1. What were the problems Dainik Bhaskar was facing?
In today’s fast paced world, without digitization, businesses lose out to competition or become irrelevant to the millennial generation. Like most businesses, media houses have also realized the importance of Digitization. Digital channels are imperative for firms to engage with their key stake holder to maintain relevance.
Dainik Bhaskar, India’s largest media conglomerate hosts around 15 websites and several sub domains for its readers across the region. Being the world’s number one Hindi portal it receives almost 24 million unique visitors. Content on the news portal includes audios and videos along with texts and graphics making the platform interactive for their new age readers.
However, whenever significant announcements were made, it was observed that network traffic would spike up between 30%-70% across Dainik Bhaskar’s various news delivery platforms and the performance of the websites would be compromised. Slow application performance during spiked traffic, network congestion and lag caused by multiple users accessing data at the same time were some of the problems faced by the media house. Their existing integrated firewall and load balancer had limited features and scalability and hence could not negate these critical issues.
2. Why has Dainik Bhaskar chosen A10 Networks as a solution provider / OEM?
The media conglomerate’s concern of removing application bottle necks in minimal time was facilitated easily by A10 Networks. A10 Application Delivery controller is built upon A10’s Advanced Core Operating System (ACOS®) platform which delivers high-performance options for dedicated, hosted or cloud data centers.
Some of the reasons why A10 was chosen as the preferred partner are:
- A10 is a technology leader in application networking for the past decade
- A10’s operationally superior ACOS platform help customers’ applications to be highly available, accelerated, and secure irrespective of the size
- A10’s all-inclusive licensing allows for multiple features in one product, ranging from application acceleration to protecting the business from malicious threats that can steal data or disrupt access taking down the network.
3. What was the solution A10 has implemented in Dainik Bhaskar’s organization and how was the state before the implementation?
A10’s ADC products aided Dainik Bhaskar’s netwoks to be easily accessible, accelerated and secure. A10 products build upon the ACOS® platform provides high-performance options for cloud data centers.
- Highly available applications and data centers, advanced server load balancing and Global Server Load Balancing (GSLB) helped maximize uptime by detecting local and remote outages.
- The combination of Software Defined Networks (SDNs), overlay networking (VXLAN and NVGRE), cloud orchestration systems (OpenStack, Microsoft SCVMM and more) and A10 ADC allowed service chaining and traffic insertion.
- Fast deployment, proven application configuration and provisioning rapidly enabled business-critical applications with predefined smart templates for popular applications from Microsoft, Oracle and many more, result in full deployment in hours, not days or weeks.
- A10 ADC provided complete management control with custom scripting for compatibility with home-grown management operations or integration into third-party management systems.
- The Web Application Firewall (WAF) guarded web servers against the critical Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP).
- A10’s ADC products also allowed the network to be ready with countermeasures against threats
- Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) protection features provided protection against high volume attacks on application servers.
4. Please state the benefits that Dainik Bhaskar has derived, post implementation of the solution.
The prime benefit Dainik Bhaskar had was in terms of CAPEX. They could save the costs with lower power consumption. The investment was both scalable and future proof.
With A10’s solution
- There was a 50-60% increase in application and network response
- It facilitated in saving time
- It helped in enabling uninterrupted service along with improved performance
- The same physical server could be used across different applications and environments
- Network jams were improved and all websites could maintain optimal performance during traffic spikes
- The A10 ADC performs periodic health checks and alerts the network administrator whenever a server goes down
