Top 5 Benefits of Using Alteon VA In Public Cloud Environments

Introduction

Businesses are striving to find the best solutions to connect their applications to cloud environments, which promise limitless scalability, remarkable flexibility, and decreased operational burdens. However, many enterprises transitioning to the cloud are concerned that their applications may suffer in terms of security and performance issues. Two prominent contenders in this arena are Application Delivery Controller as a Service (ADCaaS) or virtual appliances as Radware Alteon Virtual Appliance (VA) ADC. ADCaaS denotes the provision and delivery of load balancing and ADC functionality as an on-demand service obtained directly from an IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) public cloud, such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. Both solutions offer robust features for connecting to a Public Cloud, but understanding their differences is crucial for making informed decisions. In this blog post, we will explore the benefits of Radware VA ADC over ADCaaS.

Multi Cloud

Organizations are no longer moving to the cloud; they have already arrived. Radware research conducted by Osterman Research shows that only a negligible percentage of organizations, less than 0.5%, do not deploy applications in the public cloud at all. However, organizations are increasingly shifting into the next iteration of the cloud movement: the multi-cloud. The research shows that 95% of the organizations use at least two types of infrastructure, and nearly half of organizations deploy applications on four or more platforms. As a result, deploying applications across multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments has become the new normal.

The challenge of providing a consistent ADCaaS and protection solution across different public clouds poses a heavy burden on organizations. Deploying ADCaaS across multiple clouds requires provisioning of separate ADC instances for each IaaS vendor, significantly increasing complexity and time investment. Additionally, the absence of a unified management solution for all ADCs across diverse cloud platforms creates major operational challenges. Alteon Multi Cloud offers consistent application delivery, centralized management, and security services across various environments. One of the major concerns in multi cloud environments is making sure customers are served from the closest application server to assure minimal latency. Alteon GSLB (Global Server Load Balancing) solves this and provides optimal performance by directing users to the closest server using predefined metrics like geographical location and network latency. This dynamic routing enhances application availability and scalability, ensuring efficient resource utilization and minimizing response times for improved user experience.

Flexible and Dynamic Deployment

In the fast-paced digital era, as organizations increasingly migrate to the cloud and adopt automation, they encounter the task of effectively managing application delivery services in dynamic environments with varying capacity demands. Although ADCaaS, provided by IaaS, offers adaptable deployment options, it is restricted to a specific IaaS cloud. This lack of flexibility poses challenges in multi-cloud or hybrid environments where organizations seek agility across their own singular cloud infrastructure.

Alteon Global Elastic License (GEL) enables flexible and dynamic application delivery and security services deployment across any public cloud, private cloud, and local data centers environments, using a single, global elastic license. Radware’s GEL is a dynamic licensing mechanism which enables customers to buy a single application delivery and security license to simplify deployment and planning.

• Environment agnostic – allocate and move ADC capacity across any public cloud or form factor.
• Elastic allocation of ADC licenses based on infrastructure planning and needs.
• Breaks down the GEL capacity to as many virtual ADC instances as required, in any size needed.

All together it eliminates application delivery and security planning risks, prevents double spending for different environments, and allows for seamless licensing and deployment of ADC services anywhere they are needed.

Cost Predictability

Budgeting and licensing can become a significant planning challenge without cost predictability. This is particularly true when scaling and securing applications in a metered model environment such as ADCaaS, where business often encounters unforeseen expenses as services scale with unpredictable spikes in usage levels. This unpredictability can lead to budget overruns and challenges in financial planning.

In contrast, Alteon VA offers a more predictable and easy-to-plan cost structure. With Alteon VA organizations have greater control over their expenses, as licensing and pricing models are more transparent, known upfront and customizable. This enables businesses to accurately forecast their expenses and allocate resources accordingly reducing the risk of budgetary surprises. Additionally, Alteon VA solutions are often more cost-effective in the long run, as they provide comprehensive features and functionalities without the need for additional third-party services or add-ons.

Unified Analytics

Application administrators proactively need to manage application SLAs (service level agreements) and identify SLA degradation and their source (e.g., application slow down or network delays) before they impact the user experience. ADCaaS analytics offer insights into application performance and user behavior. However, they can provide analytics only for the cloud they reside in, not aggregated in case the same service is deployed in multi cloud. Concerns about limited control and potential vendor lock-in also impact flexibility and portability of analytics data and configurations. Alteon VA analytics on the other hand provides in-depth insight into application health and performance, facilitating rapid identification of underlying issues. Alteon VA’s intuitive analytics furnish detailed breakdowns of application chain components, enabling fast and efficient root-cause analysis. Consistent application delivery and security services are ensured through single aggregated analytics that runs across the multi cloud environments and via a single pane of glass to manage those ADC services. Collaboration across teams, including application, network, and security administrators, allows proactive management of application health and services to preempt potential issues. By leveraging these capabilities, organizations can maintain optimal performance and minimize disruptions, ensuring seamless operation of critical applications and services.

Security

Moving to the cloud is all about agility and flexibility, but this frequently comes at a cost to security. In the name of expediency, application development frequently runs ahead, while security falls behind. While ADCaaS may offer basic security features, it may not provide the same level of comprehensive security offered by Radware and the Alteon VA.

Radware is a new API-based, cloud application security architecture designed from the ground up to optimally protect applications deployed across any cloud and data center.

Alteon VA offers comprehensive, Frictionless Security Across Public and Hybrid Clouds.

Alteon VA employs a ‘positive’ security approach based on multiple layers of machine-learning (ML) and AI-based algorithms for web application protection. This ‘positive’ security model automatically generates security policies to allow only legitimate traffic, while blocking malicious requests which fall outside the parameters of allowed user behavior. The result is a higher level of protection, with lower false positives. On top of that, Alteon provides additional application protection modules:

• Bot management across web and mobile applications, combining behavioral modeling for granular intent analysis, collective bot intelligence and device fingerprinting.
• Dedicated API protection by controlling navigation flow and fingerprint M2M communications to avoid invoking APIs that are accessed or targeted by misbehaving bots.

Radware was recently named a Leader in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) market by Quadrant Knowledge Solutions in their new industry report The SPARK Matrix: Web Application Firewall (WAF), Q4 2023, and the #1 overall vendor in terms of Technology Excellence.

Conclusion

When evaluating Radware Alteon VA and ADCaaS for public cloud deployment, businesses must weigh deployment factors, advanced traffic management capabilities, security features, and cost. With a single ADC and WAF technology, unified management interface, REST API, and GEL covering all environments, it streamlines administration through centralized policies, ensuring operational consistency. Alteon VA stands out in all these aspects, especially for businesses with complex application environments and stringent security needs across multiple public clouds.

Radware can help your organization, reach out to us at: Radware Alteon solution information.