F5 Networks announced the availability of its 2019 State of Application Services report.
This year's survey showed that organizations regard application
services as vital for cloud adoption and, ultimately, for success in
today's app-driven digital economy. Emerging application services like
ingress control and IoT gateways are on the rise, and together with
established services such as firewalls and global server load balancing,
are enabling companies to adapt to the requirements of today's
multi-cloud world.
"Applications are now the most valuable asset in the modern enterprise, defining a new era of Application Capital,"
said Kara Sprague, Senior Vice President and General Manager,
Application Services Business Unit at F5. "This year's report explores
the approaches companies are taking on their digital transformation
journeys and how they are optimizing the people, processes, and systems
used to develop, deploy, and deliver applications for competitive
advantage and business impact."
The
report reflects input from nearly 2,000 respondents globally across a
range of industries, company sizes, and roles. Participants were asked
about the challenges and opportunities presented by the ongoing process
of digital transformation, resulting in a comprehensive analysis of how
IT organizations are transforming to meet the ever-changing demands of
the digital economy.
Survey Highlights
The
survey shows that as multi-cloud has evolved into a comprehensive
strategy for innovation, app services have reclaimed their status as a
key player in digital transformation and business success. The report
lays out the results through an in-depth examination of four key
findings:
1. Nearly 9 out of 10 respondents have multi-cloud architectures, driven by an app-first methodology. App-centric
business requires a multi-cloud strategy, with most organizations
evaluating cloud decisions based on what environment is best for each
application. But it's still a challenge to enforce consistent security
and ensure reliable performance. Nearly half of organizations (48%)
undergoing a digital transformation initiative report being hamstrung by
the difficulty of achieving consistent security for applications
distributed among multiple cloud platforms.
2. Sixty-nine percent of respondents are executing digital transformation-and app data reigns. With
more than two-thirds of respondents engaged in ongoing digital
initiatives, IT organizations are re-evaluating their structures,
processes, and workflows. Organizations are taking advantage of agile
development methodologies (52%) and moving applications to the public
cloud (48%), as well as exploring new application architectures such as
containerization (42%). Taken together, these shifts all point to a
changing application landscape: one that is automated, cloud-centric,
and influenced by responsiveness to business priorities.
3. Fifty-six percent of respondents are employing containers; gateways, app security, and availability are growing in importance. While
the most popular application services remain consistent, changes are
coming. Over the past five years we've tracked the deployment of
application services and noted that there is a consistent set that tops
the charts every year: antivirus, network firewall, SSL VPN, and load
balancing. But this year there are some newcomers. The rise of
containers has also boosted the deployment plans for SDN and API
gateways, with reported adoption at 47% and 42%, respectively. Adoption
of service mesh is on the rise too, at 27%.
4. Sixty-two
percent of respondents are deploying automation and orchestration
initiatives-and developer-oriented solutions are leading the charge. Automating
and orchestrating development and deployment pipelines help
organizations keep up with the rapid rate of change required for
external-facing applications. With silos breaking down and
cross-functional teams speeding innovation, organizations are
standardizing on developer-oriented solutions to implement CI/CD
practices throughout IT. DevOps favorites such as GitHub enterprise and
Jenkins are rising in popularity. With more than one-third of
organizations automating all four key components of the production
pipeline, it's clear DevOps has moved from strategic differentiator for a
set of early adopters to a mainstream part of operations.
Download the 2019 State of Application Services report