Applications are essential to business success. That’s why it’s critical for organizations to understand the importance of the application delivery infrastructure that supports their apps. If organizations deploy the right application delivery infrastructure, their applications will perform better, and their businesses will achieve greater digital resilience and improved business outcomes. Recently, I talked with Brad Casemore Research, Vice President, Datacenter and Multicloud Networking, IDC, about the modernization of IT and the future of application delivery.
Why should organizations invest in modern digital infrastructure for application delivery?
As organizations worldwide look to a new normal in the aftermath of the global pandemic, digital transformation (DX) has never been more critical to sustainable business success.
Most organizations implicitly understand that applications are now integral to business success, but they should also appreciate the implications for the infrastructure that supports and delivers their applications. To an unprecedented degree, due to the relentless imperative of digital transformation and the embrace of hybrid IT as a means of achieving DX objectives, application delivery infrastructure must be aligned seamlessly with business intent, capable of adjusting quickly to accommodate dynamic shifts in business requirements. Traditional application-delivery infrastructure wasn’t designed to meet those needs, and that’s why IDC sees a compelling need for investment in modern application-delivery infrastructure.
What are the new challenges that application-delivery infrastructure must address?
The challenges can be daunting. Adoption of hybrid IT and multi-cloud — with workloads increasingly distributed across a landscape comprising datacenters, clouds, and SaaS — places a premium on agility while compounding complexity. Recent research from IDC, based on a worldwide survey of enterprises, demonstrates the distributed nature of applications, with SaaS and IaaS increasingly predominating.
We know that complexity is a mortal enemy of agility. That means organizations must ensure that their application delivery infrastructure can deliver agility while mitigating the architectural and operational complexity associated with delivering and supporting a diverse array of applications running on heterogeneous infrastructure across in-house datacenters, multiple clouds, and SaaS.
While automation is increasingly seen as a way to resolve this dilemma, discrete and fragmented approaches to automating application delivery infrastructure in a hybrid or multi-cloud context invariably fall short of what’s required by enterprise IT, which is often struggling to keep up with the quickening pace of digital business.
A simpler, more comprehensive approach to intelligently automating application delivery infrastructure is required, one in which human operators define business intent and can then trust, through inherent verification, that the infrastructure can and will faithfully execute the corresponding machine-to-machine processes throughout the application delivery lifecycle.
How does a more comprehensive approach to application delivery infrastructure relate to successful digital business and resiliency?
Structure and infrastructure should always follow and reflect strategy, and the axiom remains true in the context of application delivery infrastructure. The business objectives are clear enough: to ensure application experience, to improve digital engagements, to maximize the productivity of personnel, and ultimately to achieve sustainable competitive advantage through digital infrastructure. For modern application delivery infrastructure, that translates into a need to auto-detect performance degradation that might affect application experience, as well as a means of precluding potential outages through a capacity to autoscale and respond dynamically to variations in application and service demand. When issues do threaten application availability and experience, modern application delivery infrastructure must offer ways to automatically resolve them, either through immediate self-healing or through expedited and effective troubleshooting and remediation.
The capabilities must extend across a WAN that includes the internet, which provides breakout and transit for a growing percentage of key cloud applications. The drawback of using the internet is the lack of control and its constantly changing state, which is one reason why the internet can materially affect application experience. Application delivery infrastructure must address this gap through advanced global server load balancing (GSLB), which ideally should be aware of geographic as well as real-time internet state. In addition, pervasive visibility is required across the network so that potential blind spots can be readily observed and monitored.
Indeed, IDC has found that the proliferation of cloud applications is having a profound impact on WAN technology choices and strategies, with SaaS, IaaS, and hybrid/multi-cloud all having considerable impact on technology choices of network technologies
Considering its criticality to digital business, what are the specific capabilities that modern application delivery infrastructure should provide?
IT teams and their organizations should look for application deliver infrastructure that is intelligently and comprehensive automated, and that means the following capabilities are essential:
- Simple, declarative, intent-based management, so that the infrastructure intelligently acts on intent and meets business objectives through continuously verified means
- Continuous learning and adaptation, which means the infrastructure ensures that intent is met at all times while also protecting and effectively responding to any issues or threats that might impair application availability and digital experience
- Ubiquitous reach across apps, infrastructure, and networks, including the capacity to address the real-time status and health of all applications, servers, ADCs, internet connectivity, cyberthreats, and other relevant variables through pervasive, full-stack visibility.
- Automated self-healing and continuous optimizations, predicated on visibility and real-time observability
- Internet status awareness throughout the entire lifecycle — from design to deployment to ongoing optimization — encompassing internet health and status awareness that can assist in responding to circumstances and variables that affect the availability, performance, and security of applications across hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
- Continuous protection for applications and APIs that are increasingly critical to successful digital business
What benefits can organizations expect to derive from having modern application-delivery infrastructure?
Several notable benefits can be achieved. What follows are five that are important to any organization pursuing digital transformation and digital resiliency.
- Business agility. The use of declarative intent to automate and simplify the orchestration and management of application delivery infrastructure results in greater business agility, ensuring that applications and services are delivered with reliability, security, and speed.
- Greater application availability and resiliency. Application delivery infrastructure that is intelligently self-sensing and self-healing, providing continuous optimization, serves to proactively and significantly mitigate network and security issues that can affect the availability and performance of business-critical applications and services.
- Increased productivity and improved operational efficiency. Simple but intelligent automation that extends throughout the life cycle — from design to deployment through day-to-day operations and ongoing optimizations — delivers operational efficiencies and contributes to greater productivity of IT staff, who can shift their focus to higher-value strategic planning and support for new services and away from lower-value manual operations.
- Enhanced application experience. Capabilities such as internet state awareness assist in ensuring that operations teams have insight into the end-to-end path of network segments that applications traverse, bolstering support for better user application experience. State awareness also helps operators choose the optimal location to host applications based on real-time and historical internet state data, also contributing to enhanced application experience.
- Holistic application protection. Integrated application and API security ensures that applications and workloads receive comprehensive protection, maintaining their integrity as well as assuring their delivery.
Conclusion
Investments in modern digital infrastructure, which offers intent-based intelligent automation and ubiquity, are becoming increasingly essential to digital business success. This is just as true for modern application delivery infrastructure, which should be predicated on the foundations of intelligent automation, simplified and streamlined operations, ubiquity (spanning datacenters and clouds worldwide), continuous optimizations, and holistic protection for applications and APIs.
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