosted client was the target of attacks. The company sporadically disconnected the targeted client. However, since it could not afford to protect itself against these menacing attacks, Xittel was forced to ask its client to find another service provider. As several of Xittel’s clients relied on Internet access and connectivity, the need for a mitigation solution increased and the survival of the organization depended on it.

Brinkster, an Infrastructure as a Service provider, needed a load balancing solution for web, cloud and mobile based applications. As an IaaS company, it was imperative that Brinkster provide load balancing capabilities for all web, cloud and mobile based applications. It is a capability that Brinkster offers in their products, as well as one they offer to customers for infrastructure deals. As applications continue to evolve and become more complex, there is an increase of stress on networks – resulting in unwanted downtime, maintenance efforts and costs. Therefore, Brinkster needed a solution that could accommodate these growing, key infrastructure challenges that affect web applications.

Brinkster, a global hosting and cloud service provider, needed a solution to protect its vast client base against a new generation of sophisticated, multi-vectored cyber attacks. The company hosts over 50,000 customers and needed a security solution that could protect its infrastructure and customers from a wide range of cyber attacks designed to impact its ability to service customers, or to infringe on the security of their information. The solution had to meet Brinkster’s rigorous demands for uninterrupted network uptime so it could deliver on its service level agreements (SLAs). As a result of recent attacks on their customers, Brinkster focused on protection from denial-of-service attacks in the form of networks and application-level floods, zero-day vulnerability attacks, low-volume, scanning, cracking and advanced persistent threats. While a growing portion of Brinkster’s data traffic is secured and encrypted by the SSL protocol, they needed a security solution that could detect and mitigate DoS and DDoS attacks that are SSL encrypted.

The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) is an intergovernmental organization spanning 187 Member States and Territories. It provides the framework for international meteorological cooperation worldwide. WMO facilitates the free and unrestricted exchange of data and information, products and services in real- or near-real time on matters relating to safety and security of society, economic welfare and the protection of the environment. It contributes to policy formulation in these areas at national and international levels. WMO needed a secure, redundant way for its Members to connect to a remote site using a public infrastructure. With this goal in mind, Vladislava Toukalek, acting chief of the WMO Information Technology division, determined that a multi-homing and WAN acceleration solution would help WMO achieve this goal in the most cost effective manner.

Telenet, Belgium’s largest cable services provider, needed to consolidate its IT infrastructure and adopt a virtualized environment. It also needed a solution that included both basic load balancing features and application performance monitoring. The company looked for a solution that would fit into its existing infrastructure in both its production site and its testing environment. As a leading cable operator with an MVNO offering, Telenet also needed to provide non-stop, premium services to more than one million subscribers (existing residential and business customers) as well deliver new services to new and existing customers.

New York Law School (NYLS), one of the oldest and most respected institutions in the United States, needed to ensure Internet connectivity to its highly demanding community of 1500 students and faculty in order to provide them the best possible Quality of Experience (QoE) in accessing their e-Learning application, web servers and hosted student email service. Network disruptions and connection failures were the reason that New York Law School became interested in implementing Radware's LinkProof solution. The School's course management system (Blackboard) is hosted and when the single link failed in the past, students could not see the teacher and the teacher could not teach. There was also a need for more robust Data Center infrastructure to allow for more hosting and future bandwidth growth. The School wanted more flexibility in negotiating with service providers to achieve lower costs and higher SLA commitments.

FireHost, a leading secure cloud hosting provider, was in need of a solution to secure its network infrastructure and provide real-time attack protection for its clients' mission-critical systems. The company is responsible for protecting sensitive data and brand reputations for companies of all sizes, including many Fortune 50 organizations. FireHost customers handle sensitive information such as credit card numbers and personal identifiable information that needs to remain secure and available. As an organization, they are known for meeting high traffic and high availability requirements for SaaS application providers and online retailers. As FireHost began to search for a seller to replace its existing infrastructure, they pursued a vendor that met their customers’ requirements for availability, performance, resiliency and security with scalable and cost-effective features that facilitate future growth.

Liquidity Services needed a consistent and cost-effective solution to ensure flexibility for its growing business. It needed a consolidated and virtual solution that would allow it to grow its business through company acquisitions and new marketplaces and accommodate the additional infrastructure requirements without increasing the data center footprint. As an all virtual platform with two data centers, Liquidity Services scales several applications including Exchange, Web applications and test and development. In addition, in order for Liquidity Services business to thrive, it is critical for the auction based sales websites to remain accessible to its clients and customers. For this reason, they required disaster recovery support and a load balancing solution that could handle any increased traffic.

O’Reilly Media, a leading publisher and disseminator of technology innovation, has been a chronicler and catalyst of cutting-edge technology development since 1978. The company has made it their critical goal to deliver their site in under 2 seconds. However, like all content-rich sites, the O’Reilly website is subject to the same performance pitfalls – everything from third-party widgets to data being served from multiple servers. A sub-2-second page load time is the current holy grail of web performance, and achieving this would keep the flow of thought seamless for users, meaning that they’re more likely to complete whatever online task they’ve started.

KPN, the leading telecommunications and IT service provider in the Netherlands, wanted to scale up its infrastructure to provide better, more predictable service to its business customers. With over 100 high-end business customers relying on its cloud services, KPN wanted to improve resiliency and scalability, as well as the ability to easily add new business customers and isolate between customer environments. Another key objective was lowering operational costs, which KPN wanted to achieve by consolidating multiple dedicated ADC devices into a virtualized ADC infrastructure.

Garanti Technology, a leader in banking and financial services, needed to ensure the confidentiality of customer information, consistent service availability, and fast application performance. As financial institutions like Garanti Technology offer more services through the web, they also inherit a new set of pressures. Applications need to be consistently available. Performance cannot waver. Security is vital. And confidentiality is not only expected, but it is essential. In order to remain a leader within the industry and protect the nature of their business, it was essential that Garanti Technology ensures customers' security and confidentiality and provide uninterrupted service.

Garanti Bank, Turkey’s second largest private bank, was in need of a virtualized Application Delivery Controller (ADC) solution for its advanced intranet and online banking services. The bank's goal was to consolidate its data center and focus on developing new online banking applications. The bank was looking for a solution that would allow it to maintain its current intranet and online banking services as well as develop new ones, all while ensuring customers enjoy a high-quality of experience whenever accessing its banking services and critical backend applications. Along with these goals, Garanti wanted to consolidate its data center in order to save costs and improve operations. The bank required a scalable, highly available solution that would deliver more, with less hardware and without compromising resiliency, performance or the customer experience.

MWEB Business, a division of MWEB, a leading ISP in South Africa, was faced with the challenge of running an efficient network for secure email that guarantees dependable, effective and scalable IT infrastructure. Among the solutions MWEB Business offers to its customers, the email service is the most challenging and complex. MWEB offers three email services to its business customers: Business Mail, for smaller businesses requiring multiple mailboxes branded with the company name; Mail Spooling, for businesses requiring a large number of mailboxes allowing for all e-mails to be collected on the MWEB server, downloaded all at once and distributed to all employees in the business; and Courier List Service, enabling sending of e-mails to multiple recipients at once via an easy-to-use Web based interface allowing customers full management of their email lists, recipient information, message content and mail batches. In order to provide its business customers with these mail services, MWEB has to offer 24/7 reliable, fast service with no delays, no spamming and secure mail without viruses. MWEB had to design a powerful, intricate network, with a physical and logical layout that could undertake these email tasks. Easy and high-speed network flow between servers was imperative. At the same time, it had to ensure that the network was simple to use and administer and scalable for future upgrades to accommodate its growing customer base while still maintaining quality service.

The customer, a Tier-1 Telecommunication Operator and Internet Service Provider, was facing ongoing growth of Internet traffic capacity resulting in increased load on its services and data centers. The growth in traffic was projected to intensely continue in the coming years. The challenge was to maintain best Quality of Experience (QoE) for end users and to ensure Service Level Agreement (SLA) and service continuity while addressing aggressive traffic capacity growth. The desired solution must eliminate capacity growth risks by providing additional room for growth of services, throughput and other metrics, as well as protecting the current investment in equipment, people and knowledge.

CSEA, under the supervision of the Italian Ministry of Economics and Finance and the Italian Energy and Water Authority, plays a critical role in regulating the Italian energy sector. It collects funds from utility suppliers and distributors and reallocates these funds to electric, gas, and water sectors. Due to the critical nature of these services, CSEA must ensure 100% uptime of its customer-facing applications and networks during all operational scenarios, including in the face of a cyber-attack. The IT department at CSEA had relied on the native security capabilities of individual servers, resulting in a manual, resource-intensive process that made it difficult to implement infrastructure-wide security updates and policies. As CSEA upgraded its data centers to a modern, high-availability cluster infrastructure, it identified the need to deploy next-generation load balancing capabilities to drive data center scalability and allow new applications/services to be deployed without incurring performance degradation.

The Bâloise Group, which includes Basler Versicherungen and Bâloise Bank SoBa, needed to ensure 24/7 access to their shared website for their customers. The website contains crucial links that allow customers to log into their personal banking and financial services accounts. While the group had more than one Web Server Directed to the front page of the companies’ website, limiting the likelihood of a major outage, they wanted a solution that, in the event of a massive failure, would redirect visitors to a special emergency page with links to essential personal account services. They also needed to maintain their reputation in the marketplace, as an unreliable or intermittently inaccessible website could question the company’s overall credibility.

SK C&C designed a consolidation project to create a single highly-dense data center that provides web portal services to all fourteen subsidiaries of SK C&C. In consolidating their data centers, SK C&C wanted to achieve two main objectives – greater cost reduction, and operational simplicity. Cost reduction evolves from consolidation of hardware, software and other infrastructure equipment, and operational simplicity is achieved by managing fewer data centers, which helps meet compliance requirements more easily, handle security threats more efficiently and enhance business agility faster. For its web portal, SK C&C designed a single data center with multiple server farms, each housing multiple servers running different applications. To support the growth in traffic to the companies’ web portals, SK C&C set a target of 10Gbps throughput capacity for each server farm. One active ADC and one backup ADC with four physical ports of 10GE each were designed to handle servers load balancing needs.

The Universities and Colleges Admission Service (UCAS) is the UK’s central organization that processes applications for universities and colleges across the country. UCAS has been processing student applications online since 2002. Today, nearly all students are using the online application system with 98.5% submitting applications as of January 2006, using electronic means via www.ucas.com in comparison with 77.6% at the same point last year. The UCAS website was independently audited by ABC Electronic during November 2005. They verified that the total number of page impressions was 67,289,583 for that month. Due to the continuous surge in online applications UCAS deployed Radware’s APSolute Education solutions to guarantee the continuous, fault tolerant and secure operation of the UCAS website.

Myntex, a leading provider of trusted encryption solutions for mobile devices, was hit with a series of massive multi-vector DDoS attacks, resulting in severe service interruptions that negatively impacted its customers and the availability of their mobile devices. The company utilized standard security methods and protocols in conjunction with a DDoS solution from a provider that offered poor customer service and couldn’t prevent downtime. Attack campaigns could last a month and involved Advanced Persistent Denial of Service (APDoS) attacks, which included multi-vector burst DDoS attacks at massive sizes ranging from 40Gbps to 130Gbps. These attacks resulted in service disruptions for Myntex’s customers, causing communication downtime with their mobile devices.

KiwiCollection.com, a curated collection of more than 2,000 international luxury hotels and resorts, was facing a significant performance challenge. The website, which allows travelers to research and book their hotels online, was being served from a single data center in the US. This resulted in slow page load times and dramatically inconsistent user experiences for its worldwide audience. The issue became glaringly apparent when the CEO of Kiwi Collection, who is based overseas, was showing the site to a group of European partners and had to wait an embarrassingly long time for the site to load. It was clear that the company needed an acceleration solution.

Convergys, a global customer management firm, was facing a challenge in maintaining customer satisfaction and VoIP availability, which are critical to its success. With over 150 call centers in 31 countries and 90 VoIP recorders in its call system, Convergys needed a solution that could load balance over a million voice calls per day across multiple recordings. Any scenario where recordings were lost could result in customer dissatisfaction. To eliminate downtime from regular maintenance of its recorders, Convergys searched for a load balancing solution to support call recording for all of its call centers.

Aruba, a leading web hosting, email, and domain name registration company in Italy, was facing a significant challenge with the rise of DDoS attacks. The evolution of cyber-attacks in recent years had changed the info-security threat landscape, and Aruba's existing defenses were no longer sufficient. The company needed a solution that could not only mitigate DDoS attacks but also guarantee service availability for its two million customers and subscribers. The ideal solution would react immediately, with no false positive events, in cases of attacks blocking millions of packets per seconds of malicious traffic. It would also need to fit within the existing network topology and provide a scalable approach according to capacity planning constraints.

The customer is one of the world’s largest independent investment management organizations, with over 20 million online users generating peak usage of over 12,000 transactions per second (TPS). They needed to invest in online programs for the benefits they deliver, such as higher customer retention, stronger migration toward self-service channels, and more attractive and profitable demographics than the average off-line customer. Real-time event processing was challenging as many data points were fraught with latency and delayed processes. This was compounded when the business was dealing with hundreds of thousands of transactions per second, such as a brokerage firm or a bank. Real-time data feeds were therefore critical to their ability to efficiently manage their businesses for competitive advantage and growth.

equaTEK Interactive, a web solution development company, was developing a SaaS application with high performance requirements. The engineers were working hard to optimize the application's performance, but they were struggling to make significant improvements within the budgeted time. The company needed a solution that could enhance the application's performance without consuming too much time and resources.

BlackMesh, a Virginia-based cloud hosting company, was facing an evolving threat landscape with only a reactive DDoS prevention solution in place. Despite implementing various tools and techniques to repel attacks such as access control lists, null routing, and cache filtering, the organization still experienced service degradation and downtime that lasted between 45-60 minutes during each cyber-attack. BlackMesh needed to shift to a more proactive stance when it came to protecting its datacenter which ultimately impacts clients and business operations. In order to ensure uninterrupted availability that could negatively affect SLAs, BlackMesh needed to implement the right solution in its datacenter.

The national telecommunication company, which provides over 30 different web services to employees and customers, needed to improve load balancing and guarantee service availability. With a large number of web applications running and high daily network traffic, they needed more control of the application process and ensure continuity during all migration phases. The IT infrastructure of the company is constantly evolving every 18 months, requiring them to modify their solutions to adapt to the demands of their customers. They needed a solution that offered scalability and the opportunity to grow on demand.