A10’s Harmony Controller as-a-Service to provide ease in multi-cloud operations

News Desk - 05/10/2022

A10 Networks has just announced the launch of Harmony Controller as-a-service, Release 5.4 with enhancements that ease multi-cloud operational complexity and strengthen security.

Every network administrator for a business or a service provider has experienced the pain of growth and change. Network administrators must constantly work to make sure capacity is correctly and efficiently deployed to meet demand due to factors such as rapid or unexpected growth in users, subscribers, and traffic, migration from centralised data centres to edge deployments, cloud, multi-cloud, or hybrid cloud environments, and the shift to distributed and suburban/home-based applications inspired by the pandemic.

The A10 Harmony Controller provides centralized management and analytics for A10 secure application services including A10 Thunder Application Delivery Controller (ADC), SSLi, Convergent Firewall (CFW), and Carrier-grade Networking (CGN) in multi-cloud environments for application configuration and policy enforcement. It is available on self-managed (on-premises/cloud) and as-a-service.

Amr Alashaal, Regional Vice President – Middle East at A10 Networks said “With the Harmony Controller, organizations can efficiently automate deployment and operations of application services, increase operational efficiency and agility, enhance end-user experiences and reduce TCO, simplify the management of distributed application services to dramatically shorten troubleshooting times, receive alerts on performance or security anomalies, improve capacity planning and optimize IT infrastructure and cloud environments.”

Harmony Controller as-a-service has key advantages over self-managed systems, providing organizations with a centralized management interface for installation, configuration, monitoring and troubleshooting of physical and virtual devices wherever they are deployed.

Installing, licencing, and registering new or modified Thunder devices used to be laborious manual tasks. These procedures are made simple and user-friendly using Harmony Controller as a service. A10 manages the service to guarantee its security and accessibility. With a management interface that adjusts automatically as the system expands, the service creates a more straightforward elastic capacity while supporting millions of users and thousands of devices.

Harmony Controller as-a-service, Release 5.4, includes the following enhancements:

Stronger Security with Multi-Factor-Authentication (MFA)

Now, administrators can enable MFA for all the users in the account. MFA is available when the users are authenticated locally in Harmony Controller. Users need to install the Google Authenticator app on their mobile devices for a one-time set-up of MFA. While users can postpone set-up, the administrator can set an enforcement deadline. The device communicator role is created for users who use Harmony Controller to register Thunder devices.

Local Authorization after Remote Authentication

Now, users can authenticate on the remote servers, such as LDAP, TACACS +, or RADIUS, and authorize locally in Harmony Controller. The user privileges and access information are stored in Harmony Controller.