Communities define us
We are defined by the company we keep – but what do we mean by the word “community?” The word “community” used to refer to the simple idea of a group of people living in the same place. And the idea of “Communication” is about the way we share information around our community. But in today’s virtual world, we live in multiple online places: at work, with friends, sports, shopping, and more. Technology means that we can inhabit all these communities simultaneously, and it is easy to create new watering holes for communities to interact.
But what makes a community grow? Why do communities gather around one watering hole rather than another? Think of the number of messaging apps out there – I just counted EIGHT messaging applications on my phone. And that doesn’t include LinkedIn, Outlook, Strava, Garmin, Facebook and all the other applications that compete for my attention.
Growing your Community
For one of those applications, the size of the community is key – the larger the community, the more valuable the application. To attract and grow, a community needs to be easy to access, low friction, a smooth user interface – but it’s a moving target, and applications are in constant competition for the attention of me and my circle of friends.
All those applications need to innovate to stay ahead, so they need to release new updates to attract my attention, and to make themselves even easier to use and even more pervasive. However, rapid application development brings a new challenge, to build security into the core of those applications, to protect all the customer data they are harvesting from their growing community. Nothing kills the trust of a community faster than losing all their data.
Application Innovation
In order to drive that innovation, organizations are changing they way they build applications – moving towards open access tools, agile development methods, and rapid release cycles. And they are changing the way they deploy and manage those applications in production, adopting DevOps-style workflows, blurring the lines between development, test and production, and designing new container-based architectures to make it easier to build and run dynamic applications.
The problem is that traditional application tools, especially legacy application delivery controllers (ADC) do not fit well with rapid application development: they are difficult to integrate with automated orchestration and provisioning, which are needed to support rapid development. They tend to be expensive, unwieldy appliances, or they are software tools with limited capabilities which can difficult to secure and scale in production.
Introducing the Community Edition
So that’s why we have released our new Pulse vADC Community Edition to help our customers build smarter, more innovative applications – applications that are secure from day #1. Our Community Edition is a full-featured ADC, based on Pulse Virtual Traffic Manager, with all the tools you need to build and launch secure applications, including the latest TLS 1.3 support, clustering, global load balancing, and even our virtual Web Application Firewall.
The Community Edition is a free-to-download, free-to-use virtual ADC, which can scale up and out whenever you are ready to go global. You can build, test and launch your application into production without a license key, and you can upgrade seamlessly to 24×7 support when you are ready. And with support for container-based architectures, such as Docker and Kubernetes, and open source tools such as Terraform, you can integrate into your development toolchain for integrated release cycles.
Download our new Pulse vADC Community Edition, and start building your communities today!
For more information, see:
- Pulse vADC Community Edition – http://pulsesecure.net/vadc-community
- Getting Started with Pulse vADC – http://pulsesecure.net/vadc-getstarted
- Upgrade for 24×7 support – http://pulsesecure.net/vadc-upgrade
