The word that drives technology is innovation. A discovery made today, is surpassed by another and the chain continues. Similar is the case of secure remote access that is becoming the order of the day as far as the professional world goes. Factors such as reliable and fast internet connection allow the service providers to deliver remote access solutions easily.

1. Functions of Application Delivery Controller
To explain in simple terms, an application delivery controller (ADC) is network equipment in a data center.
This equipment enables in carrying out daily tasks performed by websites in an attempt to eliminate the
load out of the web servers. It is placed between the router/firewall and web farm. Some technical
professionals call a ADC as a new age load balancer as they offer innovative features, such as advanced
routing strategies, content manipulation, organized sever health controlling and many others. Few other
features of the ADC’s are as follows:-
1. Compression
2. Cache
3. Connection multiplexing
4. Application layer security
5. SSL offload
6. Content switching combined with fundamental server load balancing
Gartner in a research highlighted that recently, there has been a change in the demand from simple
server load balancing equipments to the more innovative solutions, accompanied by maximized
functionality, a rich feature set, and an increased focus on effective application delivery networking. The
reason for this change is the need to enhance reliability, performance, and the manageability of the
application delivery platforms. As per Gartner “The era of load balancing is long past, and organizations
will be better served to focus their attention on improving the delivery of applications.”
Service providers of innovative application delivery controllers today help you to make your applications
secure, accessible and fast with their product offerings. The new age ADC’s are purpose – built to
leverage state-of-the-art multi-core processing, 10 Gigabit Ethernet connectivity, energy efficient
constituents and hardware acceleration modules. ADC appliances offer industry leading price-
performance, functionality, and economies-of-scale from small to global service provider. Other features
include the following:-
1. Advanced Traffic Management – Refers to Layer 2 – 7 server load balancing, global server load
balancing, link load balancing, content switching and application routing.
2. Application & Data Center Acceleration – Refers to TCP connection multiplexing, SSL
Acceleration, high-speed HTTP processing, adaptive compression, dynamic caching
3. Network Application & Data Security – Refers to hardened OS and incorporates packet inspection
firewall

2. ADC’s are engineered to thrive in the new age data center and they support advanced features that are
important for enterprise application delivery, visualization, delivery of emerging IP data services and cloud
service delivery.
Also read on - Remote Desktop, Load Balancer