State of Application Strategy 2022: Asia Pacific Prioritizes Edge Deployments, Security Workloads
As you might have already seen from our announcement, F5 recently published its annual State of Application Strategy report surveying IT decision makers. Global findings and some key insights have been shared in blog articles such as: State of Application Strategy 2022: Time to Modernize Ops; Most Exciting Tech Trend in 2022: IT/OT Convergence; and Legal functions are finally a priority for digital transformation in 2022.
While all these stats are great learnings for us, I also want to take this opportunity to introduce some additional insights specifically relevant to the Asia Pacific region.
Most Exciting Tech Trend in 2022: Asia Pacific View
On a global scale, IT/OT convergence surfaced as the most exciting tech trend among respondents. This result was no surprise, as the benefits of IT/OT convergence are abundant: low operational costs, enhanced security orchestration, and increased operational efficacy, among others.
In contrast, when asked to rank the most exciting tech trends, Asia Pacific respondents prioritized security-related technologies.
Areas such as Australia and New Zealand (A/NZ), China, and Hong Kong showed more interest in Web App and API Protection (WAAP), while other North Asian regions placed Zero Trust as a higher priority, compared to the global average. Interestingly, while there was keen interest in security-related technologies in Asia Pacific, more than half of the respondents in A/NZ and India said they would be willing to trade security measures to improve performance.
Application Security And Delivery Technologies Can Follow Wherever Apps are Hosted
As more applications are being hosted off-premises, it is crucial to check how the technologies that support those apps are deployed. To get a better understanding, we asked respondents where they are hosting the application services that are foundational to their IT and digital platforms. Through this inquiry, we can also see how the respondents prioritize the location of their business applications.
From the results, we see A/NZ and India stepping up as trailblazers for Asia Pacific, from leading the shift to the public cloud to deploying emerging technologies (this observation is consistent with our historical findings of past State of Application Strategy reports too).
Respondents from A/NZ and India also seem to be well aware of challenges around their relative geographical size; the findings place them as the top two regions with the highest level of edge deployments.
In fact, compared to last year, there’s an overall growth in edge deployments in Asia Pacific. Besides A/NZ and India, growth has also been promising in areas like China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. This indicates that the technologies supporting the apps are also shifting to the edge.
Asia Pacific Respondents Have Their Eyes on Security and Delivery at the Edge
Now, what type of technologies are being deployed at the edge? In line with the global average, Japan, India, and ASEAN regions prioritize running security workloads at the edge, while collecting and processing data at the edge is key for China and Taiwan. Korea wants to ensure their application performance is kept on top of its game, and A/NZ and Hong Kong similarly prioritize providing a positive digital experience for their users.
The overall consensus about edge deployment is (unsurprisingly) that everyone wants their apps to be secure, fast, and readily available.
Final Thoughts
On a side note, the F5 Asia Pacific team has created a separate report on the latest multi-cloud trends in APAC, exploring the progress of multi-cloud deployments and the challenges involved in connecting, running, and securing workloads in multiple clouds. Combining the findings from both reports yields one conclusion—that the need for multi-cloud and edge deployments stems from the growing digital landscape and accelerating business requirements. It is heartening to see more enterprises in Asia Pacific take positive strides in their digital transformation journey, and we encourage enterprises to prioritize security, visibility, and control when making this shift.