The Advantages of Real-Time Business Development

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1 With a Real-Time Data Platform November, 2010 North America Radware Inc. 575 Corporate Dr., Lobby 1 Mahwah, NJ Tel: (888) International Radware Ltd. 22 Raoul Wallenberg St. Tel Aviv 69710, Israel Tel:

2 Businesses today are integrating and using online user and business transactions to enhance business processes for better operational efficiency, improved revenue generation, streamlined compliance adherence, and enhanced user experiences. Real-time business intelligence is now enabling businesses to react quickly to current user activity. The benefits of running a business in real-time, with an Event-Driven Architecture (EDA), are clear: Decisions can be made and user needs met immediately Business processes are adapted quickly to meet demand or resolve an issue CRM, support, marketing and even supply chains, can be instantly shifted The entire business can be viewed in real-time to enhance enterprise efficiency The Role of Events in the Enterprise Events have been under-utilized in business applications to date. Where events have been used, they are typically simple events a single event that triggers a decision. Until recently, morepowerful CEP uses have been limited to leading-edge approaches, such as business activity monitoring (BAM), Business Process Management (BPM), and computer hardware design. Complex events are becoming much more widely used in business applications, with strong business benefits driving their adoption. For example, financial services firms require real-time events to protect their customer s identities and assets from fraudulent behavior. It matters little to know two weeks later, going through event logs, that someone s identity has been compromised. But it makes a significant difference to know in real-time that an online user is behaving erratically and you re able to stop the behavior, thwarting theft before it occurs. There are enormous financial and strategic benefits to implementing event-driven business processes, because they follow the inherently event-driven nature of many aspects of the business environment. To enhance the customer experience, in a financial institution for example, a VIPlevel customer may be identified and his transactions monitored to evaluate the best response to his actions. Business analysts and line managers can understand event-driven processes because they involve standard business issues, such as customer and supplier relationships, operating procedures, processes, and workflows. These events include everyday business transactions from daily operations customers purchasing products or making queries online, such as orders being placed from suppliers, shipments being made, deliveries being made or delayed, and more. From a business perspective, this is logical and straight-forward. But from a software or data management viewpoint, it s not nearly so clear-cut Radware, Ltd. Page 2

3 Dealing in Real-Time Real-time event processing has proven to be challenging as many data points are fraught with latency and delayed processes. This is compounded when a business is dealing with hundreds of thousands of transactions per second, such as a brokerage firm or a bank. The requirements of real-time data feeds from their online business are growing and critical for their businesses to flourish. They need to receive the events in real-time, not even near real-time to gain a competitive advantage and efficiently run their business. Users of the event-driven enterprise need to know in real-time what is happening with their business. Whether they are a Chief Information Security Officer, a CIO, Head of e-commerce or the Enterprise Architect, they need their business insight in real-time to optimize their business, mitigate risk, halt fraudulent behavior or market new products or services to an online user at the right time. This desire, or market requirement, has driven Radware to offer a revolutionary approach to capturing events in real-time, and feeding them to back-end analytic applications for use across the enterprise. This data integration platform called Inflight is available as an easy-to-deploy, network-based, pervasive appliance that passively monitors all user web activity. Radware s Inflight is built upon patent-pending technology, the Capture-Transform-Feed (CTF) architecture, that captures all Inflight (HTTP, HTTPS) traffic between the user and the web servers, transforms the raw data into useful business events, and immediately feeds real-time business-level events to back-end applications, enabling the real-time, event-driven enterprise. The Growth of CEP CEP is gaining prominence in the marketplace. Growth for this market is expected to escalate over the next few years from roughly $50M in 2006 to nearly $1B in 2010, according to the Aite Group. This clearly indicates that businesses around the globe are expected to move to an Event Driven Architecture (EDA). CEP engines correlate events from numerous sources and process them, based on the business rules established within each organization, to deliver valuable insight for the business. The goal of CEP is to generate high-level, useful insight from across the enterprise, in order to move the business to real-time. Benefits include enhanced business processes, improved decision-making, efficient marketing, better user experiences, lower costs, and increase revenues. Ideal uses for this approach include any business that generates a large volume of transactions, such as financial organizations, banks, brokerage firms, or e-commerce businesses, such as online travel, airlines, trading companies, e-retail and more. These businesses require their CEP engine to: Handle thousands of transactions per second Guarantee reliability, high availability, and security Distribute and feed events across the entire enterprise in real-time See granular, session-level detailed data for correlation of user activity Turn the events into triggers to drive decisions and actions Use a common language for easy dissemination of data 2010 Radware, Ltd. Page 3

4 CEP engines require data from numerous sources to synthesize into useful business information. One of the most critical, yet difficult to capture and disseminate in real-time is from their online transactions. A real-time online data platform must capture Inflight data, transform it and feed it as useful business events to the CEP engine. In doing so, it must also meet very demanding requirements, similar to the CEP engine, as it feeds the CEP engine with real-time events. Inflight Transaction Capture for a Real-Time Data Integration Platform The use of out-of-path capture of web application user transactions while Inflight, or using an approach to capture network traffic from web applications in a non-invasive manner, is an effective way of tackling this challenge. Being out-of-path means zero performance impact to systems, applications and users. There is no need to instrument or code an application based on the capture requirements. Pervasive, network-based monitoring captures all web-based user transactions, while the user is insession. This includes the full conversation between an online user and a web application, including the inbound requests (from the user or client) and the subsequent outbound response from the application (or server), without creating any latency. Inflight instantaneously transforms them into business events and feeds the relevant events to business applications. This enables enterprises to take action while the user is still in the web session, including re-authenticating the user due to a high risk transaction in the case of fraud detection, or up-selling them a low-interest mortgage, in the case of real-time marketing. In the case of the financial VIP, the company can provide higher level of services or offer customized, relevant products based on their transactions. If the user is transferring funds or appearing to close out an account, the company can take action to minimize these at risk actions and cross- or up-sell the client for improved revenue generation and customer retention. With actionable intelligence provided from within the network, IT can enable the business to be more responsive to their user needs and deliver more value to the business. The market is only now beginning the adoption of this approach for mainstream business purposes. Providers of CEP engines are integrating the Inflight Data Platform into their solution to deliver realtime events from the web channel to correlate with events from other aspects of the business. Uses being highlighted recently include: Real-time user monitoring for fraud detection, analytics, and marketing automation Performance management for networks, systems, and applications Network Forensics for problem isolation and/or resolution, network management, and analysis Real-time events for enhanced Compliance, Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) efforts Web application monitoring for logging, regulatory, and compliance purposes Typical approaches to Business Intelligence are no longer sufficient, especially for Business Process Management and Business Activity Monitoring, where the goal is to drive the real-time enterprise Radware, Ltd. Page 4

5 By capturing the full content, solutions using Inflight as a real-time data integration platform can analyze online activity from the highest level an overview, to the lowest level a user s session transaction detail to deliver the full scope of a users session. This is critical to meet compliance requirements, for analyzing aspects of a business, or for enhancing the user experience with your business processes. Each online session a user has with your business typically consists of hundreds of transactions. Many of these may not be part of the high-value business transactions you deem critical to your business currently, but by having the full click-stream throughout the entire session, you can easily change your requirements and meet data future needs of your business again with no impact on the application. Inflight is a passive monitoring solution that is a cost-effective purchase and non-invasive to production applications, making it low-cost to maintain and providing quick return on investment. Equally important is that it is completely transparent to the end user (customer), so the experience is enhanced with better and more relevant performance. When the users confidence on the businesses ability to protect their information escalates, it results in more users doing their transactions online, without fear of becoming a target for identity theft and fraud. One Source, Multi-Purpose for High ROI With Inflight as an online real-time event platform, delivering real-time business-level events to nearly any backend analytic engine, businesses are able to: Protect their online users by detecting and preventing fraud Meet ongoing compliance requirements Enhance the business processes with better business intelligence Deliver relevant products and services in real-time, to online users enhancing their online experience. Bottom line is that in order to optimize a business with an Event-Driven Architecture, businesses require an online data platform, such as Inflight, to deliver real-time events across the enterprise, driving businesses to new levels of efficiency while enhancing the end-user experience Radware, Ltd. Page 5