The Orange County Teachers Federal Credit Union (OCTFCU) offers retail banking services online, at ATMs and in 24 branches spread across the southern-California county. With concurrent sessions as high as 6,000 users per day with $150,000 changing hands every hour, the credit union’s online portal had to be fast, secure, reliable and available around the clock. Simple load balancing between its Web servers became inadequate to this task; seamless failover was needed. The credit union’s server farm had needed load balancers for its backend servers and initially, it had used Cisco’s Local Director and Content Services Switches. That went some way toward keeping applications responsive, but when its banking services went online to the public, the credit union needed something far more reliable: It needed to be able to detect a server’s imminent failure and divert traffic to another server while the faulty server was taken out of the farm for scrutiny. All this had to be done without interruption to its online service, and without customers feeling any “glitch.”

The financial services company was facing an increased rate of cyberattacks and required a new on-premise DDoS mitigation platform at its primary data centers in addition to protection from encrypted network attacks to protect web applications. In recent years, financial services has become one of the industries most targeted by cyberattacks. In addition to facing an array of attack vectors and threats, including hacktivist-backed campaigns and ransom-motivated assaults, it is also overcoming a hodgepodge of various network and application security challenges, including migration to the cloud, application exploits and encrypted traffic management. The bank required a new on-premise DDoS mitigation platform at its primary data centers that could protect them from DDoS attacks without negatively impacting legitimate traffic. In addition, with the percentage of encrypted network traffic increasing, the bank required a solution that could protect their web applications from encrypted floods.

As a provider of data center managed services and technology solutions, Xand’s customers require secure, high performance, highly-available infrastructures for its mission-critical environments. Since, distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks can inflict costly and destructive downtime on hosted applications and resources, Xand needed a solution to protect its customers cloud systems and comprehensively guard against user data breaches.

Convergys, a global customer management firm, was facing a challenge in maintaining customer satisfaction and VoIP availability, which are critical to its success. With over 150 call centers in 31 countries and 90 VoIP recorders in its call system, Convergys needed a solution that could load balance over a million voice calls per day across multiple recordings. Any scenario where recordings were lost could result in customer dissatisfaction. To eliminate downtime from regular maintenance of its recorders, Convergys searched for a load balancing solution to support call recording for all of its call centers.

The bank faced a number of challenges, including network expansion, increased dependency on web applications and an increase in the number of cyberattacks. With 400 million users dependent on the bank’s applications to access accounts and related services, the bank must provide high application performance 24x7 for over 180 applications to keep customers satisfied. Due to high network traffic volumes, its existing load balancing solution couldn’t handle the connections per second. Another challenge for this bank is scaling its network to manage international business. Internet banking spans various individual banking divisions, including retail, corporate and consumer, each of which has its own applications and requirements. The bank, which also has to handle large traffic loads from consumer and enterprise customers, was looking for a scalable solution to manage traffic and applications for more than a dozen departments across two data centers. The third challenge for the bank is application security to maintain service availability. Protection of mission-critical application is critical to stay in business. The majority of network traffic that the bank receives is encrypted, which necessitated having the ability to inspect that traffic for attacks.

CCS, a major provider of data access cards in the Czech market, needed to ensure its network was continuously available to service several thousand transactions daily. The company's profits are derived from the number of transactions completed, so uninterrupted access to data is integral to its business relationship as a service provider to its partners and customers. In 2002, floods in Karlín revealed a weakness in its existing Internet connection: Availability. CCS decided it must have two Internet providers to handle unexpected events and interruptions caused by natural disasters. The company created two pipelines for service: One at 34 Mb/s and the other at 7 Mb/s. These pipelines would provide availability for essential services such as customer service, e-mail communication with customers and partners, and communications with partners from other business chains to exchange transaction files and payment card blacklists.