Device Technologies Updates Its Technologies with NGINX

Overview

Device Technologies began life in the&bnsp;1990s as a designer and manufacturer of orthopedic joint replacement devices. Over the ensuing years, the company has become a leader in medical technologies, from being the first company to distribute robotic, remote surgery tools in New Zealand, to building the world’s first complete artificial heart implant.

Challenge

Keith Strachan, Solutions Architect at Device Technologies, sums up the problem at Device Technologies succinctly: “We’ve had a few issues around aging technologies disappearing from vendors, such as Microsoft Threat Management Gateway (TMG). And trying to find a suitable replacement that would actually fit both at a security level and a functionality level, some of the MS products they created to replace TMG don’t do the whole portfolio of applications we desired. We looked to the market to see what else could provide reverse proxying capabilities.”

Solution

Strachan says that finding NGINX was easy, due to the well‑known and documented capabilities of its reverse proxying features. “Obviously, NGINX is quite famed for reverse proxying. Upon quickly having a few test cases around the NGINX portfolios to see what it could do for our environment, we’ve pretty much leveraged it to replace all of our reverse‑proxying situations for external services for the greater business, and also some services that weren’t feasible in the past around the SAP and Citrix platforms,” says Strachan.

That means the team was not only able to replace the now end-of-lifed Microsoft TMG, but they were also able to do things that platform could not, such as reliably and securely route outside traffic to internal SAP systems.

Results

With NGINX in place, the Device Technologies team is able to better identify problems via NGINX logging capabilities. “The logging scenarios in relation to trying to find faults were a lot simpler to diagnose because they have a standardized format, and obviously being able to pull those into general tools such as Splunk were great. It made it a lot easier for us to get all those issues we were having, identified and sorted out quite nicely,” explains Strachan.

Strachan said that NGINX has been so successful in its reverse‑proxy duties that the team has begun to roll it out as a web server throughout the company. “We have recently been leveraging NGINX for the reverse‑proxy capabilities, but we’ve also decided to use the NGINX web server platform as our platform of choice. ALl of our corporate websites around the world will be replatformed onto NGINX to be the next generation of our websites,” says Strachan.

About Device Technologies

Device Technologies was founded in Australia in 1992. Since that time, the company has become a world leader in medical and surgical technologies. The company now distributes hundreds of brands of medical equipment and devices, ranging from cardiovascular equipment to spinal support implants.