How Kemp load balancers ensure seamless business continuity

Kemp Technologies is an application experience company that helps enterprises in delivering, optimising and securing applications and networks across any cloud or hybrid environment. It specialises in offering state-of-the-art solutions for load balancing, network performance, monitoring, networking detection and response to ensure applications are always-on and free from any type of network complications.

It is important to understand the functions of load balancers, the benefits and how Kemp load balancers can help businesses in these critical times.

Load balancers facilitate work from home
During a situation of crisis, like the coronavirus pandemic that the world is still facing, Work from Home (WFH) has gained more relevance. At such times, there is increased stress on business functions, applications and the network that individuals or organisations are a part of. And, most of them, depend on robust IT infrastructure and business applications during these times. Kemp load balancers maintain an optimal application experience (AX) for employees, external workers /contractors or for the general public. Deployed as a software, hardware or as cloud instances, the Kemp load balancers optimise the performance and availability of servers delivering important content to the end users, and act as a ‘traffic cop’ to deliver requests to the best network servers at the best speed, while continuously checking the performance and the security of the workload.

And as work from home is getting popularity all across companies and platforms, the need for cloud, hybrid cloud, VDI, virtualisation, VPN and the usage of many other critical services is on a constant rise. Load balancer ensures that these services meet with the business continuity requirements that are essential for growth.

For efficient and seamless processes
Load balancing refers to the procedure of dispensing a set of tasks over a set of resources, with goal of making the overall processing more efficient and seamless. All load balancers act as middle point between the client devices and backend servers, receiving and distributing incoming requests to any available capable server.

Kemp load balancers are specifically customised to optimise a wide variety of applications with templates and support, such as:
+ Web Application server including SSL and HTTP/2
+ Microsoft Applications including Exchange, Skype, RDS, always-on-VPN
+ SharePoint and ADFS
+ DELL EMC ECS
+ Citrix XenAPP/XenDesk
+ Oracle E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft and WebLogic
+ E-Commerce, Healthcare, Education and Government Applications

Types of load balancers offered by Kemp

Kemp technologies offer three types of load balancers:
+ Hardware Load Balancer: Helps in optimising Load Balancing Hardware for any environment. To know the complete list of offerings: For more details, click here- Hardware
+ Virtual Load Balancer: Helps in enhancing the application security, availability, performance and scalability with the software load balancer optimised for virtual environments: For more details, click here- Virtual
+ Cloud Load Balancer: Helps in distributing client requests across various application servers that run on cloud environment, and enhancing application security, control and visibility. For more details, click here- Cloud

Why companies need load balancers?
Kemp load balancers are used across all industry segments and business sizes. However, some organisations that can reap the maximum benefit from Kemp’s services are:

+ Those running critical applications and need to ensure their business continuity.
+ Organisations that have application servers installed in multiple locations in the country or across the globe.
+ Companies that run end user-facing web applications that needs to be secured.
+ Ones who need to operate applications that integrate multi-factor authentications.

First choice of CIOs

Kemp provides overall and effective solutions for IT departments that go beyond the functioning of load balancing.

Here are some of the solutions that Kemp offers to all key decision-makers in an organisation:
+ Makes sure that all applications and networks are fully secured, at all times.
+ Helps in extracting all necessary packet, flow and application telemetry for proper diagnosis.
+ Continuously monitors all network traffic and application behaviours for anomalies.
+ Protects the enterprise from malicious acts by stopping and blocking threats much before they occur.

Kemp also offers a wholesome load balancing feature, such as –Global Server Load Balancing (GSLB) to help companies with disaster recovery and maintain flawless business continuity.

Enhanced security features

Kemp Technologies provides enhanced security and protection for your applications and general network infrastructure. Some of the popular security features are:

Web Application Firewall:
Web Application Firewall helps in protecting one’s custom or off the shelf applications from common threats like SQL injection and cross-site scripting XSS). It allows the user to create per application security profiles, to enforce source to enforce source location-level filtering, pre-integrated rulesets for common attack vectors and custom rules support. With these pre-defined rules and the ability to create your own custom rules, you can protect all your applications from within the LoadMaster from known attacks and prevent specific traffic patterns from reaching your applications and APIs – all without changing your application or infrastructure.

Edge Security Pack:
The Kemp Edge Security Pack (ESP) delivers a solution to customers who would have previously deployed TMG to publish their Microsoft applications. For the same reason, Kemp Technologies continues to add features to its ESP which in turn enhances the LoadMaster Load Balancer’s capability to secure pubic-facing applications and improve the overall user experience. As it functions way more than a Reverse Proxy, ESP comes along with some of the most common features that TMG users are familiar with, which includes:
+ End point authentication for pre-authentication
+ Persistent logging and reporting for user logging
+ Single Sign-On (SSO) across Virtual Services
+ LDAP Authentication from the LoadMaster to the Active Directory
+ Basic authentication communication from a client to the LoadMaster
+ Dual-factor authentication

Zero Trust Access Gateway:

Kemp’s Zero Trust Access Gateway is designed to simplify the application of complex access policies to published applications and services. Kemp Technologies’ heritage in being an application proxy advanced traffic steering and pre-authentication puts our advanced application load balancers in a prime position to contribute to a zero trust strategy.

A cut above the rest

Kemp has a concept of application delivery controller (ADC) for load balancers. The ADC is like a Swiss Army knife, it is highly multi-purpose; it performs various functions such as – network security, Intrusion Prevention System (IPS), Web Application Firewall (WAF), authentication and many others.

Most organisation that look for an ADC, in actuality only require a core load balancer that supports their Server Load Balancing (SLB) and Global Server Load Balancing (GSLB) features. Other than that, the demands are usually redundant and end up in adding cost to complexity. Vendors are trying to differentiate by branching out to other markets, such as DDoS mitigation, but that dilutes the value of their load balancing solution, which is what most customers are always looking for.

Organisations expect to have their applications always switched on, fully secured, performing at optimum level and deliver the best possible experience for their users.

Kemp is simple to deploy, offers flexible licensing options that aligns with different customer requirements and provides key loading features at competitive prices.