The days of simply building out your data centre with all the right considerations in place and planning for the near term future are long gone. Change is now much more than planning for things we can measure, control and manage.
With the advent of the cloud, the rise in cyber threats and the need to do more, faster, it is becoming more difficult for enterprises to plan for change, and to maximise the investments that they make in their IT infrastructure today.
Even recent initiatives like Bring Your Own Device (BYOD), mobility and collaborative mobile workspaces are considered more the status quo than as truly innovative, and organisations are taking on more ambitious digital change to prepare themselves for the future.
The new pillars in an enterprise digital transformation strategy now include leveraging cloud and new application architectures to drive profitability, while reducing security vulnerabilities and overall technical debt. There are now several large enterprise organisations beginning to make this new wave of digital transformation a critical strategy to ensure profitability and success.
As organisations continue down the path of digital transformation, the move to the cloud has become a given, and hybrid and multi-cloud environments have become the solution of choice.
Applications will play a critical role in this endeavour. It is therefore important to understand how application delivery controllers (ADCs) work with new app architectures as a key pillar of digital transformation.
Harnessing the power of the cloud
Every enterprise needs to have a cloud strategy, and with their extensive number of on-premise systems, many opt for hybrid cloud - one that leverages resources sourced from both on-premise and public cloud. Companies with significant workloads in hybrid cloud have been able to enhance their business agility by 35%, reduce their costs by over a third through competitive cloud pricing, and have been able to deploy their apps and services twice as fast, according to a study from Citrix.
A hybrid cloud presents increasing challenges of complexity in managing multiple workloads across a diverse ecosystem of platforms, so it is necessary for your ADC to easily adapt across local and cloud hosted domains for true end-to-end application delivery and maximum leverage.
Selecting an ADC that can seamlessly be managed and deployed across all cloud environments creates flexibility and scalability to support changing network demands efficiently.
Supporting new generation application architectures
The cloud is now playing a role in how applications are architected, and can be held largely responsible for the app evolution that is currently underway.
In addition, applications are being built leveraging massive service-oriented architectures that bring a high level of resiliency and scalability. These applications are being deployed in containers and with microservices. They're even impacting traditional legacy application deployments, where IT is seeking to emulate the operational advantages of their web development peers and incorporating procedures for infrastructure automation.
The key to delivering these next generation application architectures is an ADC that can span physical, virtual and containerised form factors. Deploying the same ADC in these new environments provides a simplified platform for manageability, security and visibility, regardless of the inherent application architectures.
Providing protection and security
Some organisations have hundreds of consumer-facing web apps that have anything from five to 32 vulnerabilities each, according to WhiteHat Security, meaning that there are thousands of vulnerabilities across the average organisation's web applications.
Elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) is now becoming more widely used to protect data that is transferred over the web, coupled with secure identity protection measures to further secure application data and traffic.
Enterprises must now incorporate these new standards of protection to secure their environments and prepare for emerging security threats. This places emphasis and importance on choosing an ADC that includes built-in security features such as a web application firewall, DDoS protection and a hybrid approach to supporting encryption leveraging hardware and software.
