Every year, the Network Computing Awards hone in on technologies and vendors that have really made a difference over the past year and continue to play an important role in the IT ecosystem. The categories include network and data center optimization, cloud telephony and networking, storage, SD-WAN, network management, security, and education and training.
But one category in particular stands out in this extraordinary year: “IT Optimisation.” And Kemp is honored to receive the Product of the Year award for IT optimisation with the LoadMaster X15 load balancer.
Beyond the excitement Kemp selfishly has for winning this award, you should look a level deeper at the significance the load balancer or application delivery controller (ADC) has for being recognized in such a significant category. It’s not only symbolic of how our networks and the use of IT resources have evolved throughout the Coronavirus, but indicative of the new challenges IT professionals currently face in a year none of us will forget.
For business with some or all employees working remote indefinitely, network and application usage will increase as we practice “social distancing.” As more business is conducted over the internet, additional load is placed on the IT infrastructure and application servers. The challenge is keeping an eye on the new stress to corporate-hosted workloads and VPN services, as well as any private-cloud infrastructure and applications.
For education environments, it means optimizing applications like Moodle or Blackboard, and increasing the efficiency of online student registration and content access. It means improving communications between faculty, staff, and students with the capacity to accommodate peak loads, fast end-user response time, and a method to easily secure information and applications.
For e-commerce, the challenge is keeping up with increased and un-forecasted demand. You might ask yourself, can my online storefront handle tens-of-thousands or millions of visitors in a day, and better yet, will the end-user application experience be one that brings them back to my brand?
The reality is we depend on our IT infrastructure and business applications despite any circumstances, and the load balancer is the instrumental piece of infrastructure proven to deliver the always-on service availability, resiliency, and security that your IT organization, and your business, needs to succeed.
What is a load balancer? Put simply, it is deployed as software, hardware, or as cloud instance to optimize the performance and availability of servers that deliver important content to end-users. It acts as a “traffic cop” to deliver requests to the best network servers as quickly and efficiently as possible, continually checking performance and security of the workload.
Kemp is honored to have its load balancer decorated with the Network Computing “IT Optimisation Product of the Year” award. It validates our long-standing commitment to product excellence and maintaining one of the highest customer satisfaction rates in our industry.
Congratulations to all the other award winners, including Silver Peak, Dell EMC, ExaGrid, StorageCraft, Thousand Eyes, 8×8, Natterbox, NetAlly, Prism DCS, Allied Telesis, Nectar Services Corp., Altaro, Proficio, webCRM, Rohde & Schwarz, Knowbe4, Pulse Secure, ZPE Systems, Zyxel, e-bate, Axial, and Andrew Stevens.