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Key Considerations for Maximizing Business Value from Load Balancing

Pabio November 18, 2024

In today’s dynamic application landscape, providing IT infrastructure A highly available, efficient and secure solution is essential for organizations of all sizes. Load balancers help achieve this by distributing client network traffic across multiple servers. They also distribute traffic across geographic locations to minimize downtime and improve application experiences.

With 65% of organizations reporting that their cloud environment is multi-cloud, IT teams and business decision-makers are re-evaluating their load balancing choices more frequently. They need a versatile, secure and cost-effective solution that aligns with modern deployment needs, one that optimizes workflows and minimizes downtime to improve application performance. Understand the essential role of load balancers, the state of load balancing in modern technology ecosystems and where application Today’s service delivery gives professionals a holistic perspective from which they can make informed choices.

Kurt Jung

Senior Solutions Engineer, Progress.

The changing landscape of load balancers

Many industry trends and application influences are shaping the way load balancers are used today. Enterprise IT teams and decision makers are increasingly open to exploring and using load balancing providers and solutions. A survey by the EMA found that 80% of businesses indicated they were willing to consider changing load balancing providers in the next two years.

There are many reasons why application demands are changing. The rise of cloud-based applications, microservices architectures, and hybrid cloud deployments has increased the complexity of load balancing requirements. Many organizations are struggling to support this evolving application landscape with their current load balancers, highlighting their need for a solution that provides advanced security, robust analytics, and other features that simplify management.

Ongoing support costs for their existing load balancers and additional deployments can be significant, as can adding additional nodes for new applications. This pushes organizations to look for more cost-effective alternatives that will allow them to flexibly scale their load balancing architecture without significantly increasing their operational costs.

Benefits of Load Balancing

Controlling load balancers business value in a variety of ways, well beyond improving the performance, availability, reliability and redundancy of IT infrastructure to maintain continuous service.

In addition to these critical roles, load balancers can also optimize resource utilization, significantly reducing costs and improving system performance. They facilitate efficient use of server resources, reducing the risk of underutilization or overload.

A perhaps lesser known but essential benefit: load balancers can improve security by controlling traffic in a way that mitigates the risk of DDoS attacks. They can detect and block malicious traffic, helping to protect the network from potential threats. They can also play a crucial role in disaster recovery strategies by redirecting traffic to backup servers in the event of an outage. This feature maintains business continuity and minimizes downtime.

Load balancing also allows organizations to easily add or remove servers depending on traffic requirements. This flexibility supports seamless scalability, accommodating growing user bases without service interruption.

Considerations for Choosing a Load Balancing Platform

When evaluating load balancing platforms, it is essential to find one that can adapt to changing organizational needs in terms of scale and complexity. A platform offering customer-focused support and rich online resources will help an organization of any size get the most out of deployments.

It’s also worth looking at the vendor’s development history. For example, look for how the vendor has reinvested in product R&D and how quickly they fix bugs. Some providers can even provide an estimate of the return on investment. Finally, it is essential that licenses are not only perpetual and that they offer flexibility capable of adapting to the needs of the business.

Some fundamental features to look for in a solution include:

Basic load balancing: The primary load balancing functionality of concern to modern organizations includes on-premises, cloud, and hybrid application deployments. It’s even better to find one that offers a Global Server Load Balancing (GSLB) feature that can be used across multiple data centers, cloud providers, and regions.

Cybersecurity functionality: Layered cybersecurity This feature can provide additional security enhancement to an organization’s existing cybersecurity practices. These include a Web Application Firewall (WAF), Edge Security Pack (ESP) including reverse proxy, endpoint authentication, Active Directory integration, RADIUS authentication, single sign-on (SSO) to virtual services, RSA SecurID two-factor authentication, and persistent logging. Report.

Adaptable deployment options: Load balancers can be deployed in different infrastructure configurations, including dedicated hardware, virtual machines, or cloud platforms, such as Azure and AWS.

Flexible and competitive rates: Specifiers should be able to choose the licensing model that fits their business needs. These include perpetual, subscription, pay-as-you-go (PAYG), and pooled. By making the right choice, organizations can realize significant deployment cost savings and reduce ongoing support costs.

Prioritize safety and efficiency

The load balancer landscape continues to evolve in anticipation of upcoming industry trends and influences. Therefore, a versatile, secure and efficient load balancing solution is essential for businesses.

For organizations to optimize their current load balancing capabilities to achieve the best application experience, they must be aligned with modern deployment needs, enhanced functionality, flexible licensing and reduced cost of ownership, as well as as well as industry-leading online support and resources.

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