CUSTOMER SUCCESS STORY

COSENTRY

Cosentry Keeps Customers’ Critical Apps Up and Running with New ADC Solution

"As we evaluated Pulse Secure Virtual Traffic Manager, it became clear that the easy-to-use interface would greatly improve our team’s ability to support customers, and testing proved that the reliability was unparalleled—we couldn’t break it."

Why was Pulse Secure chosen?

Pulse Secure vTM

Pulse Secure Services Director

Pulse Secure TrafficScript

Company

Cosentry

Industry

Technology

Challenges

Eliminate network failures that impact the company’s ability to deliver on its 100 percent uptime guarantee and cause support issues

Solutions

Pulse Secure Virtual Traffic Manager and Pulse Secure Services Director on common off-the-shelf servers based on Intel x86 architectures

Results
  • Increased network reliability, minimizing support requirements and enabling Cosentry to deliver on its 100 percent uptime guarantee
  • Allowed greater flexibility with “pay as you grow” pricing and the ability to scale up and down as needed
  • Enabled more intelligent design for customers, thanks to easier and simpler traffic scripting
  • Moved load balancing to a softwarebased solution, enabling more intelligent decisions and a shift from CapEx to OpEx spending
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Introduction

With nine data centers throughout the Midwestern United States, Cosentry provides a full range of solutions that solve mission critical IT infrastructure challenges. The company’s “customer first” culture—along with two decades of providing data center services that include colocation, cloud services, managed hosting, managed services, and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) solutions—has created trusted business partnerships with customers seeking an extension of their internal IT team. This collaborative approach, fueled by a commitment to helping customers achieve strategic business goals, has accelerated the company’s growth and garnered Cosentry a spot on the list of Inc. Magazine’s 5000 Fastest Growing Companies, eight years in a row
It was the company’s “customer first” approach that prompted a reevaluation of its existing network load balancers. Increasing failures were impacting Cosentry’s ability to deliver on its 100 percent uptime guarantee, in addition to creating support and troubleshooting issues as these failures became more time-consuming and resource-intensive. Also, the existing solution was hardware-based, making it a CapEx spend. If Cosentry moved to a software-based solution, it could potentially shift this cost to an OpEx spend and enable faster provisioning, providing a win-win for both the company and its customers.

Challenge

When evaluating new technology, Cosentry first puts it to the test in its own environment. Pulse Secure Virtual Traffic Manager (vTM) offered a software-based option that was easy to use and reliable, while providing a level of intelligence previously unavailable in the company’s existing load balancers. With Pulse Secure vTM in place for testing, the team set about creating the most extreme use conditions, and each time the solution passed with flying colors.

“Industry-proven supportability and stability were our primary concerns when considering a new solution,” explains Josh Allen, Web Operations Infrastructure Engineer at Cosentry. “As we evaluated Pulse Secure Virtual Traffic Manager, it became clear that the easy-to-use interface would greatly improve our team’s ability to support customers, and testing proved that the reliability was unparalleled—we couldn’t break it.”

SOLUTIONS

The engineering team also recognized that having the ability to intelligently support its customers’ Web-based services would yield significant benefits. Easier and simpler traffic scripting enables more intelligent design for customers, which can open the door to develop more advanced applications. The built-in Pulse Secure TrafficScript software controls how individual requests are optimized, routed, and transformed.

“We never know what a customer may want to implement next, but we know with TrafficScript we are ready for any future implementation,” says Allen.

RESULTS

Moving from a hardware- to a software-based virtual platform is also a boon for Cosentry because, in addition to enabling more intelligent decisions, it provides the flexibility to move from one host to another, for an added layer of redundancy. With Pulse Secure Services Director, each application is given a dedicated application delivery controller instance in a high-density, multitenant platform. Detailed usage reporting supports a usage-based model that enables Cosentry to offer customers “pay as you grow” pricing and the ability to scale up and down as needed. The ability to be more nimble, coupled with the ability to bill monthly for managed services based on usage, creates greater flexibility for both Cosentry and its customers.

“The Pulse Secure solution has enabled us to have conversations we couldn’t have before because our support for applications is performing at the highest levels, and our pricing model supports a forward-looking mindset,” notes Allen. “Now we are talking with customers about how we can help them grow their businesses, and in return, that helps us grow ours.”

Whether a customer is virtualizing, consolidating, optimizing, or fully outsourcing data center and IT infrastructure to Cosentry, the company can confidently support the demands that come with Web and application requirements. Pulse Secure vTM has provided a high-performance solution that is reliable, scalable, and aligned with Cosentry’s business.

“The Pulse Secure solution doesn’t just minimize support requirements and enable us to deliver on our 100 percent uptime guarantee, it keeps our customers’ mission-critical applications up and running,” concludes Allen. “At the end of the day, that’s what it’s all about.”