Internal Systems

Increasing numbers of businesses are moving towards web-enabled applications for both internal and external services. As companies rely on their internal systems for the essential day-to-day running of the business, it is of great importance to safeguard employee productivity. Some public services may also rely on access to internal systems, such as databases.

Reliability is important to maintain productivity and avoid the IT time and effort associated with recovery from a failure. Similarly, cost savings can be achieved if the internal applications interact with one another more seamlessly, including the legacy systems which may need to be integrated, migrated or hardened.

There is also increasing demand for workers to be able to access key internal systems remotely and securely when working at home, or when on the road. The ability to open up internal systems such as the CRM or email to remote workers is important, however it must be done securely. An encrypted view of internal systems to remote workers, protected by digital certificate for access control, is often how this is achieved.

Information transfer between offices may also need to be secured to protect against unwanted eavesdropping. Also, application filters may need to be set up to prevent malware such as Internet worms or viruses from reaching private systems and causing disruption. Existing network firewalls often do not have the ability to drill into application traffic to detect complex attacks masquerading as legitimate traffic so application-aware firewalls are required.

Case Study: Market-leading graphics hardware vendor

As one of the dominant market leaders in the graphics hardware industry, the company has a significant requirement to provide customer support. This requirement is mission-critical as good customer support helps to prevent customer churn in a highly-competitive marketplace.

The challenge

The company was looking to safeguard the productivity of their customer support staff by making their internal Remedy support management system resilient to software and hardware failures.

The solution

ZXTM was deployed to manage multiple instances of their Remedy support system, ensuring that their support staff always had access to a working, responsive application service.

The payback

Since ZXTM was deployed, the company has suffered no downtime in their Remedy support system. They are now looking to manage further business-critical systems with ZXTM in order to safeguard productivity in other areas.

Key solution features

Active back-end monitoring - Regularly probes each back-end server to verify that the required services are running.
Multiple protocol and service support - ZXTM can balance multiple TCP and UDP protocols and services simultaneously.
TrafficScript™ - Ensures that each request is directed to the set of machines that provide the requested resource.
Session persistence - Ensures that each e-commerce or other stateful web transaction is consistently directed to same back-end server where required.
Multiple application sessions - Allows each user to maintain multiple application sessions, for example, with a web-mail system, a search system and a purchasing system. The user does not need to log out of each application before using the next.