The 2016 State of Application Delivery

Welcome! No, no, don’t tell me about yourself yet, let me guess instead.

You probably hail from one of the 4 in 5 organizations that plan on operating in a hybrid cloud environment. You use at least one app service to deliver apps but more than likely that number is actually ten (60% of you) and nearly half of those services are focused on security. If you’re considering app services delivered from a managed cloud, you’re probably thinking of security-related ones like DDoS and ID federation.  Availability and security are tied for the top of your “must have” service stack.

You (and your cohorts) are lukewarm on the concept of DevOps but you’re using 1-3 different automation frameworks to provision and deploy apps across cloud and on-premises locations. You aren’t completely sold on SDN yet (only 3% of you have implementations in production), but you might be dipping your toes in the proverbial water along with the 36% of respondents who are in the evaluation stage.

Only 9% of you consider performance so critical you won’t deploy an app without services supportive of improving it. Yet you wouldn’t give those same services up even if meant making your network more secure.

And encryption of data at rest and in flight is paramount in your cloud adoption decisions.

That’s just some of what we learned from this year’s State of Application Delivery survey, in which over 3000 respondents provided us with insights into what technology they think will have a strategic impact (hint: clouds are still high on this list), what’s holding them back (security, budgets, security), and what services and technology they actually use day-to-day to provision and deliver apps and app services in their organizations.

This year we expanded our reach and went global. Respondents from every corner of the globe (I can say “I don’t know” in at least 5 different languages now) offered us insight into their environments, tools, and applications, the results of which you can peruse in more depth in our 2016 State of Application Delivery report.

The focus of our survey remained the same as last year; we’re passionately interested in the app services organizations want, need, and rely on to deliver apps. But they don’t do that in a vacuum. Cloud, DevOps, the Internet of Things, and even emerging app architectures like microservices have a profound impact on not just the app services organizations need and use, but how and where those app services need to be deployed. That’s why we also dig into the trends and technology driving the need for app services, like mobility and the cloud (performance and security, anyone?) as well as DevOps and SDN (let there be APIs and templates for all the network things!).

So without further ado, here are the key takeaways from this year’s State of Application Delivery survey:

1. Application Services are Essential and Pervasive
   Ten or more app services are used by well over half of respondents, who recognize that slow, unresponsive, and unsecured applications can have a substantial negative impact on revenue and operations.
2. Hybrid Cloud is the New Normal
   The vast majority of respondents (81%) are moving toward hybrid cloud environments to leverage the flexibility and potential cost savings it offers, especially for small and mid-sized organizations.
3. Today’s Most Valued Security Solutions Focus on Protecting Users, Data, and Applications 
   Security professionals who have the highest level of confidence in their ability to ward off attacks are protecting clients, requests, and responses – the critical points at which data can be easily compromised.
4. DevOps and SDN are Key to Improving Operational Efficiency 
   Because DevOps and software-defined networking (SDN) enable automation and orchestration, they are both seen as key factors for reducing operating costs and improving time to market.

You can get the full report (and of course an infographic) at f5.com/SOAD.