App-hungry APAC enterprises increasingly going hybrid: F5 survey

By Digital News Asia August 31, 2015

Mobile apps and BDA considered more important trends than the IoT
F5 releases Big-IP 12.0 to improve on- and off-premises deployments

App-hungry APAC enterprises increasingly going hybrid: F5 survey

ENTERPRISE applications are increasingly being moved to the cloud as organisations embrace the ‘cloud-first’ philosophy, according to F5 Networks and its recently released The State of Application Delivery in APAC 2015 survey.

Based on survey data from 3,200 IT decision-makers across Asia Pacific, the report looks into their current and planned use of application services, F5 Networks said in a statement.

The findings reveal that the use of apps by Asia Pacific companies is growing and shows no sign of abating, the company said.

Amongst those surveyed, almost half (45%) currently deploy from one to 200 apps, while almost 10% of organisations currently deploy more than 3,000 apps.

The study also showed that at least 41% of IT decision-makers are open to moving up to a quarter (24%) of their apps to the cloud by 2016, while almost 24% are keen to move between 25% and 50%.

App-hungry APAC enterprises increasingly going hybrid: F5 survey “As apps continue to be a critical part of the business strategy, organisations are seeking the same confidence level in cloud deployments that they’ve seen in the data centre,” said Emmanuel Bonnassie (pic), Asia Pacific senior vice president at F5 Networks.

“Companies in every industry rely on apps to drive customer engagement, employee productivity, and revenue today.

“In fact, our research revealed that mobile apps and big data analytics are considered more important trends than the Internet of Things.

“These findings suggest a growing hybrid environment across the region, with a mix of on-premises and off-premises solutions increasingly being adopted by enterprises,” Bonnassie added.

Obstacles for hybrid adoption

Despite the growing popularity of hybrid clouds, 29% of organisations attributed slow adoption to the failure to identify a comprehensive identity and access management policy.

Furthermore, another 35% also admitted to the lack of internal knowledge of the scope of cloud usage as an impediment to adoption.

App security is top priority

Additional survey results reveal that security is top priority for Asia Pacific organisations, outranking the importance of availability and performance when it comes to applications.

In fact, 42% of survey respondents believe that application services cannot be deployed without security.

Yet worryingly, a further quarter had no plans to deploy DDoS (Distributed Denial-of-Service) protection, suggesting that many organisations in the region still fail to view various types of attack as a significant threat to their business.

Big-IP v12

For organisations looking to deploy application services in hybrid environments, F5 Networks said ti has updated its Big-IP platform to expands hybrid services and improve the agility, security and performance of cloud application deployments.

BIG-IP version 12.0 takes advantage of F5’s application delivery services fabric, extending the F5 Synthesis model by combining physical and virtual resources to better support cloud and hybrid scenarios, the company claimed.

Among the key features, the new version:

Unifies hardware, software, and managed service resources to realise IT efficiency and cost savings, allowing customers to more easily transition workloads to cloud environments as needed, and incorporate technologies such as HTTP/2 while maintaining the same visibility, security and control of traditional infrastructures.

Supports customers deploying cloud and hybrid IT architectures, with Big-IP Virtual Edition solutions becoming available in Microsoft’s Azure Marketplace.

Extends secure authentication, authorisation, and accounting (AAA) capabilities to cloud-based, web-based, and virtual applications while centrally managing federated identity functions.