SSL Off-loading onto Load Balancer

SSL-intensive servers, such as the Secure Remote Access Gateway, require large amounts of processing power to perform the encryption required for each secure transaction. Using a load balancer with ssl capability can speed up the Portal Gateway's by off-loading the execution of cryptographic algorithms.

Terminating SSL traffic on a load balancer in a DMZ simplifies the portal topology. Access manager sessions are maintained in cookies and it is very important from a performance point of view that the correct servers are engaged in processing a browser request. For Example, those servers which have that particular session in its cache. Session stickiness is much easily achieved using cookies and http than using https to all the back-end servers.