What is SSL Offloading?

SSL offloading is the process of removing the SSL-based encryption from incoming traffic to relieve a web server of the processing burden of decrypting and/or encrypting traffic sent via SSL. The processing is offloaded to a separate device designed specifically for SSL acceleration or SSL termination.

SSL termination is particularly useful when used with clusters of SSL VPNs, because it greatly increases the number of connections a cluster can handle.