Pravin Jeyaraj
Online banks like Egg have used aggressive marketing to attract people to their sites, but in order to provide an efficient service they must make sure that the sites are accessible.
One example of a bank that has had to upgrade its technology is Coutts. In December, the international private bank replaced its server because it was too old to cope with future demand. But last week's Computer Weekly/Keynote Systems Web site performance indicator, the site failed to connect 39 times out of 1,000 tries.
William Spooner, technology support engineer at UK consultancy Zeus Technology, says the most secure way to ensure that a site is accessible is to "build redundancy into the system" by using a load balancer.
A load balancer is a front-end server that takes incoming requests and forwards them to a multiple back-end servers. It prevents a system from becoming overloaded by evenly distributing processing among available computers and maintaining a queue for waiting requests until a suitable host is found.
But this means that users of the e-commerce system can be transferred to another back-end server mid-transaction, leading to lost information and hence customer dissatisfaction.
Last week US company ArrowPoint Communications launched an alternative method to traditional load balancing based on Internet cookies. The cookie-based Web switching system uses URLs rather than general IP addresses to route requests.
ArrowPoint says it is able to track content requests with the cookie technology. Using the Web-switching software popular content can be routed and replicated to additional servers before the Web site becomes overwhelmed.
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This was first published in February 2000
