Cover-More Travel Insurance relies on ICE Systems and Citrix NetScaler for web application acceleration and load balancing
Customer Name: Cover-More Travel Insurance
Cover-More administer more travel insurance sales, medical assessments and claims than any other provider in Australia. Each year more than 1,000,000 travellers pack a Cover-More Travel Insurance with them when they travel.
Industry: Insurance
Website: http://www.covermore.com.au
Business Requirements: Provide load-balancing and high-availability to Cover-More web applications.
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Solution: 2 x Citrix NetScaler 7000 Appliances in a HA Pair Configuration.
Background: Cover-More Travel Insurance had a primary business requirement to provide load-balancing and fault tolerance to their 32 business websites both internal and external. Cover-More Travel Insurance is a global organisation with operations in Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom and their business critical web applications need to be delivered 24x7 making high availability and automatic failover key to any proposed solution.
Solution: Cover-More Travel Insurance have been utilising the Citrix XenApp platform to deliver applications to their end users for some time and so the Citrix NetScaler platform was not only the most obvious solution as a leading load balancing solution however as ICE Systems ascertained solution requirements with Cover-More there were a number of other business objectives that a Citrix NetScaler solution could also meet providing further benefits and increasing the cost effectiveness of the proposed solution such as;
- Application Acceleration
- Open Scalable Appliance
- End-to-End Web Security
- AppExpert Framework
- Dynamic Workload Response
- Load Balancing
- Compression and Caching
- Web 2.0 Application Optimization
- Maximum Feature Concurrency
Benefits: The Citrix NetScaler platform has provided a rich feature set to Cover-More that has enabled them to receive many business, technical and financial benefits since their successful implementation carried out by ICE Systems professional services over and above their original business drivers of load balancing and high-availability including;
- Acceleration of their web-based applications with up to 5x faster response times creating a better end user experience and increased employee productivity.
- High performance load balancing and Layer 7 content switching which ensures fast, reliable application delivery.
- Reduce rising data centre costs by reducing the number of data centre appliances and servers by offloading
- Application level protection for mission-critical applications ensuring business continuity compliance and productivity.
- Monitors end-user experience for web based applications ensuring maximum productivity and compliance
- Enabled the internal web developers to build stronger applications easily and be more productive
- Remote access utilising secure SSLVPN and granular access policies enabling access from anywhere with different security levels associated to the device you are accessing from
- SSL VPN with a pass-through to Citrix Web Interface offering an additional layer of security.
- Increase security to web sites through inbuilt NetScaler firewall and DoS attack protection.
- Use of URL and content switching to enable efficient redirection of web server requests, now an automatic process removing administrator overhead.
- Providing high availability for key infrastructure services such as DNS.
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