Complutense University of Madrid (UCM), Spain’s biggest university system, required a highly available and scalable networking solution to ensure critical services are provided to nearly 100,000 students and staff members in its centers in Spain and throughout the world. The university’s networking environment includes two data centers and a total of 232 physical and virtual servers of multiple types (Microsoft Windows, Linux, UNIX and VMS). Services such as a university-wide intranet, an enrollment system, virtual campuses, email, directory services, ERP, proxy services, and multiple varied business applications are all critical to day to day operations and learning. During peak usage times, there are more than 55,000 concurrent users connected to the network. In order to meet the needs of such an extensive and complex international network, Complutense University needed a reliable load balancing solution that would integrate the different critical services and allow for greater degrees of scalability and availability, enabling it to resolve various complex topological issues that several of the services had. UCM also needed a scalable solution that would offer the flexibility to add new servers as necessary.

Groupama Seguros, a leading European insurance firm, needed a geo-dispersed, balanced web platform that would deliver top-rate performance while ensuring communications privacy and protection against attacks. The company’s web applications are used every day by approximately 7,000 employees, partners and customers located in multiple countries. They conduct a number of activities that all require a seamless, fast and reliable connection, 24*7. Local and global visitors processing online transactions need continuous connectivity. They furthermore need to be directed to the most suitable site that will provide optimal service and have a record of their relevant data. In June 2008, Groupama Seguros began searching for ways to provide a better user experience. As the company is responsible for large volumes of confidential data, including customer accounts and personal information, customers required a secure platform to perform their online transactions. This meant that network attacks and unwanted malware such as worms, viruses, reconnaissance, Trojans and VoIP attacks needed to be intercepted.

OSRAM, a leading global lighting manufacturer, maintains more than 45 websites in 38 languages, including a SAP-integrated sales extranet, MyOsram.com. The company required a solution to ensure continuous, high-speed Internet access for their partners, resellers, and customers to successfully drive and increase revenue. The company’s employees are connected via a worldwide Wide Area Network (WAN), Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) network, and several Virtual Private Networks (VPNs). MyOsram.com, a fully SAP-integrated sales extranet, provides OSRAM customers with the ability to place expedited orders around the clock. Uninterrupted Internet and application access are critical to the company’s day-to-day operations. However, achieving network consistency has been a challenge for OSRAM.

The Conservation & Liquidation Office (CLO), a subsidiary of the California Department of Insurance, is tasked with the conservation of insurance companies and the management of their affairs for the benefit and protection of policyholders. This involves taking over the entire operations of the company, including all policies, accounts, claims, and personal information of insured individuals. This information is subject to increased risk during the takeover procedure when the CLO establishes connectivity with the insurer’s network and IT infrastructure. The CLO previously relied on traditional firewall protection methods to secure its network and IT infrastructure. However, these methods provided insufficient protection to safeguard the crucial data and information the CLO was managing. The CLO needed a solution that would stop any attack from any entity, at headquarters as well as the regional insurance companies.

FireHost, a leading secure cloud hosting provider, was in need of a solution to secure its network infrastructure and provide real-time attack protection for its clients' mission-critical systems. The company is responsible for protecting sensitive data and brand reputations for companies of all sizes, including many Fortune 50 organizations. FireHost customers handle sensitive information such as credit card numbers and personal identifiable information that needs to remain secure and available. As an organization, they are known for meeting high traffic and high availability requirements for SaaS application providers and online retailers. As FireHost began to search for a seller to replace its existing infrastructure, they pursued a vendor that met their customers’ requirements for availability, performance, resiliency and security with scalable and cost-effective features that facilitate future growth.

AccuWeather, the world’s largest online commercial weather service, serves an average of 5 to 6 million users a day. However, when regions across the globe are hit with severe weather conditions such as hurricanes and snowstorms, traffic volume increases to 15 million hits a day. This surge in traffic presents a significant challenge for the company as it needs to ensure 24/7 information availability under these conditions. Therefore, Accuweather required a solution that would allow them to dynamically scale and add server capacity to handle the increased traffic. The company also needed to maintain customer satisfaction by providing exceptional weather service capabilities 24/7. It was crucial for AccuWeather's network to be available and optimized for web access 24/7 for critical weather information.

Liquidity Services needed a consistent and cost-effective solution to ensure flexibility for its growing business. It needed a consolidated and virtual solution that would allow it to grow its business through company acquisitions and new marketplaces and accommodate the additional infrastructure requirements without increasing the data center footprint. As an all virtual platform with two data centers, Liquidity Services scales several applications including Exchange, Web applications and test and development. In addition, in order for Liquidity Services business to thrive, it is critical for the auction based sales websites to remain accessible to its clients and customers. For this reason, they required disaster recovery support and a load balancing solution that could handle any increased traffic.

In the fall of 2009, AutoAnything was preparing for Black Friday. They aimed to create a premium shopping experience that would minimize cart abandonment and yield high conversion rates. To achieve this, they needed to create an image-rich website with fast-loading pages and reliable performance. Despite already using a content distribution network (CDN), AutoAnything knew they could be even faster. The site’s home page took up to 10 seconds to load, which was far too slow by the performance standards of the time. With a small engineering team and site traffic of over 2 million unique visitors each month, it was crucial that the company partner with a vendor who could deliver easy implementation.

O’Reilly Media, a leading publisher and disseminator of technology innovation, has been a chronicler and catalyst of cutting-edge technology development since 1978. The company has made it their critical goal to deliver their site in under 2 seconds. However, like all content-rich sites, the O’Reilly website is subject to the same performance pitfalls – everything from third-party widgets to data being served from multiple servers. A sub-2-second page load time is the current holy grail of web performance, and achieving this would keep the flow of thought seamless for users, meaning that they’re more likely to complete whatever online task they’ve started.

KPN, the leading telecommunications and IT service provider in the Netherlands, wanted to scale up its infrastructure to provide better, more predictable service to its business customers. With over 100 high-end business customers relying on its cloud services, KPN wanted to improve resiliency and scalability, as well as the ability to easily add new business customers and isolate between customer environments. Another key objective was lowering operational costs, which KPN wanted to achieve by consolidating multiple dedicated ADC devices into a virtualized ADC infrastructure.

Garanti Technology, a leader in banking and financial services, needed to ensure the confidentiality of customer information, consistent service availability, and fast application performance. As financial institutions like Garanti Technology offer more services through the web, they also inherit a new set of pressures. Applications need to be consistently available. Performance cannot waver. Security is vital. And confidentiality is not only expected, but it is essential. In order to remain a leader within the industry and protect the nature of their business, it was essential that Garanti Technology ensures customers' security and confidentiality and provide uninterrupted service.

Garanti Bank, Turkey’s second largest private bank, was in need of a virtualized Application Delivery Controller (ADC) solution for its advanced intranet and online banking services. The bank's goal was to consolidate its data center and focus on developing new online banking applications. The bank was looking for a solution that would allow it to maintain its current intranet and online banking services as well as develop new ones, all while ensuring customers enjoy a high-quality of experience whenever accessing its banking services and critical backend applications. Along with these goals, Garanti wanted to consolidate its data center in order to save costs and improve operations. The bank required a scalable, highly available solution that would deliver more, with less hardware and without compromising resiliency, performance or the customer experience.

MWEB Business, a division of MWEB, a leading ISP in South Africa, was faced with the challenge of running an efficient network for secure email that guarantees dependable, effective and scalable IT infrastructure. Among the solutions MWEB Business offers to its customers, the email service is the most challenging and complex. MWEB offers three email services to its business customers: Business Mail, for smaller businesses requiring multiple mailboxes branded with the company name; Mail Spooling, for businesses requiring a large number of mailboxes allowing for all e-mails to be collected on the MWEB server, downloaded all at once and distributed to all employees in the business; and Courier List Service, enabling sending of e-mails to multiple recipients at once via an easy-to-use Web based interface allowing customers full management of their email lists, recipient information, message content and mail batches. In order to provide its business customers with these mail services, MWEB has to offer 24/7 reliable, fast service with no delays, no spamming and secure mail without viruses. MWEB had to design a powerful, intricate network, with a physical and logical layout that could undertake these email tasks. Easy and high-speed network flow between servers was imperative. At the same time, it had to ensure that the network was simple to use and administer and scalable for future upgrades to accommodate its growing customer base while still maintaining quality service.

PenTeleData, a strategic partnership of cable and telephone companies, was facing issues with its legacy security solution. The old system often resulted in application disruptions, connectivity disruptions, and security threats to PenTeleData’s infrastructure. The company required a new solution that could consistently protect its infrastructure and that would be able to integrate with DDoS detection from Kentik Technologies’ cloud-based NetFlow analytics solution. Moreover, PenTeleData was seeking to use this new security offering as the foundation for launching a new DDoS mitigation service it could sell to its customers, allowing them to stay operational during a cyber-attack.

The customer, a Tier-1 Telecommunication Operator and Internet Service Provider, was facing ongoing growth of Internet traffic capacity resulting in increased load on its services and data centers. The growth in traffic was projected to intensely continue in the coming years. The challenge was to maintain best Quality of Experience (QoE) for end users and to ensure Service Level Agreement (SLA) and service continuity while addressing aggressive traffic capacity growth. The desired solution must eliminate capacity growth risks by providing additional room for growth of services, throughput and other metrics, as well as protecting the current investment in equipment, people and knowledge.

CSEA, under the supervision of the Italian Ministry of Economics and Finance and the Italian Energy and Water Authority, plays a critical role in regulating the Italian energy sector. It collects funds from utility suppliers and distributors and reallocates these funds to electric, gas, and water sectors. Due to the critical nature of these services, CSEA must ensure 100% uptime of its customer-facing applications and networks during all operational scenarios, including in the face of a cyber-attack. The IT department at CSEA had relied on the native security capabilities of individual servers, resulting in a manual, resource-intensive process that made it difficult to implement infrastructure-wide security updates and policies. As CSEA upgraded its data centers to a modern, high-availability cluster infrastructure, it identified the need to deploy next-generation load balancing capabilities to drive data center scalability and allow new applications/services to be deployed without incurring performance degradation.

The Bâloise Group, which includes Basler Versicherungen and Bâloise Bank SoBa, needed to ensure 24/7 access to their shared website for their customers. The website contains crucial links that allow customers to log into their personal banking and financial services accounts. While the group had more than one Web Server Directed to the front page of the companies’ website, limiting the likelihood of a major outage, they wanted a solution that, in the event of a massive failure, would redirect visitors to a special emergency page with links to essential personal account services. They also needed to maintain their reputation in the marketplace, as an unreliable or intermittently inaccessible website could question the company’s overall credibility.

SK C&C designed a consolidation project to create a single highly-dense data center that provides web portal services to all fourteen subsidiaries of SK C&C. In consolidating their data centers, SK C&C wanted to achieve two main objectives – greater cost reduction, and operational simplicity. Cost reduction evolves from consolidation of hardware, software and other infrastructure equipment, and operational simplicity is achieved by managing fewer data centers, which helps meet compliance requirements more easily, handle security threats more efficiently and enhance business agility faster. For its web portal, SK C&C designed a single data center with multiple server farms, each housing multiple servers running different applications. To support the growth in traffic to the companies’ web portals, SK C&C set a target of 10Gbps throughput capacity for each server farm. One active ADC and one backup ADC with four physical ports of 10GE each were designed to handle servers load balancing needs.

In June 2015, Hexatom, a leading Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) Managed Service Provider (MSP) in France, took on a new client in the gaming industry and experienced its first major attack. The attack significantly affected not only the gaming company targeted, but also neighboring clients in the data center. Equipped with only a rate-based solution provided by its carriers, Hexatom needed an in-house, comprehensive and automated attack mitigation solution to protect its infrastructure and ensure such an incident did not happen again.

The Universities and Colleges Admission Service (UCAS) is the UK’s central organization that processes applications for universities and colleges across the country. UCAS has been processing student applications online since 2002. Today, nearly all students are using the online application system with 98.5% submitting applications as of January 2006, using electronic means via www.ucas.com in comparison with 77.6% at the same point last year. The UCAS website was independently audited by ABC Electronic during November 2005. They verified that the total number of page impressions was 67,289,583 for that month. Due to the continuous surge in online applications UCAS deployed Radware’s APSolute Education solutions to guarantee the continuous, fault tolerant and secure operation of the UCAS website.

Myntex, a leading provider of trusted encryption solutions for mobile devices, was hit with a series of massive multi-vector DDoS attacks, resulting in severe service interruptions that negatively impacted its customers and the availability of their mobile devices. The company utilized standard security methods and protocols in conjunction with a DDoS solution from a provider that offered poor customer service and couldn’t prevent downtime. Attack campaigns could last a month and involved Advanced Persistent Denial of Service (APDoS) attacks, which included multi-vector burst DDoS attacks at massive sizes ranging from 40Gbps to 130Gbps. These attacks resulted in service disruptions for Myntex’s customers, causing communication downtime with their mobile devices.

KiwiCollection.com, a curated collection of more than 2,000 international luxury hotels and resorts, was facing a significant performance challenge. The website, which allows travelers to research and book their hotels online, was being served from a single data center in the US. This resulted in slow page load times and dramatically inconsistent user experiences for its worldwide audience. The issue became glaringly apparent when the CEO of Kiwi Collection, who is based overseas, was showing the site to a group of European partners and had to wait an embarrassingly long time for the site to load. It was clear that the company needed an acceleration solution.

The Town of Ajax was struggling with a paper-based document management system that had become an administrative nightmare. The municipality was maintaining 27 sets of binders across their departments with hard copies of their ISO 9001 quality documentation. Every time a document was created, edited, or updated, 27 copies had to be printed, distributed, and added to each binder. This process was not only time-consuming but also led to a lack of version control, disparity across the departments, and last-minute scrambling to ensure audit preparedness. The municipality needed a system that would allow them to better manage their ISO 9001 documentation, including operating procedures, work instructions, and related forms.

The Wine Group, a global wine company, was facing challenges with managing Environmental, Quality, and Health & Safety activities as their employees were using different systems. This led to a lack of centralization and standardization of processes and data. The company wanted to implement a centralized software solution that would unify all their performance data and standardize common processes. The solution needed to be user-friendly and support a high level of transparency into their performance metrics with the ability to output data in reports and dashboards easily available to upper management.

The City of St. Albert, the 5th largest city in the province of Alberta, was seeking an integrated management system to help them achieve their short term goal of meeting requirements for ISO 14001 certification and their long term goal of ensuring operational efficiency and excellence. The first step towards ISO 14001 certification required the City of St. Albert to streamline internal processes and data management across the City’s departments, beginning with Transit and Public Works. Before Intelex, the majority of the City’s documentation, tracking, and reporting lived on paper, in disparate spreadsheets, or in the municipality’s in-house system. This resulted in lengthy processes to find the right document and at times turned out missing or inconsistent data fields. The City of St. Albert knew they would need to standardize their approach to environmental management by automating the collection, storage, assessment and reporting of environmental data.

Moss, a leader in the construction business in America, was looking for a fully integrated safety, risk and claims management platform. The company needed to integrate its dispersed and siloed data into a single database. They could use it to extract knowledge that could be used to understand what was happening in the business and to identify opportunities for improvement. Legacy manual systems simply would not allow Moss to be predictive and achieve the kind of growth rate they were seeking. Moss’ Safety Management System had a good foundation, but lacked comprehensive and analytical views – including the ability to assess incidents and claims together. It also did not have predictive analysis capabilities. Moss wanted to move to an SMS/RMIS (Safety Management System/Risk Management Information System) that provides a more integrated view of a working environment.

In 2010, Agnico Eagle recognized a need to improve environmental health and safety (EHS). It was using paper-based spreadsheets to track incidents, inspections and other critical activities and had no real-time capabilities to act on data. EHS staff at Agnico also needed to quickly get data in the hands of executives to speed up EHS project approvals. And, with locations throughout the world, a tool that could accommodate multiple languages – particularly Finnish – was a must.

SUEZ North America, a company responsible for treating 560 million gallons of water and over 440 million gallons of wastewater each day, faced challenges in managing facilities of different ages and stages in building and equipment maintenance, supervising and engaging employees who have not received comparable training, and aligning often varied safety missions and cultures. Accurate incident reporting and data management was key to improving health and safety for workers and satisfying maintenance and operations demands at the many facilities SUEZ manages. Initially, the company used spreadsheets to capture, report, analyze, and correct hazards. As its client list grew and new software and technology became available, SUEZ realized a paper-based approach to incident management had become cumbersome and ineffective.

Cory, a leading waste management, recycling and energy recovery company in the UK, was overly reliant on paper-based forms and checklists, making it difficult to meet current demands while planning an expansion of the business. These paper-based forms needed to be scanned and emailed to a central team who cut-and-pasted relevant information into an Excel spreadsheet for basic analysis. This process was time-consuming, costly, and did not allow for data to be seen in aggregate or in context. The company needed a solution that would streamline data collection, improve visibility of operations, and foster a culture of continuous improvement and awareness.

Kloeckner Metals Corporation, a full-line manufacturing, production and service center business specializing in metals industries, was seeking a solution to streamline its processes and make it easier for branch operations to meet the company’s environmental health and safety (EHS) objectives. In 2017, the company was using multiple EHS systems to track incidents, perform corrective actions, hold safety meetings, perform job hazard analyses, and run other EHS programs. Each system was disparate and there was no interoperability. Kloeckner wanted to consolidate these workflows, close the loop on both corrective actions and audit recommendations, and enhance its overall EHS processes.