Today F5 Networks released its third annual State of Application Delivery report. Data comes from a customer survey of over 2,000 IT professionals across the networking, application, and security realms, and examines the vital role application services play in enabling enterprises to deploy applications faster, smarter, and safer.
Survey responses came from around the globe, spanning industries like government, financial services, technology, and education as well as occupational roles from DevOps to the executive suite.
Overall, the survey revealed how accelerated cloud adoption is increasing the demand for application services. The average enterprise is currently deploying 14 application services, up from 11 in 2016, and plans to increase to 17 over the coming year.
Other key highlights include:
- Security is the top priority. For the first year, application security trumped availability as the number one concern for respondents. Security teams are noting the increasing sophistication of attacks as their top challenge, and are expanding beyond traditional firewalls and the legacy enterprise perimeter as a response to hackers increasingly targeting apps.
- 2017 welcomes the cloud. It’s a multi-cloud world today, with four out of five respondents adopting hybrid cloud, and 20% reporting that over half their apps will be in the cloud by the end of 2017.
- Operational scale and programmability rise to the top for DevOps. With the increases in app services and continued expansion of cloud, organizations are turning to automation and orchestration to scale operations across environments. As a result, over half of respondents now view API-enabled infrastructures and templates as important, up from 31 percent and 22 percent last year, respectively. Scalability and OpEx reduction remain the top two drivers for use of SDN.
The full 2017 State of Application Delivery report is available here.
As a Senior Security Solutions Architect at F5 Networks, Brian McHenry focuses on web application and network security. McHenry acts as a liaison between customers and F5 product teams, providing a hands-on, real-world perspective. He is a regular contributor on InformationSecurityBuzz.com, a co-founder of BSidesNYC, and a speaker at AppSecUSA, BC Aware Day, GoSec Montreal, and the Central Ohio Infosec Summit, among others. Prior to joining F5 in 2008, McHenry, a self-described IT generalist, held leadership positions within a variety of technology organizations, ranging from startups to major financial services firms.
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