Why do you need to load balance your mission-critical financial applications?

If you need to guarantee the performance and reliability of your financial applications but aren't sure if you need a load balancer to do this, then this blog is for you. Spoiler alert - the answer is 'yes', and here's why...

Gaining and retaining customer trust

In the world of finance, the cost of compromised security is measured in more than money. Trust is the most valuable currency, and reputation is everything. Your customers rely on you to provide iron-clad protection and uninterrupted uptime for the applications they need. This is the key role of a load balancer.

Guaranteed uptime

A load balancer is a front-end server that takes incoming requests and forwards them to a multitude of back-end servers. This improves the performance of the application by reducing the burden on a particular server or directing it elsewhere when demand surges or there's a critical system failure. For this reason, load balancers are most commonly deployed in active-passive pairs to ensure traffic can then be redirected to the redundant device.

Why does that matter you might ask? Well, server fairy godmother = no impact on the end-user when something fails. Now you might not care if Facebook goes down, but you certainly would care if one of your customers was trying to buy a house and your banking app crashed halfway through the transfer!

An extra layer of security

Loadbalancer.org appliances come complete with an additional layer of security. Our WAF (web application firewall) protects web-based applications from common vulnerabilities by applying a set of rules to HTTP traffic and blocking actions it regards as suspicious. And, unlike other vendors, we care enough to include a WAF as standard, because we want it to be there if our customers ever need it.

Why should you load balance your financial applications?

As we've established, if you want to keep your critical applications secure and up and running 24/7, then you need a load balancer. An example of a load balancer use case may be helpful here. Let's take the financial application Fiserv DNA.

Fiserv provides financial solutions from account processing to mobile banking and beyond. They approached Loadbalancer.org to help them load balance one of their flagship products, Fiserv DNA, to ensure their application would be able to meet growing customer demand. Fiserv’s need to ensure customers got the user experience they wanted, combined with the need for security and reliability, meant a load balancer was essential.

There was also a desire from Fiserv’s clients to supplement their core DNA solution with a load balancer to improve the availability and scalability of the platform, meaning Fiserv was able to assure financial institutions of its ability to meet customer demand.

Full details of the solution implemented can be found in this case study: Load balancing Fiserv to improve uptime in business-critical financial applications.

Which load balancing provider should I use?

Load balancers are different! If you want bells-and-whistles, gold-plated, Rubix's cube-level functionality, then our products may not be for you. And that's ok!

But if you like the sound of any of the below, get in touch:

1. Clever not complex: Our simple management interface allows our load balancers to simply work, so you don't need to pay an expensive external 'expert' to maintain them!
2. Open Source: Our suite of load balancer appliances and virtualized load balancer solutions are all based on well-established open source technologies.
3. Enhanced security: Our load balancers have an OWASP top 10 compliant Web Application Firewall (WAF), adding an additional layer of security.
4. Seamless migration: All our products have the same interface and features available across all platforms. And our Freedom License means you can migrate across them seamlessly, at no extra cost.
5. Cost optimization: We offer a mix of licensing models, from site licenses to monthly subscriptions, with no vendor lock-in for ultimate flexibility.
6. Consultative and tierless support: Our tierless support means you can resolve any issues quickly and effectively, so you can get back to what matters.
7. Expertise in load balancing finance applications: Our dedicated finance solutions mean you can leverage our financial expertise.
8. Expertise in load balancing storage: Our dedicated storage team has 20+ years of experience delivering highly available, secure, and scalable storage solutions.