Managing Risks

This section contains a few tips to help you in the sizing process.

• A business-to-consumer portal requires that you deploy Secure Remote Access to use the Gateway and SSL. Make sure you take this into account for your sizing requirements. Once you turn on SSL, the performance of the portal can be up to ten times slower than without SSL.

• For a business-to-employee portal, make sure that you have a user profile that serves as a baseline.

• For any portal, build in headroom for growth. This means not just sizing for today’s needs, but future needs and capacity. This includes usual peaks after users return from a break, such as a weekend or holiday, or if usage is increased over time because the portal is more “sticky.”

• If you are deploying your portal solution across multiple geographic sites, you need to fully understand the layout of your networks and data centers

• Decide what type of redundancy you need. Consider items such as production down time, upgrades, and maintenance work. In general, when you take a portal server out of production, the impact to your capacity should be no more than one quarter of the overall capacity.

• In general, usage concurrencies for a business-to-employee portal are higher than a business-to-consumer portal.