Oscar Visaya, F5 Networks Philippines Country Manager
By Oscar Visaya, F5 Networks Philippines Country Manager
Can you imagine a world without apps?
Applications have changed our world. Not only have applications become pervasive in our personal lives, they are critical to the modern business. Companies in every industry rely on applications to drive customer engagement, employee productivity, and revenue.
What is less widely studied is the wide variety of application services, which are a suite of technology and services that improve apps’ performance and reliability, as well as enhance apps’ security. Without application services, apps simply won’t perform the way users expect them to.
To understand more about the applications that organizations rely on, F5 surveyed 3,200 IT decision makers across the Asia Pacific (APAC) region about their current and planned use of application services. Respondents across a broad spectrum of vertical markets gave their perspectives on how emerging trends and technologies will impact application services in the future.
It’s an Apps world
Survey findings revealed almost half of organizations (45%) deploy 1 to 200 applications and 17% deploy 201 to 500 applications. This shows that applications are growing in popularity and will not stop anytime soon. In fact, applications have become an integral part of business life, with a third of respondents stating they were unable to shut down a single app without someone noticing.
While applications are at the heart of IT’s ability to drive revenue and business efficiencies, they are only as good as the application services that deliver them. As applications increase in their strategic importance to the business, application services will be required to provide for their security, performance, and availability.
Security remains top of mind for customers
Security for applications spans a wide spectrum of services, from network anti-DDoS, to anti-fraud and anti-virus scanning, to application security. The depth and breadth of these services indicate the diverse attack surfaces that must be defended.
Based on the survey findings, 42% of the respondents were unwilling to deploy an application without at least one of these services. This is not surprising since the threat landscape is expanding, and protection services need to span inbound, outbound, and end-client concerns.
Moving to cloud…
Currently, only 11% of security application services in APAC are deployed in the cloud, with the vast majority of organizations preferring to keep it on premise. But this is changing as organizations find the lure of cloud irresistible. By 2016, majority of the respondents (41%) said they expect to move from 0% to 24% of their business applications to the cloud.
From respondents’ point of view, among the technologies and trends that will have strategic importance within the next two to five years are private cloud (43%), mobile apps, and Software as a Service (SaaS).
As organizations embrace a “cloud-first” philosophy, some respondents even predict that up to their entire application portfolio could soon be cloud based.
…but challenges exist
Despite the rush to the cloud, the road is not entirely smooth. Those who are slow to adopt (29%) attributed it to the failure to identify a comprehensive identity and access management policy. Another 35% admitted that they lacked the internal knowledge to know when best to deploy in public or private cloud.
Just 11% or respondents were very confident that their organization could withstand an application level security threat.
Conclusion
Key findings of the survey indicate that organizations are aware of the importance of application services, andrely on them to deliver their applications. As application deployments expand, the complexity and diversity of the network services needed to support those applications will also continue to grow.
With the increase in the diversity of application deployments across on-premises, cloud, and hybrid data center models, the need and demand for security services that enable and fit seamlessly into those models will also increase.
