Addressing the Availability of the ACAEngine
In my experience as a Solutions Engineer, I’ve seen many companies strive for 100% uptime of enterprise applications. However, this is a goal that cannot happen by itself. Careful thought must be put into the underlying architecture that delivers these critical enterprise applications.
Recently, two customers brought up ACA Projects applications, and asked about how Akamai can assist with the delivery of the ACAEngine – specifically to increase availability of the solution.
What is the ACAEngine?
As described on their website: “ACAEngine is an automation system that can control any physical, virtual, electronic or digital environment over a standard IP network. It is a web-based solution that can control thousands of rooms from one web-server. The user interface is a HTML web page that can run on any device.”
How can Akamai can help deliver the ACAEngine?
An ACAEngine solution can be deployed on-premise or in a cloud environment. Traditionally, the best practice is to deploy multiple instances of the ACAEngine to eliminate single-point-of-failure. It is recommended that the delivery platform supports TLS offload and Websockets.
Enterprise Application Access is a next-generation cloud access service that delivers access to internal applications in a hybrid data center environment, without providing users excessive access to the network, hence reducing the impact of malware in the environment.
As shown in the EAA architecture diagram above, the two main elements of the solution are the EAA cloud component and the Enterprise Connector.
When EAA is deployed for delivery of the ACAEngine, the benefit is two-fold. Both Global and Local Availability is achieved, as seen in the diagram below (Please note that the ACA database tier is not shown in the diagram.) The EAA cloud component delivers Global Load-balancing and the Enterprise Connector delivers Local Load-balancing. The solution is extremely quick and easy to configure as no hardware needs to be deployed. Since no complex firewall policies need to be set up, most customers have a working environment in thirty minutes or less.
So far we’ve only looked at availability of the ACAEngine, but EAA can also integrate from an Identity perspective with the objective of delivering a single-sign-on experience for the user.
As businesses start to embrace the cloud perimeter they may ask the question: “How can we protect the internal web applications from advanced threats?” The good news is that EAA integrates with Akamai’s Kona Site Defender, a cloud Web Application Firewall, to keep those internal assets safe.
And last but not least, with many global users far-flung from applications, performance becomes a real concern, but fortunately Akamai can help with route optimization, protocol optimization and content caching to deliver a better user experience.
The time is now to shift to next-gen access with Akamai’s EAA solution. Sign up for a free trial today.
*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from The Akamai Blog authored by Jano van Deventer. Read the original post at: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheAkamaiBlog/~3/u7FBquNM85A/addressing-the-availability-of-the-acaengine.html
