Digital Transformation – Take Advantage of Application Delivery in Your Journey

The adoption of new technologies is accelerating business transformation. In its essence, the digital transformation of businesses uses technologies to drive significant improvement in process effectiveness.

Cloud computing is one of the core technologies for Digital Transformation

Increasing maturity of cloud-based infrastructure enables organizations to deploy business-critical applications in public and private cloud. According to a new forecast from the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Cloud IT Infrastructure Tracker, total spending on IT infrastructure for deployment in cloud environments is expected to total $46.5 billion in 2017 with year-over-year growth of 20.9%. Public cloud data centers will account for the majority of this spending, 65.3%, growing at the fastest annual rate of 26.2%.

Many enterprises are in the midst of this transition to the cloud, whether moving to a public cloud, building their own private cloud or managing a hybrid deployment. In this fluid environment, where new services are being frequently added and old ones updated, the new paradigm requires support for needs across multiple environments and across many constituencies – an IT administrator, an application developer, DevOps and tenants.

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Nobody Said It Was Easy!

However, the process of migration of applications to the cloud is not easy. The flexibility and cost benefit that drives the shift to the cloud also presents many challenges - security, business continuity, and application availability, latency reduction, issues with visibility, SLA guarantees and isolation of resources.  Some other aspects that require some thought – licensing, lock-in with a cloud service provider, architecture to address hybrid deployment, shadow IT, automation, user access, user privacy, and compliance needs.

One of the main challenges for enterprises moving to a cloud infrastructure is how to guarantee consistent quality of experience to consumers across multiple applications, many of which are business critical developed using legacy technologies and still hosted on-premise.

Along with the quality of experience, organizations need to look at the security policies. Sometimes policies require integration with a cloud service provider’s infrastructure or require new capabilities to complement on-premises architecture while addressing denial of service, application security and compliance for new attack surface exposed by applications in the cloud.

Convenience and productivity improvements are often the initial drivers for adopting IT services in the cloud. One way to address security and availability concerns for the enterprise embarking on the cloud journey is to ensure that the security and availability are also included as part of IT self-service, orchestration and automation systems, without requiring additional effort from those driving adoptions of cloud-based IT applications.

The World of Application Delivery Has Changed to Adapt!

Application delivery and load balancing technologies have been the strategic components providing availability, optimization, security and latency reduction for applications. In order to enable seamless migration of business-critical applications to the cloud, the same load balancing and application delivery infrastructure has to evolve to address the needs of continuous delivery/integration, hybrid and multi-cloud deployments.