Pandemic continues to advance digital
transformation with increased emphasis on AI, telemetry, and
multi-cloud deployments
F5 (NASDAQ: FFIV) today announced the availability of its 2021
State of Application Strategy report. In its seventh iteration,
this annual survey identifies several converging trends, many of
which have been significantly impacted as organizations revamp
digital experiences to address the evolving realities of COVID-era
consumers. Companies have significantly sped up their digital
transformation efforts in the past year, a theme anticipated to
persist beyond the pandemic. With limited in-person interactions,
applications—and the digital experiences they facilitate—have
become synonymous with an organization’s presence and ability to
thrive.
“This year’s report highlights the many contrasting priorities
that IT teams are currently facing. Of course, there’s the familiar
one of flexibility and convenience versus security, but then you
also have organizations generating an immense amount of data while
seeking ways to extract meaningful insights from that data,” said
Kara Sprague, EVP and GM, BIG-IP at F5. “Similarly, we find
companies relying more on automation to reduce operating costs
while increasingly tailoring applications for customer-centric
digital experiences. Many of these are a function of the speed in
which the industry has responded to COVID—in that it forced a
myriad of operational considerations, concerns, and opportunities
to be addressed simultaneously almost overnight.”
Improving connectivity, reducing latency, ensuring security, and
leveraging data insights are now even more essential, as IT teams
have found it nearly impossible to keep pace with the rate of
change and digitization of experiences. Moreover, while
microservices, APIs, and containers may accelerate individual
application rollouts from a DevOps perspective, the reach and
pervasiveness of modern apps has also resulted in heightened
complexity—with many organizations lacking the skill sets to truly
streamline deployments. This is especially the case when managing
broader application portfolios that span multiple generations of
application architectures. Correspondingly, this new research
centers on the following four trends, pointing to an elevated
interest in cloud and as-a-service offerings, edge computing, and
application security and delivery technologies that require less
expertise to deploy and manage while providing out-of-the-box
insights.
Continued Modernization of Apps and Architectures to Enable
Better Digital Experiences
According to the survey, 87% of organizations operate both
modern and traditional architectures, with modernization deemed
necessary when legacy systems are too rigid to adapt to rapidly
changing business conditions. More than three-quarters of
respondents (77%) reported that they are presently modernizing
internal or customer-facing applications, with APIs as the primary
method given their ability to combine capabilities of traditional
and modern application components. In addition, the percentage of
organizations maintaining multiple app architectures is growing,
with the survey also affirming that as-a-service and managed
service offerings continue to be viewed as replacements for some
applications where vendors can provide cloud-friendly
alternatives.
The Rise of the Edge as Containerization Expands
Edge computing generally refers to operations performed outside
of a centralized data center. With employees and consumers logging
on from increasingly distributed locations, edge computing has been
identified as a significant means to reduce latency and increase
the real-time responsiveness required by today’s applications.
Accordingly, the edge must evolve to better support modular
application components such as containers residing across multiple
cloud locations. In addition to promoting faster and more efficient
deployments, placing containerized applications at the edge can
improve scalability and the customer experience. Demonstrating an
appetite for these advantages, survey results note that 76% of
organizations have implemented or are actively planning edge
deployments, with improving application performance and collecting
data/enabling analytics as the primary drivers.
Accelerating Growth in SaaS and Cloud Deployments, Balancing
Flexibility and Security
With the percentage of applications deployed in the cloud
rising‚ more than two-thirds of respondents (68%) are also hosting
at least some of their application security and delivery
technologies in the cloud. Simultaneously, organizations are
positioning themselves to address the architectural complexity that
results from adding SaaS and edge solutions, maintaining
on-premises and multi-cloud environments, and modernizing
applications. Successful integration of these elements within a
cohesive application strategy will require up-leveling how tools,
skill sets, IT processes, and analytics are applied across dynamic
architectures. Security continues to be a key driver, with efforts
to stay ahead of attackers frequently requiring capabilities beyond
what organizations have the resources to manage on premises.
Further highlighting this challenge, SaaS for security was
identified as the top strategic trend among survey respondents.
The Importance of Telemetry in Meeting Evolving Customer and
Business Expectations
Harnessing telemetry to turn large volumes of data into business
insights is essential for adaptive applications. Even still, an
overwhelming 95% of respondents believe they are missing insights
related to performance, security, and availability, indicating a
desire for a much clearer end-to-end picture than their current
monitoring and analytics solutions provide. Individuals across
organizational roles were in uniform agreement on the topic, citing
the top three insights missed as: the root cause of application
issues; performance degradation causes; and potential attack
details. In parallel, nearly three-quarters of respondents intend
to leverage AI to better utilize telemetry data, and more than half
are looking toward AI to help their organizations transition to
applications that can automatically adapt to better defend
themselves and respond to changing conditions.
The report represents more than 1,500 respondents worldwide from
a breadth of industries, organization sizes, and professional
roles. Fundamentally, the survey focused on IT decision-makers to
best highlight the priorities, concerns, and expectations of those
most responsible for meeting the toughest challenges of today’s
digital economy. Together, their responses form a compelling
perspective of how organizations are evolving application
strategies to better serve the current and anticipated needs of
customers.
Additional Resources
- F5’s 2021 State of Application Strategy Report
- The State of Application Strategy: Enabling Adaptive Apps – F5
Blog Post
- The State of Application Strategy: Necessity is the Mother of
Motivation – F5 Blog Post
About F5
F5 (NASDAQ: FFIV) is a multi-cloud application security and
delivery company that enables our customers—which include the
world’s largest enterprises, financial institutions, service
providers, and governments—to bring extraordinary digital
experiences to life. For more information, go to f5.com. You can
also follow @F5 on Twitter or visit us on LinkedIn and Facebook for
more information about F5, its partners, and technologies.
F5 is a trademark, service mark, or tradename of F5 Networks,
Inc., in the U.S. and other countries. All other product and
company names herein may be trademarks of their respective
owners.
This press release may contain forward-looking statements
relating to future events or future financial performance that
involve risks and uncertainties. Such statements can be identified
by terminology such as "may," "will," "should," "expects," "plans,"
"anticipates," "believes," "estimates," "predicts," "potential," or
"continue," or the negative of such terms or comparable terms.
These statements are only predictions and actual results could
differ materially from those anticipated in these statements based
upon a number of factors including those identified in the
company's filings with the SEC.
Source: F5 Networks
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version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210303005338/en/
Rob Gruening F5 (206) 272-6208 r.gruening@f5.com
Holly Lancaster WE Communications (415) 547-7054
hluka@we-worldwide.com
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