As global organizations are embracing flexible workstyles, more users than ever are looking for an enhanced user experience and service resilience when working from home. With BYOD and an evolving mobile workforce distributed across many locations, achieving Secure Access for the whole organization can be a daunting task. With the addition of Pulse vADC to the Pulse Secure Access Suite, the combined solution harnesses the productivity boost needed to maximize an organization’s return on investment (ROI).
Pulse vADC solutions helps you build dynamic applications which are more resilient, more secure, and more responsive at global scale. This article gives a quick three-step guide to how you can download Pulse Virtual Traffic Manager, including how to download the Community Edition of the software, and shows how you can provide Business Continuity using Optimal Gateway Selection to keep your users connected 24x7, and how you can use Pulse vADC load balancing to boost the performance, utilization and security of Pulse Connect Secure appliances.
Complete information on how to get started with Pulse vADC, including installation guides, documentation and more is available on the Get Started pages.
1. Download Pulse vADC
Whether you are clustering Pulse Connect Secure (PCS) appliances together at a single location for performance, or linking multiple locations into a single virtual Secure Access service, Pulse vADC lets you build a layered secure access infrastructure, which can be adapted to meet your own policies to support work-from-home and business continuity policies. See this article for more information about installing and configuring Pulse vADC.
2. Optimal Gateway Selection
Do you need to improve the productivity of mobile users? Pulse vADC makes it easy to implement Optimal Gateway Selection (OGS), so that users are automatically connected to the nearest available application gateway. For example, using Pulse Connect Secure for mobile access and home workers, OGS will check the service availability at each location, and then redirect new sessions to the nearest location, helping your business stay online.
Using DNS-based load-balancing, OGS uses geolocation to determine the nearest available gateway, and return the CNAME of the nearest gateway to redirect new sessions to the optimal location. In the background, OGS keeps track of the service health at each location, to ensure that new sessions are routes appropriately. OGS can even be customised to implement your own business policies, and even check license headroom at each location to ensure that sessions are evenly distributed between nearby locations.
You can use the built-in OGS Wizard for simple configuration, or else you can download the Deployment guide for Optimal Gateway Selection here. Alternatively, Pulse Professional Services can help to create custom policies, such as shielding login screens against credential stuffing, and blocking sessions during times of high workloads.
3. Load-Balancing Remote Access Solutions
How do you optimize the performance and utilization of application gateways? Do you need to balance sessions evenly across platforms of different sizes? Pulse vADC provides even distribution of sessions, even when server appliances and gateways have different sized capacity. For example, using Pulse Connect Secure, Pulse vADC will check the health of each appliance, and balance license usage across each appliance in the cluster, steering traffic towards lightly-loaded appliances, increasing the utilisation of PCS appliances and licenses.
Using smart local load balancing, Pulse vADC can test the health and license usage at local PCS appliances, and route sessions in real time across the cluster, Pulse vADC applies session persistence even when used in a large cluster of appliances, and can even apply service protection methods such as shielding login screens against credential stuffing, and blocking sessions during times of high workloads.
There is a built-in Wizard for load-balancing PCS appliances, or you can download the Deployment Guide for Optimizing PCS. You can also configure custom policies for service protection, or apply weighting to ensure even distribution between different-sized appliances.
