Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) - Tech Leaders 2023

Content Editor at PeerSpot

Published:Oct 15, 2023

Top 3 Tech Leaders in Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) 2023

Discover the leading technology solutions in Application Delivery Controllers with PeerSpot's annual Tech Leaders awards. The awards are based on comprehensive user reviews and other criteria as outlined below, offering you a window into the top products in this category and a way to explore and compare outstanding products. Join us as we unveil the Peerspot 2023 Tech Leader award winners, helping you stay informed about the best-in-class solutions available.

Application Delivery Controllers are critical components in delivering applications. They optimize the delivery of applications ensuring availability, security, and performance. ADCs act as intermediaries between clients and servers, load balancing traffic across multiple servers, accelerating content delivery, and providing features such as SSL encryption, traffic compression, and application security. These devices help manage the complex traffic patterns and demands of web applications to provide a smooth user experience while enhancing the overall security and performance of applications in enterprise environments.

The Award Winners

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) helps deliver applications in a reliable, secure, and optimized way. Its wide range of features include load balancing to provide efficient distribution of network traffic across servers, and SSL/TLS that decrypts and encrypts traffic to improve performance and reduce application server workload. The solution also offers application security such as a web application firewall and intrusion detection/prevention to protect applications from attack. In addition, it offers a variety of features to control and manage traffic, such as traffic shaping, access control, and content caching.

"BIG-IP LTM's most valuable feature is that it allows you to seamlessly add more servers without impacting your application's configuration." - Kok KeongLow, Head of Presales, Tech Vendor

"The most valuable features are DNS, APM, and ASM. Additionally, it is easy to use and you have a lot of flexibility to use the solution within a network." - reviewer1010148, Security Consultant, Tech Services Company

"It is nicely designed and orchestrated. The solution has all the features that are necessary for medium to large-sized enterprises would need to ensure their application are available throughout the globe." - Rajnish Niraj , Founder, Tech Services Company

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway optimizes and secures web traffic in Azure environments. It offers SSL termination, load balancing, and web application firewall (WAF) capabilities, making it a compelling choice for organizations hosting web applications on Azure. It operates at OSI layer 7, which means that it can make routing decisions based on the HTTP request, such as the URI path or host headers. This allows for more granular traffic management and routing than traditional load balancers, which operate at the transport layer (OSI layer 4). Microsoft Azure Application Gateway helps enhance application performance, provides security against web threats and a reliable and secure application delivery solution tailored to the Azure ecosystem.

"Azure Application Gateway's most valuable feature is ease of use. The configuration is straightforward. It isn't difficult to adjust the size of your instances in the settings… You can also set rules and policies with minimal time and effort." Carlos James, Cybersecurity Administrator, Consultancy

"The solution has built-in rules that reduce alerts and are easy to configure. You can enable any missing rules or create custom rules if needed." - Sami, Consultant, Retailer

"The security feature in all the layers of the application is the most valuable." - Daniel Gualteros, Senior DevOps Engineer, Healthcare Company

Citrix NetScaler

Citrix NetScaler is a versatile Application Delivery Controller (ADC) that optimizes the performance, security, and availability of applications and services. It offers load balancing, content switching, application firewall, and SSL offloading features, making it a robust choice for managing and securing application traffic. Citrix NetScaler also provides content caching, application acceleration, and web application firewall (WAF) protection. It helps scale applications by distributing traffic across multiple application servers to improve the availability and reliability of applications during peak traffic periods.

"The solution is quite stable and the performance is good. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable. The stability is good." - PradeepKumar11, IT Manager, Manufacturing Company

"The solution's most valuable features are low latency, reverse proxy, content switching, and access gateway." - Aaron Finkelberg, HCI & Citrix Senior Systems Engineer, Teleconsys

"What I found most valuable from Citrix ADC were the Content Switching and Integrated Caching features which were the things we commonly installed for our customers." - Abel Camarillo, Gerente Divisional, Tech Services Company

How Award Winners Are Determined

PeerSpot Tech Leaders Awards recognize the top products in a category based on real users' in-depth reviews, which are verified for authenticity. The ranking criteria include the number of reviews, views, and comparisons of each product, as well as the overall reviewer rating and the word count per review. The winning products are acknowledged as top performers within their category.

Summary

The Tech Leaders award is PeerSpot's most prestigious. Recipients have earned the esteem of industry professionals who use and review the products and compare them with their competition. Application Delivery Controllers optimize application performance, enhance security, and ensure availability, and the award winners, F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM), Microsoft Azure Application Gateway, and Citrix NetScaler have merited peer recognition as Tech Leaders in this category.

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Related Questions

Netanya Carmi

Content Manager at PeerSpot (formerly IT Central Station)

May 25, 2022

Why do I need an ADC solution?

See 1 answer

Janet Staver

Tech Blogger

May 25, 2022

The main reason organizations opt to implement an ADC solution is because they provide load balancing, SSL termination, application acceleration, and security, along with seamless access to applications at peak times. ADC solutions are also becoming necessary because, as computing moves to the cloud, they can perform tasks that have been traditionally performed by custom-built hardware. ADCs also offer added functionality and flexibility for application deployment. Not only that, but they allow organizations to quickly and securely scale up their application services based on demand in the cloud. Modern software ADCs also enable organizations to consolidate network-based services. Critical capabilities for ADCs include SSL/TLS offload, web application firewalls, caching, intrusion detection, compression, and microservices for container applications. With these capabilities, faster delivery times become possible and you also gain greater scalability. Another reason why it is good to have an ADC solution is because it helps optimize end-user performance and application deployment. ADC solutions assist in application acceleration and provide security for applications. What’s more is they help improve acceleration of business applications by using techniques like application classification, compression, and reverse caching. Another advantage is that ADCs determine security needs as the single point of control for multiple servers. In addition, ADCs handle distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks and secure web applications against common threats using web application firewalls (WAFs), and can also provide SSL offloading and application autoscaling. If your organization utilizes large-scale content delivery networks (CDNs), it is also important to have an ADC solution in place so you can provide fast web application software services and ensure that high-traffic websites are always on, secure, and available to their users. While ADCs are important and useful for all enterprises, it is even more important for companies that have hundreds of web servers to handle thousands of simultaneous customer requests, which is the case for retail, financial services, ecommerce, and healthcare industries. Load-balancing provided by ADCs ensures their applications can run smoothly even when there are spikes in traffic. Also important is that ADCs play an important role in network security. In addition to being a first line of defense against DDoS attacks, they can terminate SSL tunneling attacks. To guard DNS servers, some ADCs even offer a DNS application firewall to stop a sudden influx of DNS traffic to a server. Sometimes ADCs also offer data loss protection, where data is inspected to determine whether it meets company policies and is flagged or blocked if it is malicious or a violation of those policies. Among its other benefits, ADC solutions can be installed as hardware or virtualized software, giving enterprises additional flexibility in how they are deployed. Furthermore, by efficiently managing internal data traffic, they can also support the use of dedicated microservices within enterprise environments. ADCs give your organization an opportunity for improved performance, along with offering many more useful features. Overall, it is easy to see why implementing an ADC solution is important for your organization, especially given all its benefits and advantages, and how it can drastically impact your organization’s success.

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Netanya Carmi

Content Manager at PeerSpot (formerly IT Central Station)

May 16, 2022

What is the best ADC solution?

See 1 answer

Janet Staver

Tech Blogger

May 16, 2022

The best ADC solution, in my opinion, comes down to two top choices: Kemp LoadMaster is a great option, and a close second is F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM). For starters, Kemp LoadMaster has superb load balancing and support, and its performance is exceptional. The product is very easy to set up. All you have to do is build the virtual machine, download the image from KEMP, and that’s all that’s involved. You set the IP for the VM and everything is then done through the web interface. The support pages have detailed information about everything you need to do. Automated backups can also be set up with the load master itself. Besides its ease of deployment, the solution offers a variety of configuration options. Not only that, but support is quick, on-point, and nothing short of 10 stars. With the use of the templates and website, it's extremely easy to manage and administrate. In addition, I found that having countless templates is really very practical and simplifies things tremendously. Moreover, Kemp LoadMaster is very stable and has moderate CPU usage. And when upgrades are necessary, the process is painless. Lastly, for what you get, the price is definitely worth it. In terms of drawbacks, I think the UI could benefit from a little overhaul to make it look a little cleaner on the eye and to make things slightly easier to find. Regarding F5 BIG-IP LTM, its set of features is exhaustive, in the best possible way. Here are some of the ones I like most: Application traffic management: F5 BIG-IP LTM includes static and dynamic load balancing to eliminate single points of failure. Application proxies give you protocol awareness to control traffic for your most important applications. BIG-IP LTM also tracks the dynamic performance levels of servers in a group, ensuring that your applications are not just always on, but also are easier to scale and manage. Application delivery optimization: F5 BIG-IP LTM can dramatically scale, improving page load times and the user experience. Additionally, it makes real-time protocol and traffic-management decisions based on application and server conditions, enables rules customization and programmability, and TCP and content offloading. Application visibility and monitoring: F5 BIG-IP LTM helps monitor exactly how your application is performing for real users based on application response times, network conditions, and user context. One of the solution’s biggest advantages is that you can scale applications rapidly and reliably. From the way it is designed, it helps ensure that your customers as well as your users have access to the applications they need, whenever they need them. Another good thing about the solution is that it protects the apps that run your business by using industry-leading SSL performance and visibility. Furthermore, F5 BIG-IP LTM provides operational consistency and helps your organization comply with business needs across physical, virtual, and cloud environments. Overall, both solutions are fantastic, each offering unique features and many benefits.

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