SOLUTION BRIEF

Secure Application Delivery with FortiADC

Executive Summary
In recent years, the landscape of application delivery has undergone significant
transformations influenced by evolving technology trends and the increasing
adoption of cloud computing. Many organizations are integrating on-premises
data centers with public cloud environments to optimize application performance,
enhance scalability, and improve overall business agility. FortiADC is an
application delivery controller (ADC) with advanced security features that help
ensure application security, availability, and optimization. Over the past three years,
nearly 40% of organizations
Application Delivery Trends and Challenges have suffered a major outage
caused by human error.1
Today, many organizations have adopted hybrid and multi-cloud architectures.
They use a mix of on-premises data centers and public cloud services to maximize
flexibility, scalability, and redundancy. This approach facilitates workload mobility
and strategic resource allocation based on specific business requirements, but it
has introduced new challenges as well.

Application development life-cycle and deployment architectures have changed. The shift toward microservices and
containerization, such as Docker and Kubernetes, has enhanced agility, enabling the development, deployment, and scaling
of applications in a more modular and efficient manner in data centers and across multiple cloud environments.

The rise of edge computing has influenced how applications are delivered. By processing data closer to the source, edge
computing reduces latency and enhances real-time capabilities. Applications that require low latency, such as the Internet of
Things (IoT) and AI-driven applications, particularly benefit from edge computing.

The need for organizations to bridge the gap between on-premises data centers and public cloud platforms introduces
integration complexity issues. Ensuring seamless communication, data consistency, and secure connections between these
environments requires robust solutions and careful planning.

Security also becomes more complex as applications span data centers and public clouds. Organizations must implement
comprehensive security measures to protect data in transit and at rest, ensure identity and access management, and address
compliance requirements across diverse environments.

Achieving optimal performance and scalability is a persistent challenge. Organizations must dynamically scale resources to meet
fluctuating demand, which requires effective load balancing, resource provisioning, and monitoring across both on-premises and
cloud environments.

To navigate these trends and challenges, organizations increasingly turn to solutions such as ADCs, DevOps practices, and
comprehensive management platforms to streamline operations, enhance security, and ensure seamless application delivery
across diverse infrastructures.

FortiADC Key Features and Benefits

FortiADC is a powerful ADC solution that provides intelligent traffic distribution, session persistence, and application
acceleration capabilities to optimize application performance, availability, and security. It also provides load balancing and
web security for applications within a single data center or for multiple applications for millions of users around the globe.
FortiADC delivers availability, performance, and security with a single, all-inclusive license.

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Secure Application Delivery with FortiADC SOLUTION BRIEF

Offering Layer 4 through 7 load-balancing capabilities, FortiADC ensures

application availability and the distribution of traffic across multiple servers. The
Lua scripting language support allows for advanced customization and control
over traffic management so that organizations can tailor the load-balancing
behavior to their specific requirements.

FortiADC provides robust application security features, including a web application

firewall that safeguards against common vulnerabilities and attacks. It also offers
protection against distributed denial-of-service attacks, leveraging advanced FortiADC provides extensive
threat intelligence and mitigation techniques. Additional FortiADC security integration through APIs
features include antivirus scanning and intrusion prevention system capabilities to and plugins to third-party
provide comprehensive application protection. solutions, including Amazon
Web Services, Microsoft
Using application acceleration technologies such as HTTP/2 and SSL/TLS
Azure, Kubernetes, OpenShift
offloading, FortiADC improves application performance and reduces end-user Container Platform, and SAP.
latency. By offloading SSL/TLS processing from back-end servers, FortiADC
reduces the computational overhead on those servers, enhancing their overall
performance.

FortiADC provides robust authentication mechanisms to ensure secure access to applications. It supports various
authentication methods, including LDAP, RADIUS, and SAML, so organizations can enforce user authentication before
granting access.

The global load-balancing capabilities in FortiADC enable organizations to distribute traffic across multiple data centers or
geographical locations. Load balancing ensures optimal performance and availability of applications worldwide, even in a data
center or network failure.

Deploying FortiADC as Part of the Fortinet Security Fabric

As a core component of the Fortinet Security Fabric, FortiADC enhances the visibility and control of east-west traffic.
It leverages shared threat intelligence from FortiGuard Labs across Security Fabric solutions, including FortiGate Next-
Generation Firewall (NGFW), FortiWeb, FortiAnalyzer, FortiSIEM, and FortiAuthenticator. This Security Fabric integration
applies comprehensive detection and prevention across the full attack surface from the network to applications.

Corrective measures for security issues or application performance can be automated, and detailed analytics provide a
unified view across all security layers. For example, FortiADC integrates with FortiGate NGFWs for unified security policies,
FortiAnalyzer for analytics, and FortiManager for centralized orchestration across the Security Fabric.

FortiADC supports standard deployment requirements and is available in multiple form factors:
n Hardware appliances: FortiADC is available as physical appliances with different throughput and scalability options,
ranging from 3Gbps to 250Gbps. FortiADC appliances are suitable for organizations that require high-performance ADC
solutions for their on-premises infrastructures.
n Virtual appliances: FortiADC can be deployed as virtual machines in virtualized environments, which offers flexibility,
scalability, and cost-effectiveness. This option is ideal for organizations with virtualized or cloud-based infrastructures
and is supported via Fortinet FortiFlex on-demand licensing and provisioning for security solutions and services for all
environments.
n Cloud service: FortiADC is also available as a cloud-based service so that organizations can leverage ADC capabilities
without needing hardware or software deployment. This option provides agility, scalability, and ease of management for
cloud-native applications. It is also supported via FortiFlex.

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Secure Application Delivery with FortiADC SOLUTION BRIEF

Optimize Performance, Availability, and Security

FortiADC is a feature-rich ADC solution that optimizes application performance, availability, and security. With its advanced
traffic distribution, session persistence, and application acceleration capabilities, FortiADC helps organizations reliably deliver
applications to their users. Whether deployed as a hardware appliance, virtual machine, or cloud-based service, FortiADC
offers a flexible and scalable solution for modern application delivery requirements. Learn more about FortiADC or contact the
Fortinet sales team for more information.

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Uptime Intelligence, Annual outages analysis 2023 The causes and impacts of IT and data center outages, March 2023.

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Copyright © 2023 Fortinet, Inc. All rights reserved. Fortinet®, FortiGate®, FortiCare® and FortiGuard®, and certain other marks are registered trademarks of Fortinet, Inc., and other Fortinet names herein may also be registered and/or common law trademarks of Fortinet. All other product
or company names may be trademarks of their respective owners. Performance and other metrics contained herein were attained in internal lab tests under ideal conditions, and actual performance and other results may vary. Network variables, different network environments and other
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revise this publication without notice, and the most current version of the publication shall be applicable.

December 23, 2023 10:02 PM

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