Companies have significantly sped up their digital transformation efforts in the past year, a theme anticipated to persist beyond the pandemic, especially on artificial intelligence, telemetry and multi-cloud deployments, according to F5’s 2021 State of Application Strategy Report.
The report represents more than 1,500 IT decision-makers worldwide, with a significant portion of respondents coming from Asia Pacific.
“We find companies relying more on automation to reduce operating costs while increasingly tailoring applications for customer-centric digital experiences.,” said Kara Sprague, EVP at F5. “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.”
The report focused 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.
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.
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. 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.
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.
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.
