We send all of our production web traffic through our A10. We have a major website, which is our school's website. On the website, there are many different applications and sites, so being able to balance that between our on-premise resources as well as our public cloud with AWS is a huge feature. The solution's security features are excellent. It actively helped us mitigate a DDoS attack in October of 2018. You can do SSL offloading. You can use the A10 to terminate your SSL connectivity, meaning that you can install all your public certificates on the A10 box itself. It just has a wealth of security features. Being a public entity and having a public website, which is highly visible with a lot of traffic, we are a target for DDoS. Within the last year, we have had a couple of DDoS attacks which could have affected our web traffic and taken down certain parts of our website. This did not happen because the A10 was able to mitigate the attacks using rate limiting that can be configured for DDoS mitigation on the box. The single pane of glass traffic management is a nice feature. It allows us to be able to delegate access to different groups of people. This means that I can provide a front line support (a help desk) a certain level of access to be able to look at things, a second level support a little more access, and then engineers can have full access. It is very useful to have a simple dashboard where you can login and look into what your traffic patterns are, then look and see what times of day you're experiencing the heaviest traffic. You can quickly identify if you are possibly having a security issue or security breach. It makes it very easy to use the box. Troubleshooting traffic flows is fairly easy on the box, as you can do packet captures or tcpdumps directly on the A10 itself. So, you can do a trace and see what the A10 is doing with certain traffic. E.g., if I have a client somewhere out in the world who is coming into my A10 box and reporting some weird behavior, or saying, "Hey, I can't get to this application on your website," or "I'm getting blocked for this reason. I can't look at the A10 and figure it out." I could then go into the traffic flows, run a tcpdump, and do a traffic capture. At this point, I can immediately identify where the traffic is coming from and why it is not getting through the box. I have a very technical background and was a network engineer for many years before I became a manager. For me, it is a very easy to use product. The web GUI makes it very easy to configure. The CLI is not very difficult to use, along with the syntax. The command line is very easy to learn.
