Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) to Offer Secure and Stable Network Servers

By Rohanish Chavan

An application delivery controller (ADC) is a computer networking device that is typically placed in a data center that is placed between the firewall and one or more application servers in a datacenter. It is used as an application delivery network (AND). This application is primarily is used to accelerate applications and handle load balancing between servers. More complex features of this device include handling of wider range of functions including the F5 BIG-IP product family for rate shaping, SSL offloading, and serving Web application firewall. They are generally integrated with big enterprises and is capable of working in unity by sharing a common operating system and control language.

ADC is a key network component that helps in optimizing and managing the information of the working of client machines connection through enterprises and web application servers. This hardware device helps in managing and directing the flow of data between the two entities. It acts as a perfect load balancing between the accelerated applications and servers. With the advancements and developments, the upgraded ADC is able to surpass traditional load balancers including Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) offloading, firewalls for web applications or rate shaping.

This device work efficiently as a load balancer to optimize the end-user performance, usage of data center, reliability, and provide secure network for enterprise applications. Furthermore, this utility has several functionalities such as caching, application acceleration, content switching, traffic shaping, multiplexing, and application security. ADC is used by enterprises to accelerate the performance of the applications that are delivered all over the wide area network (WAN). This is performed by instigating several techniques that optimizes the process such as compression, application classification, and reverse caching. This device is generally installed behind a firewall and in front of one or more application servers so that it can act as a single point of control. This helps the ADC in determining the security needs of an application and enable simplified accounting, authorization, and authentication.

An ADC can be used as a virtual software or can be deployed physically as a hardware appliance that can be processed on an 86x server. Delivery controlling in a large enterprise and cloud computing environment summarizes the virtual application of ADC. The cloud computing environment enables the scale capacity and down as application demand fluctuates. The alternate ADCs network connection can be used for enhancing response time, round robin or other different approaches related to packets. These applications are also based on the ability of the system to support the applications. The upgraded ADCs follow the important steps to manage the traffic by maintaining the health of the servers. Several protocols offer functionality of monitoring that would include File Transfer Protocol (FTP), domain name system (DNS), User Datagram Protocol (UDP), HTTP, HTTP Secure (HTTPS), TCP, and others.

ADCs play a vital role in an enterprise by enhancing the operability of network systems along with offering the benefits of security against distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. By implementing such techniques, the firewall of enterprise by optimizing load balancing, detection and intrusion prevention, web application firewalls (WAFs), engineered ADCs to tackle DDoS attacks on servers that are flooded with traffic. Furthermore, this device helps in terminating SSL tunneling attacks and to guard the DNS servers, ADCs enable DNS application firewall that support the sudden influx in the servers.

ADCs have several benefits among which some of them include secure application delivery, load balancing, and manage application behavior. This device is flexible enough to be easily installed as a hardware or virtualized software. They help in supporting a dedicated microservices inside the enterprise by optimizing the efficiency of managing the internal data traffic generated by all the services. The current developments in ADC have helped in supporting containerized applications and comprehensive analytics. This enables the enterprise to work more smoothly by managing the traffic flows that are inside their operational parameters. This have significantly enhanced the features and improve the performance of ADC.

There are several advantages of integrating ADC with enterprises as it boosts the network system and provides security. This has raised the importance of ADC which has resulted several developers and companies to increase investments in the application delivery controller market. Allied Market Research, after performing exhaustive study, anticipated that the global application delivery controllers (ADC) market to garner $4.2 billion by 2023, growing at a CAGR of 5.3% during the forecast period. This market has several promising aspects that will help in growing the economy at an astronomical level.

About The Author

Rohanish Chavan is a content writer, working on a large marketing and sales platform that helps firms attract visitors and close customers. Proficient monitoring and evaluating search results and search performance in order to write market reports and editorials sums up his job description. He keeps his technical skills and knowledge up to date to optimize the social media updates and industry changes. In his free time, he also writes short stories, poems, and blogs in order to cultivate his writing prowess.