Insurer solves web proxy service availability and performance woes

Jan Blažek, IT Infrastructure Services Manager for Uniqa Group AG—one of the largest insurance groups in Central and Eastern Europe, with 21,000 employees in 17 countries—had a problem to solve. 

The availability and performance of business-critical web proxy services were deteriorating at peak times, leaving employees struggling to access the resources they needed to be productive. Five specific servers in the company’s Czechia and Slovakia datacenters were especially affected. (Get the full case study.)

Modern load balancer to the rescue

Jan understood that a modern load-balancing solution would be a cost-effective way to solve the availability and performance challenges he was facing. And when he turned to his  IT vendor, M-COM s.r.o., the longtime Barracuda partner recommended a free real-world trial of Barracuda Load Balancer ADC—and Jan soon learned about its rich set of capabilities and benefits.

“The deployment went very smoothly thanks to good technical documentation and an intuitive setup of the load balancer environment. Unlike competing products, Barracuda’s are highly intuitive in terms of administration, configuration, and implementation.” — Jan Blažek, IT Infrastructure Services Manager, Uniqa Group AG

It worked!

Once the Barracuda Load Balancer ADC was deployed, Jan very quickly saw major improvements in overall service availability and performance—and in improved productivity for employees.

“With Barracuda we get availability, performance, reliability, and scalability. And there have been no outages of web proxy services since deployment.”— Jan Blažek, IT Infrastructure Services Manager, Uniqa Group AG

Load Balancer ADC achieves this thanks to multiple integrated capabilities, including: 

• SSL Offloading

• L4/L7 Load Balancing

• Global Server Load Balancing

• Dynamic, real-time traffic control and content routing

And there’s a lot more to discover here.

“With the Barracuda deployment, the web proxies can run in a multi-node active-active cluster. Thanks to this, we are able to ensure the availability of web proxy services, even in case of a failure of one of the data centers, without impacting end users.” — Jan Blažek, IT Infrastructure Services Manager, Uniqa Group AG

Bonus: Improved security

Jan and his team were looking for a load balancer to address specific service-delivery issues. But they were pleased to have the additional security capabilities of Barracuda Load Balancer ADC. 

Integrated authentication and authorization features let admins easily apply and enforce granular, resource- and user-specific access and permissions policies.

Comprehensive application security protects against DDoS attacks as well as the OWASP Top 10 and other attack types.

Advanced data loss prevention capabilities scan outgoing traffic to prevent the leakage of sensitive or personal data. 

Get all the details about how Unica Group AG was able to optimize employee productivity, improve employees’ daily experience, and boost overall security. Read the case study here.