Increasing internet traffic is a major concern that needs immediate attention. Enterprises are pressurized to handle traffic and ensure that employees do not face application performance delays. At the same time, it is also important to have corporate networks secured. Web Application Firewall (WAF) and Next-Generation Firewall (NGFW) play an important role in securing applications and further keeping our systems safe from malware or other threats. While we all understand that firewalls are needed, it is also a fact that the SSL/TLS encrypted data flow from these firewalls majorly impact internet traffic which in-turn affects the performance of the applications. Organizations should look at solutions to fasten this process which could help increase the traffic and in turn business productivity.
The Tolly Report, a 3rd-party validation firm tested WAF and NGFW across industries and presented a set of results after. According to this report, when SSL processing was offloaded to Array Networks AVX Series it helped the IT administrators to witness an increased performance in Transactions Per Second (TPS), data throughput, and URL response time. During the testing process, WAF saw a 67 times increase in TPS and NGFW saw a 5 times increase in TPS.
The observation made post usage of Array’s AVX Series platform and SSL offload shows the stark reality of why the product is a game-changer. These are the results obtained post the study:
1. Traffic caused due to processing of SSL/TLS dropped dramatically on per second count in virtual WAF transactions, optimizing the URL response time.
2. Similar results were obtained in the virtual NGFW transactions including similar performance hits.
3. AVX Series platform and SSL offload products of Array helped in improving the performance for both WAF and NGFW.
These results point towards a more traffic-free route for internet users in corporate networks. Array’s AVX network functions platform series provides a cost-effective and time-saving solution to ensure performance without sacrificing the agility of virtual appliances.
By Shibu Paul, Vice President – International Sales, Array Networks