Cisco Secure ADC and Secure ADC Multicloud: Application performance in a cloud-first world – Cisco Blogs

This blog is a joint collaboration between contributors Ravi Balakrishnan and Will Zupan of Cisco, and lead author Grif Morrel, Director Business Development of Radware.

As organizations digitize, applications increasingly drive productivity and the user experience, requiring networks and applications to be resilient and available at all times.  Application Delivery Controllers (ADCs) are essential for secure, agile, and optimized application delivery.

ADCs intelligently distribute traffic across multiple servers – whether on-premise or in the cloud – to ensure availability, minimize latency, and optimize the user experience.

In addition to load balancing, ADCs perform other critical functions that impact application performance by offloading servers, including acceleration, SSL termination, compression, caching, and security.  These ADC features ensure that network resources are optimized, allowing applications to scale to millions of connections without adversely affecting the user experience.

Cisco Secure ADC

Cisco Secure ADC^® is a leading application delivery controller that continuously monitors and intelligently manages application traffic, ensuring the efficient use of network resources and optimizing application performance.  Secure ADC allows the same solution to be deployed across private data center, private cloud, and public cloud environments, reducing cost and ensuring that application policies are consistent regardless of where applications are deployed.  Secure ADC is available in physical, virtual, and cloud platforms.

Cisco Secure ADC multicloud solution

What about applications in the cloud?  Secure ADC multicloud is an application delivery solution for on-prem data centers, private clouds, and public clouds.  Secure ADC multicloud extends the benefits of Secure ADC to private and public cloud environments using Radware Alteon Cloud Control for centralized service management across hybrid environments.

The diagram below shows the key components of a Secure ADC multicloud solution.  Secure ADC complements Cisco ACI deployments by giving administrators and application owners complete visibility into the health and performance of applications as well as the network infrastructure.  Enhanced visibility and control of both applications and the network ensures that application performance and network resources are optimized as workloads grow and business requirements change.

Cisco ACI and Secure ADC provide a complete API feature set that enables full automation for accelerating application deployment, simplifying management, and ensuring that policies comply with corporate requirements.  By providing a single license and code base that can be deployed across all environments and all form factors, Secure ADC reduces costs and minimizes the challenges of managing multi-cloud environments. And, if an issue arises that requires technical support, customers are able to reach out to one organization, Cisco, to resolve both networking and application issues.

Secure ADC multicloud addresses several important challenges that face organizations today:

1. Optimize the application experience – Secure ADC multicloud continuously monitors the network and dynamically manages traffic flow, optimizing application performance and enabling ADC services to be rapidly deployed as needed across any environment.
2. Simplify migration to the cloud – Global Elastic Licensing (GEL) provides a single, platform-agnostic license that allows ADC capacity to be provisioned or decommissioned instantaneously across any environment as demand fluctuates. GEL monitors the demand for ADC services, automatically provisions additional capacity during periods of peak usage, and decommissions ADC capacity when it is not needed, minimizing IT costs.
3. Consistent policy and interface across environments – Secure ADC allows the same solution to be deployed across private data center and cloud environments, ensuring that application policies are consistent regardless of where applications are deployed.
4. Support for DevOps and CI/CD – Secure ADC multicloud provides seamless integration with DevOps automation tools such as Ansible via REST APIs. This enables non-IT personnel, such as DevOps and application developers, to provision new ADC services across multiple environments and accelerate the development and deployment of new applications.
5. Enhanced Visibility and Control – Secure ADC multicloud collects application performance and health information from all the application resources it manages. Its analytics engine and intuitive dashboards enable rapid root cause analysis (RCA) and SLA breach resolution. Its interface allows native integration with 3^rd party analytics and reporting tools such as Splunk, Grafana, and Terraform.

Conclusion

As organizations move to the cloud, the need to provide agile, consistent, application delivery and protection across private data centers, private cloud, and public cloud environments places an increasing burden on IT.  Cisco Secure ADC and Secure ADC multicloud allow uniform application delivery policies to be deployed and optimized dynamically across hybrid environments.  Cisco Secure ADC optimizes application performance and simplifies migration to the cloud while minimizing IT costs.

Resources

Secure Data Center: Cisco ACI, Secure Firewall, and Secure ADC Design Guide

Secure ADC At-A-Glance

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