With the increasing use of the Internet to service core business functions comes the need for reliable WAN connectivity. A specific aspect of this requirement is for reliable connectivity to particular destinations.

Network Load Balancing is the ability to balance traffic across two WAN links. This capability balances network sessions like web, email, etc over multiple connections in order to spread out the amount of bandwidth used by each LAN user, thus increasing the total amount of bandwidth available.

When a company implements a Wide Area Network load balancing solution as a part of its IT infrastructure, it can have the ability to take full advantage of server resources by distributing incoming traffic appropriately and evenly. By performing this traffic management function in an efficient manner, load balancing will help an organization’s WAN avoid potential performance problems such as traffic bottlenecks and server crashes that can slow or halt operation completely. This solution can also help guard against potentially harmful traffic that preys on the vulnerabilities of slow networks by launching worms, Denial of Service (DoS) attacks, Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks and other malicious activities. By prioritizing the consumption and application of bandwidth within a business’s WAN, load balancing can make the most out of available bandwidth resources to improve the application delivery and functionality. With the even distribution of traffic, proactive security measures and bandwidth prioritization methods, load balancing is an optimal way to provide a scalable performance solution to any far-reaching business network.