Provider tier
High-capacity, multi-tenant hardware deals with L4 load balancing, network firewalling, SSL decryption, access control, and network optimization at the edge of the network, where it has the greatest impact.
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Tenant tier
Specific tasks such as web-application firewalling, advanced application monitoring, traffic management, and content routing can be fulfilled by a software-only platform close to a single or small number of applications (tenants) tied to an organizational unit.