Microsoft 22809176, R1802907, P7204473, R1802926, C9C00500 Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery

F5 APPLICATION READY NETWORK GUIDE: MICROSOFT WINDOWS SERVER 2008

Benefits and F5 Value

transactions, and partners, contractors, and suppliers all clamoring for access to different internal applications, organizations are struggling with access control and enforcement issues.

F5 provides a complete approach to security enforcement and providing access control for Windows Server 2008, regardless of end user, client type, application, access network, or network resources.

In the past, remote access was provided by IPsec VPN solutions — a complicated deployment which required software installation and maintenance on every client, and was difficult to enforce and control. IPSec has shown it is unable to keep up with the growing demands of remote access required by today’s enterprise organizations. F5’s remote access solution enables you to easily grant remote access to anyone from any device, while ensuring this access is carefully controlled and restricted on a granular basis.

With F5, access to Windows Server 2008 resources can be easily controlled on an extremely granular level. For example, employees can be granted full access to internal resources, while a trusted partner group can be restricted to a specific subset of applications, and a contractor group could be locked down to a specific application or port. F5 centralizes this access control, and makes configuring and enforcing this type of control simple. F5 can even gather device information (like IP address or time of day) and determine if a resource should be offered. The F5 solution also includes control for any access network and any device, with no need to deploy multiple access control solutions for remote users, wireless LANs, and the LAN.

F5 supports virtual administration domains, allowing a single F5 device to be managed by multiple application teams without interference. Every user can be assigned to specific administrative domains which define which objects are visible to that user. Multiple levels of access are also definable for each user, with basic read-only users who can log on to the devices to monitor status of specific objects and traffic quantities to full administrative users capable of making configuration changes to every object on the device. This increases productivity by reducing the time spent in meetings, tracking

down appropriate administrative personnel, and improves the ability of application administrations to manage applications when it’s necessary. F5 helps streamline the business process and improve the productivity and efficiency of operational personnel.

Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery

Disaster recovery and business continuity are vital to the success of an organization. Merely having a solid security platform cannot protect against unexpected events and disasters that create a wide range of obstacles, ranging from knocking out the power to wiping out entire data centers. These disruptive events not only cost organizations thousands or even millions of dollars, but can bring about legal ramifications with industry and government rules concerning data protection and disaster recovery. With the amount of irreplaceable, business critical information stored on the network and in applications like those found in Windows Server 2008, having an effective disaster recovery plan is essential.

F5 products are uniquely positioned to help organizations mitigate disasters and other disruptive events. F5 is the only vendor

to virtualize data centers, VPN access, optimization, and traffic in an integrated fashion — ensuring the Windows Server 2008 devices and applications are always available.

F5 provides the industry’s most comprehensive solution for site failover and business continuity. From performing comprehensive site application availability checks, to defining the conditions for dynamically and transparently shifting all traffic to a backup data center, failing over

an entire site, or controlling only the affected applications, F5 has the complete solution.

When one of these disruptive events does happen, even something as simple as a snow storm that prevents most employees from making it to the office, F5 provides extremely secure remote access to the network and Windows Server 2008 deployment, ensuring that even though the physical office might be unavailable, as long as a single data center

is still up, business can continue. F5 remote access devices support Microsoft Vista and access to Windows Server 2008 devices, and even provide secure application access from Windows Mobile® 5/6 PocketPC and Smartphones.

One scenario often neglected in a disaster recovery plan is when the event doesn’t happen to your organization, but to your ISP. While many organizations do have multiple links, they have to contend with complicated BGP configurations. F5 simplifies multi-homed deployments so you no longer need ISP cooperation, designated IP address blocks, ASNs, or reliance on complex BGP configurations to protect your network from ISP failures. With F5 technology, an organization also has the choice of aggregating multiple small connections together rather than having to invest in a single high bandwidth connection. This frees businesses to expand their service

as they grow. F5 seamlessly monitors availability and performance of multiple WAN ISP connections to intelligently manage bi-directional traffic flows to a site, providing fault tolerant and optimized Internet access. F5 devices detect errors across an entire link to provide end-to-end, reliable WAN connectivity. F5 monitors the health and availability of each connection, detecting outages to a link or ISP. In the event of a failure, traffic is dynamically directed across other available links so users stay connected.

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