Category: Cloud

Businesses tailor their use of cloud infrastructure to the needs of their business.Organizations need consistency across environments – security most of all.

Whether they are responding to government mandates or C-level
demands, organizations use the public cloud to participate in
industry ecosystems, leverage cloud-native architectures, and
deliver applications at the speed of the business. Despite the
strategic imperative, organizations are much less confident in their
ability to withstand an application-layer attack in the public cloud
versus in an on-premises data center. This discrepancy illustrates
a real need for easy-to-deploy solutions that can ensure consistent
security across multiple environments.

87% of organizations are multi-cloud and most still struggle with security.

Following through on their strategic initiatives, organizations continue to adopt cloud platforms at a high rate, with 27% of respondents reporting that they will have more than half of their applications in the cloud by the end of 2020. When we asked organizations how they decide which cloud is best for their applications, the number one answer was on a “case-by-case, per application” basis. This approach necessitates using multiple providers, and three out of four respondents report that they have applications in two or more cloud providers. This per-application strategy is required because each application is unique and serves a specific function within the business. Each can have end users that scale from less than a hundred to into the millions. And each has a different risk exposure—from a breach, to public embarrassment, to costing the business billions of dollars in damages.

It is imperative to have application services that span multiple
architectures and multiple infrastructures to ensure consistent
(and cost-effective) performance, security, and operability
across the application portfolio.

There are many challenges in managing a multi-cloud environment, and maintaining security, policy, and compliance are chief among them as reported by respondents:

• • Applying consistent security policies across all company applications
• • Protecting applications from existing and emerging threats
• • Complying with regulations

This is not surprising as evidenced by 71% of organizations reporting a skills gap in security. The highest skills gap lies in the discipline of protecting their applications from attack and breach according to 54% of respondents. The location of those apps matters as well. Organizations report a much lower confidence in their ability to withstand an
application-layer attack in the public cloud. While 62% report they are confident in their ability to protect applications in an on-premises data center, only 45% of organizations are confident in their ability to protect applications in the public cloud.

F5 INSIGHTS FOR KEY FINDING 02
The notion of achieving a single application architecture or uniform infrastructure environment is a pipedream for most organizations of scale. Instead, leading organizations recognize that the most efficient and effective way to treat each application uniquely while operating and securing applications across heterogeneous architectures and environments is through a set of application services that abstract the application logic from the underlying infrastructure.

The challenge of providing security parity across all application architectures and infrastructure is brought into even sharper relief by taking a snapshot of the average application portfolio.

According to the survey respondents, no single application architecture has the majority. Three-tier web and mobile app architectures come in first at 40%, with client-server following right behind at 34%. Microservices/cloud-native architectures are on the rise at 15%, but old school mainframe/monoliths still account for 11%. With each new generation, additional business value is created and captured, yet the investments, value, and insights arising from the previous generation of architecture is still necessary—which leads to organizations having a diverse application portfolio.

Given the heterogeneous mix of application architectures in a typical organization’s portfolio, it is understandable that over a third of respondents reported that refactoring legacy applications for modern environments is a priority for digital transformation. Additionally, it highlights the fact that multi-cloud will be the norm for the long term. It is imperative to have application services that span multiple architectures and multiple infrastructures to ensure consistent (and cost-effective) performance, security, and operability across the application portfolio.

F5 NGINX INSIGHTS FOR KEY FINDING 01

Cloud, automation and orchestration, and big data analytics will be the top three strategic trends in the coming years.

It is time to manage the application portfolio like the business asset it is.
First, focus on the application services required to secure, scale, and digitize
IT and business processes. Automation and orchestration are key foundational tenets in this first phase of digital transformation. As organizations transition to the second phase, it is important to instrument application services to emit telemetry for unified visibility and control over policy enforcement. In the third phase, this telemetry from application services can be studied by cloud analytics tools to provide actionable operational and business insights such as predicting capacity, preventing loss, and delivering differentiated customer experiences.

80% of organizations are executing
on digital transformation—with
increasing emphasis on accelerating
speed to market.

According to senior leader respondents, 4 out of 5 organizations are embarking on digital transformation. Consistent with our findings last year, IT optimization and business process optimization are the top reported benefits of these initiatives. This demonstrates that IT organizations continue to re-evaluate their structures, processes, and workflows to set the stage for the next phase in their digital transformation journey. With organizations beginning to breach the second phase of digital transformation—a period marked by an increase in applications and an expansion of automation—their growing dependence on applications should be no surprise. When we asked organizations why they wanted to engage in digital transformation, it came down to business agility and differentiated customer experiences: the primary driver for organizations was improving the velocity of new product/service introductions (67%), followed by responding to emerging competitors (32%), and the behaviors of new buyers (31%). That every business today is an application business is not just a catchy marketing phrase.

For 62% of organizations, applications are essential to business; without applications, they cannot operate. And 36% tell us applications support their business and provide competitive advantage. Only 2% of respondents globally reported they do not need applications to operate—a group primarily composed of organizations with fewer than 100 employees.

It’s important to note that the use of the term “business” here is not restricted to revenue generating applications. External-facing applications make up less than half (45%) of an organization’s app portfolio. The rest are internal facing and include productivity, process related, and, increasingly, operational applications. These internal-facing apps are critical to digitizing business processes—and making them consistent, repeatable, and scalable. As digital business activities mature, organizations are looking to combine digital services from previously unconnected industries or segments, forming new ecosystems to create value. Senior leaders reported that cloud, automation and orchestration, and big data
analytics will be the top three strategic trends in the next two to five years.