As more businesses shift their infrastructure to hybrid and multi-cloud environments, the demand for robust application delivery services is on the rise. For managed service providers (MSPs), this presents an important opportunity to offer Application Delivery Controller (ADC)-as-a-Service, ensuring high availability, performance, and security for client applications.
But transitioning into an ADC MSP is more than just deploying load balancers. To deliver real value and remain competitive, service providers need to build a foundation that’s flexible, scalable, and enterprise-grade. In this post, we’ll cover the nine essential components you need in your ADC solution to become a successful ADC MSP.
1. Support for Both Hardware and Virtual Form Factors
Client needs vary drastically across sectors—from large enterprises running on-prem data centers to startups embracing cloud-native architectures. As an MSP, flexibility is key.
Your ADC must be available in multiple form factors to meet different customer environments:
- Hardware-based ADCs for clients with high throughput requirements or strict regulatory constraints.
- Virtual ADCs for clients leveraging private or public clouds, enabling faster deployment and reduced footprint.
Offering both options allows you to service a wider range of customers while aligning with their preferred infrastructure strategies.
2. Comprehensive Deployment Flexibility: Public Cloud, Private Cloud & Kubernetes
Modern infrastructure is increasingly fragmented. A capable ADC must go wherever your clients' applications reside. That means:
- Public Cloud support for all major providers: AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), IBM Cloud, Oracle Cloud, and more.
- Private Cloud compatibility with technologies like OpenStack, VMware, Nutanix, and others.
- Kubernetes support for containerized environments—ensuring seamless ingress control, load balancing, and service mesh integration for microservices-based applications.
Additionally, if you aim to support government or public sector clients, certified compatibility with government-grade public clouds (such as AWS GovCloud or Azure Government) becomes a major advantage.
3. Support for Automation Frameworks
In the MSP world, automation is non-negotiable. The ability to provision, scale, and manage ADC services automatically saves time, reduces errors, and accelerates time-to-market.
Your ADC solution should integrate easily with industry-standard automation tools, including:
- Ansible for configuration management and infrastructure-as-code.
- ProxMox orchestration, especially in environments where lightweight hypervisor management is needed.
4. Flexible, Elastic Licensing Model
Rigid, per-instance ADC licenses can quickly eat into profit margins and complicate operations. To succeed as an MSP, you need a licensing model that reflects the fluid nature of service delivery.
Look for solutions that offer elastic consumption-based licensing, like Radware’s Global Elastic License (GEL). GEL enables:
- Dynamic allocation of ADC capacity across multiple tenants and environments.
- Centralized license management and tracking.
- Optimized usage and cost control without sacrificing agility.
5. Clustering and Auto-Scaling Capabilities
Your clients expect continuous availability and consistent performance, even as demand fluctuates. To meet these expectations, your ADC infrastructure must:
- Support clustering for high availability and failover.
- Enable auto-scaling based on real-time traffic loads or application demand.
These features ensure the ADC services you provide are cost-effective and resilient, scaling up during peak times and scaling down during lulls to optimize resource usage.
6. Backed by a Trusted and Innovative Vendor
An ADC is a core component of your service offering—it must be dependable, secure, and future-proof. That’s why selecting a solution from a trusted and established vendor is essential.
Look for a vendor that offers:
- Proven expertise in application delivery and security, with thousands of customers and, preferably, Fortune-500 ones
- Rapid support and patching, to help you resolve issues promptly.
- Continuous innovation, ensuring the ADC evolves with new protocols, security threats, and industry standards.
7. Efficient SSL/TLS Traffic Handling
Today, most internet traffic is encrypted. An ADC must have robust capabilities to decrypt, inspect, and re-encrypt SSL/TLS traffic efficiently. Without efficient SSL/TLS handling, your client's application will suffer greatly from degraded performance and business impact. In addition, without efficient and effective TLS/SSL handling, advanced security services like WAF or bot management can't function effectively.
Efficient SSL offloading not only enables deeper traffic inspection but also reduces the load on backend servers, delivering faster response times and improved application performance.
8. Integrated Application Security Capabilities
Security is no longer optional. Your ADC must offer integrated security features that go beyond basic load balancing. These include:
- Web Application Firewall (WAF) to block common and emerging attacks.
- Bot Management to detect and mitigate malicious crawlers and other malware jeopardizing your business.
- API Protection to secure backend APIs from abuse and data leaks.
- Client-Side Protection for detecting JavaScript injection or formjacking and the likes.
- Advanced Web DDoS Mitigation capable of discerning legitimate traffic patterns from stealthy application-layer attacks.
By bundling these capabilities, you can offer clients both availability and protection under a single service umbrella.
9. AI-Powered Operational Intelligence
Managing large-scale ADC deployments can quickly become complex. AI-powered tools can dramatically improve operational efficiency by:
- Assisting support teams and R&D with faster root cause analysis.
- Providing contextual, document-driven answers to user queries buried in technical manuals.
- Offering intelligent configuration help, reducing the learning curve and improving accuracy.
This type of AI integration turns your ADC into more than just an infrastructure component—it becomes a self-optimizing platform that empowers your teams and enhances client satisfaction.
Final Thoughts
Becoming an ADC MSP is a strategic move that opens up new revenue opportunities and lets you play a critical role in your clients' application delivery success. But to do it right, you need more than just a load balancer—you need a scalable, secure, flexible, and intelligent platform backed by a reliable vendor.
From multi-cloud and Kubernetes deployment support to elastic licensing, SSL handling, advanced security, and AI-driven operational assistance, these nine essentials form the blueprint of a world-class ADC MSP offering.
If you're evaluating ADC vendors or planning your MSP strategy, use this checklist to guide your decisions and set the foundation for sustainable success in the evolving world of application delivery.
About Radware’s Alteon ADC – the most complete and flexible ADC in the marketplace
Alteon is a robust application delivery controller that incorporates all of the traditional ADC features and capabilities, ranging from L3/4 load balancing to L7 LB and TLS advanced encryption. Alteon is deployed across a large range of deployment environments supporting public clouds such as AWS, GCP, Azure, IBM, Oracle, and more, as well as private clouds such as OpenStack, VMWare, and Nutanix. Alteon also supports automation systems such as Ansible and ProxMos with tens of modules and playbooks ready-made out of the box. It also provides a range of application security features such as WAF, Bot protection, API protection, client-side protection, various security-oriented feeds and more. In addition, Alteon can be sold such that its application-security features are provided as a managed service, freeing up the organization’s personnel from dealing with security aspects of their business. Alteon is sold in a revolutionary pricing model called Global Elastic License (GEL), which provides the utmost cost flexibility in the marketplace, allowing organizations to completely decouple BW from features and footprint (virtual or physical instances). GEL allows organizations to start at any level they want and then grow their infrastructure side-by-side with business growth
To learn more about Alteon please log in to radware.com or contact your local Radware representative.