PUMA improves application speed and security

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PUMA is using application acceleration and network protection technologies to optimise the performance and security of its global network infrastructure.

The global sport-lifestyle company has deployed a number of Juniper Networks products to improve the performance of numerous mission-critical applications, including common internet file systems (CIFS), a number of web applications and Lotus Notes across its wide area network (WAN).

The firms WAN infrastructure includes its major IT hubs in Europe, where it has headquarters in London and near Nuremberg, North America and Asia, a well as more than 500 retail outlets and offices globally.

“PUMA’s challenge is to control costs while simultaneously improving the network's performance and security, and to ensure future scalability in line with our business demands,” said Kurt Walther, PUMA global IT director.

The global firm deployed Juniper Networks’ WXC application acceleration platform to accelerate application performance across the network and the its secure services gateway (SSG) with unified threat management (UTM), secure access (SA) secure sockets layer (SSL) virtual private network (VPN) and intrusion detection and prevention (IDP) platforms to create a layered defence against vulnerabilities for both WAN and local area network (LAN) based and remote users.

Walther explained: “Juniper’s WXC has enabled us to accelerate the performance of key applications by up to eight times. By performing 80 per cent compression, the WXC also helps us to better use and provision the existing bandwidth, while the security deployment helps to ensure data security within and between our sites without compromising network performance.”

Benefits to the business include fast and consistent application response times, enhanced customer service in main locations, increased staff productivity and operational cost cuts.

PUMA also said the WXC platforms provide broad application support for web-based, client-server, custom software, voice, and video applications, delivering the performance and scale to support its large application deployments in geographically distributed areas.

The Juniper platform’s management system helps to automate provisioning tasks and centrally monitors and troubleshoots application and network performance to deliver applications as intended.

The SSG integrated firewall/VPN and IDP devices provide PUMA with faster throughput and UTM capabilities to protect against a wide range of network-borne attacks such as viruses, worms, trojans and malware. And the standalone IDP appliances protect areas of the network with high throughput. The SA SSL VPN platforms provide web-based secure access for remote and mobile users and has become PUMA’s standard platform for secure remote access.

The PUMA deployment was completed with a local Juniper Networks J-Partner, Kroha und Heinze.

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