Digital transformation has led to a surge in the number of emerging application services

January 17, 2018? F5 Networks (NASDAQ: FFIV) today announced the findings of its 2018 State of Application Delivery report. (Please click 2018SOAD to download the full survey results) This global customer survey shows that accelerating the deployment of cross-cloud environments can help enterprises choose the cloud platform that best meets specific application requirements. However, as enterprises innovate their application portfolios to adapt to the new digital economy, issues such as managing operations and security across multiple clouds have also arisen.

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“Even as security breaches continue, the trend toward digital transformation shows no signs of slowing down,” said Adam Judd, senior vice president of F5 Networks’ Asia Pacific China and Japan region. “Applications are the new normal in Asia Pacific as digital transformation changes the way more than 4 billion Asians interact with the data-driven economy. This year’s State of Application Delivery report reflects how digital transformation is impacting businesses in Asia Pacific, helping them build a solid platform to deliver faster, smarter, and more secure application-driven customer experiences.”

Now in its fourth year, the State of Application Delivery report examines the critical role application services play in enabling enterprises to deploy applications faster, smarter, and more securely. More than 3,000 IT, network, application, and security professionals around the world weighed in on application delivery topics ranging from public, private, and cross-cloud adoption to growing security challenges to automation, orchestration, and the future of enterprise application services.

Survey Highlights

The survey collected responses from a variety of global industries including government, financial services, technology and education. Respondents’ positions ranged from infrastructure, IT security, application development and DevOps staff to executives. Key findings include:

• Digital transformation drives the development of new architectures and IT optimization initiatives: 69% of respondents in Asia Pacific said that optimizing IT infrastructure and processes remains the main driver of digital transformation projects, while more than half of respondents said digital transformation has led to an increase in cloud application delivery services. In addition, 44% of respondents said that digital transformation has changed the way they develop applications, and 37% said they are developing new application architectures such as containers and microservices.
• Cross-cloud environment helps implement "best cloud selection for applications": Most companies want to implement the best deployment strategy for each application, which gives rise to cross-cloud architecture. 84% of respondents in the Asia-Pacific region said their companies have adopted a cross-cloud environment, while nearly half (49%) of respondents said cloud decisions are made on a per-application basis.
• Gateway services are rising rapidly: Enterprises use an average of 16 different application services to ensure applications are fast, secure, and available. Security remains the most important application service, but gateway services have emerged rapidly as an emerging need this year as IT organizations prepare for the digital economy. In Asia Pacific, four of the top five services that enterprises plan to deploy in the next 12 months are application gateway services, including SDN, API, IoT, and HTTP/2.
• Increased cross-cloud environments and reduced security confidence: Although digital transformation has prompted enterprises to deliver more applications through the cloud, the lack of experience and expertise in protecting public cloud applications has hit the confidence of enterprises in resisting attacks. In fact, 28% of respondents worldwide this year said that application protection is the top security challenge facing their companies. This has led to more and more enterprises starting to deploy web application firewalls (WAFs), and only 2% of respondents in the Asia-Pacific region said they would not expect WAFs to protect applications in the next 12 months.
• Automation and orchestration go hand in hand: IT departments are beginning to embrace programmability and standardize on automation and orchestration environments to streamline IT while reducing operational expenses. More than 80% of respondents in Asia Pacific said they have implemented automation in production deployments, and most of the companies surveyed aim to address automation needs through the "big three" (VMware, Cisco, and OpenStack).

F5 (NASDAQ: FFIV) helps the world's largest enterprises, service providers, governments, and consumer brands improve the speed, intelligence, and security of applications. F5 provides cloud and security solutions that enable enterprises to take full advantage of the application infrastructure of their choice without sacrificing speed and control. For more information, please visit f5.com. You can also follow @F5 China official Weibo on Weibo to learn more about F5, its partners, and technology.

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