State of Application Delivery 2015: The answer was efficiency

When last we visited the State of Application Delivery 2015 we asked if SDN is the answer, what was the question? After taking live to the Internet for the last webinar in our series to discuss the insights we gleaned from our survey we determined that pretty much the answer was efficiency.

You can check out some highlights from that webinar here.

For some, SDN was about operational efficiency; about driving more stability and consistency out of the processes that push applications through the app deployment pipeline into production. For others, it was really about financial efficiency - the drive to lower capital expenditures. And for yet others it was about efficient use of time - speed - in getting apps to market faster.

All had at their root this common theme - efficiency. IT and indeed businesses today are experiencing rapid and sometimes unexpected growth driven by demand for mobile applications and the introduction of things into the equation. All agree that IT is under incredible pressure to step up and become more fast, scalable and efficient in order to deliver the apps upon which business now relies in this new economy. SDN, like DevOps, is one of the ways in which organizations are looking to operationalize their networks using programmability to automate and orchestrate the processes that govern the production pipeline.

Programmability is seen as a key component in general. A clear majority of organizations believe that all three faces of programmability - data path, APIs, and templatization - are important to operational strategies moving forward. As all three are at the heart of a clearly growing trend toward automation and orchestration of the entire data center and beyond (into cloud) we weren't surprised to see the emphasis put on programmability in general.

Over the course of our webinar series on the State of Application Delivery 2015 we've seen interesting and sometimes surprising results (whodda thunk availability would win out over security as the most important application service?) and sometimes just validating results that match up with trends noted in the industry at large and by our own internal conversations with customers. We've delved deep into security, looking at the importance of DDoS protection as a means to ensure both security and availability, as well as looking into a growing interest to include subscription-based, managed services  like DDoS protection and Web Application Firewalls into the corporate security portfolio.

The State of Application Delivery 2015 represents our  (and the industry's) first - but certainly not our last - look at the application services considered essential to business' strategy of delivering secure, fast, and available applications with increasing velocity and at lower costs. As we move into this year, we're already gathering the data to pull together our next edition of the State of Application Delivery, which will no doubt carry a similarly descriptive title like "State of Application Delivery 2016." 

In the meantime, while you're waiting expectantly, you can review the webinars or grab a copy of this year's report.