2016-06-09

By Sanjai Gangadharan

Big Data is big business for the digital organisation. Digital advertising has changed the face of media, offering highly personalised buying opportunities to consumers throughout virtually every facet of their online experience. Successful digital marketing programs map prospective customers’ behaviour – from their buying habits to their career – with advertisers’ objectives. For digital advertisers to succeed, they must make the most from the power of the cloud, combined with granular analysis of almost unimaginable volumes of data and lightning fast ad delivery.

Digital advertisers use information generated by systems that monitor and analyse tens of millions of simultaneous sessions; top agencies may process trillions of transactions in milliseconds. Complicating matters still further is the fact that this is a very competitive market, in which speed is equal to competitive advantage.

The question therefore is: What needs to be taken into consideration when planning new infrastructure to leverage the business benefits of big data?

Flexible and scalable architecture that maximises throughput

In digital advertising high connection rates, huge number of simultaneous connections, and sessions consisting of very small packet sizes combine to create a unique set of needs. Network throughput with large volume of data can require very high maintenance costs and make the network prone to performance degradation or failure – and traffic is only increasing with the use of mobile devices. Companies must balance the need to quickly harness data and serve relevant advertising, while preventing network slowdowns or downtime, which has the potential to be catastrophic. The solution is in the ability to maintain constant uptime of your network infrastructure and application servers, as you offload these server farms in every way possible to maximise performance. While conventional application networking vendors have been challenged to scale system performance with rapidly escalating network backbone speeds, next-generation Application Delivery Controller (ADC) can efficiently scale performance linearly with increasing CPU or processor density. This results in the high speed and performance that digital advertisers can count on, at a very low overhead.

Ensuring uptime and availability throughout the infrastructure

Digital advertisers require 99.99 percent uptime, so Server Load Balancing (SLB) solutions have to be rock solid, with capacity, scalability and redundancy. A high performance Layer 4/Layer 7 SLB that includes fast TCP, UDP and full HTTP proxy keeps digital advertising servers performing to capacity, and with high availability. The next consideration is that the ADCs themselves not become a single point of failure. Even if it’s possible to run an entire server application on a single server, it may not be a good idea for business continuity and reliability. To promote business continuity, two units can be deployed in active/passive mode with full failover to a backup unit or in an active implementation, with full session synchronisation for completely seamless failover.

Security that scales

Security is another key consideration in big data infrastructure. Today’s growing threat of malicious encrypted traffic, Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) and protocol attacks have the potential to cripple servers and take down applications. ADC with SSL inspection and multi-vector DDoS protection features should ideally be placed between the routers and datacenter resources to detect and stop attacks directed at any datacenter server or application – even if you are already using perimeter firewalls. While dedicated security devices provide in-depth inspection and analysis of network traffic, they are rarely designed to decrypt and re-encrypt SSL traffic at high speeds, rendering most of them ineffective in stopping potential threats. With speed being imperative with big data, offloading complex SSL operations such as processing decryption and encryption in gigabits per second with virtually zero latency becomes critical as volume of data scale up. At the same time, multi-vector DDoS attacks that simultaneously hit the bandwidth, network and application layers can bring down an organisation’s website and/or their online services, ultimately impacting the experience of their customers and causing immediate revenue losses as well as damage brand reputation. A full spectrum DDoS protection that is able to detect and mitigate broad spectrum of attacks, especially when multiple attacks hit the network simultaneously is required for service availability.

To sum it up, digital advertisers’ high connection rates, large numbers of simultaneous connections, and sessions consisting of very small packet sizes, all combine to create a unique set of needs. To optimise infrastructure and accelerate success, the qualities that big data demands: traffic management features to ensure high availability, massive scalability, and protection from even the heaviest DDoS bombardments, should be met. Organisations must adopt ways to quickly harness data and serve relevant advertising, while avoiding any network slowdowns or downtime, which can be catastrophic.

The author is Regional Director, SAARC, A10 Networks

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