Global enterprises are increasingly leveraging the ubiquitous presence of the network to transact business and enable business-critical functions over the Web. Unfortunately, businesses have quickly discovered that globally deployed Web applications offer their own set of challenges, specifically in application performance and security. Current risk management initiatives have forced enterprises to tighten up their security practices, which have caused IT managers to scrutinize how and to whom secure information is being transmitted.
Last year, Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocol usage within enterprises grew more than 20% over the previous year. Certeon has seen this same growth in secure servers within the businesses it supports and understands the issues these enterprises face around securely accelerating information over the WAN. Certeon’s S-Series™ Application Acceleration Appliance was the first, and remains the only solution on the market, to significantly erase the negative effects of the WAN for both secure and un-secure content, dramatically improve application performance, and ensure end-to-end security.
Enterprises today are increasingly concerned about the security of information, especially in remote-office locations where security is weaker and IT and security staffing are limited. For this reason, enterprises are adopting SSL to ensure privacy between authorized users and corporate servers. In Web-based portals and applications, this takes the form of HTTPS as a transport protocol between clients and servers.
SSL presents a fundamental problem for products that accelerate application or file traffic between remote offices and data center servers. With SSL, all session-layer data is encrypted and is not compressible. Because SSL uses cryptographic keys that vary by time of day and individual user session, no two sessions’ traffic streams look the same; thus differencing of this encrypted data is not possible. In order to overcome these problems, Certeon has implemented a patent-pending Secure Application Technology™ (SAT) within its S-Series appliances.
The SAT achieves the following two key goals:
By achieving these goals, S-Series appliances are able to inspect and accelerate SSL-encrypted traffic over the WAN securely and with no additional management of certificates and private keys. The S-Series also supplements its secure application acceleration with a variety of techniques to securely accelerate encrypted applications and protocols, such as IPsec and SMB, within Virtual Private Networks (VPNs). All stored content and databases on the S-Series are encrypted at both the server and client sites. Because the S-Series appliances keep the origin server’s private security key on the device that is physically co-located with the server, no enterprise data or keys are compromised, even if the remote S-Series is physically compromised.
The S-Series makes use of distributed HTTP/HTTPS offload techniques to ensure that the centralized servers are not overburdened with CPU-intensive SSL processing. The S-Series proxies HTTP and HTTPS connections, performing SSL setup with the client without the numerous WAN round-trips required to set up an SSL connection directly from client to server. The Tolly Group tested the acceleration of HTTP and HTTPS traffic with and without Certeon’s S-Series and saw a 43x improvement in response times for HTTP traffic and a 36x improvement in response times for HTTPS traffic.
Certeon customers have seen significant improvements in their ability to access encrypted and unencrypted files, applications, and Web pages in cases where the WAN performance had previously made these resources virtually unusable. Customers realize greater employee productivity and satisfaction by having better application, file, and Web page access. Certeon accelerates all WAN traffic, optimizes mission critical applications, and is the only company to accelerate WAN traffic securely.
