Suppose you decided to sell your house. You would try to make it as attractive as possible to a potential buyer-maybe adding a coat of paint outside, then perhaps sprucing up the landscaping. All this in hopes of maximizing the property's "street appeal."
Should a prospective buyer, initially attracted by the outward attractiveness, suddenly discover that the foundation is cracked and unstable, you lose the sale.
Similarly, banking enterprises may have the most attractive services on the best-looking Web sites in the world. But it means nothing if the infrastructure can't support the many companies, organizations, and customers who wish to do business on-line.
Why is this even important? Consider that a financial institution Web site is not only a means to display and sell products and services but also an opportunity to build brand equity.
Every consumer in the world may know that your bank offers various on- line services. A lot of promotional dollars may have been spent making this fact known. Yet if your site is difficult to enter, or sends back error messages, you have lost an opportunity to build brand equity, to differentiate your bank through a positive Web experience.
Control over the infrastructure is therefore needed. It comes through four main elements: the server, the network, applications and content, and network management.
To achieve control of servers and to ensure that customers can gain proper access to your sites, it is imperative to deploy effective "high availability" and "load-balancing" appliances. High availability means reliability. Think of load balancing as air-traffic control. It redirects traffic among servers, balancing the load on each, so that no single server becomes bogged down.
Control of servers also means security. The proper Internet traffic management has built-in security features to protect against hackers and other threats.
As a bank extends its services to geographically dispersed areas worldwide, the Web operation may have a server in Tokyo, one in New York, another in London. When a user in Seattle decides to log on, control of the network implies the Internet traffic management appliance will choose the fastest server available at that time, then deliver the data.
Application and content control is based on a simple law: Increases in Web content and applications are directly related to the increased difficulty of keeping Internet data sites current. Therefore, an Internet traffic management appliance or "content manager" is required for distribution and synchronization of content to geographically distributed servers. This can yield a simple, efficient, and foolproof way to maintain dynamic Web content over a large set of servers and distributed sites.
As for network management, let's return to our house-selling analogy. If only the seller had known that the foundation was in poor condition, he could have taken corrective action. This is the theory behind network management. The proper tools here can help managers monitor Internet traffic, see where potential problems exist, then fix them before disaster strikes.
In today's business environment, revenue, profitability, and brand equity all depend on being able to control Web site availability and performance. A pretty Internet site is no longer enough. For it to be seen and used, customers must be able to get there in the first place, and faster than ever before. The key to ensuring that this occurs is to build the strongest, most dynamic, and most secure foundation possible.
