A ZK Research survey of 200 respondents from the US and UK, as well as Forrester Consulting survey data of 150 IT and business leaders across five APAC markets revealed that 66% of businesses face difficulty in integrating and managing apps across third-party environments, while IT leaders also claim that over the next three years 50% of application workloads will not be migrated into public cloud environments.
More than 84% of senior IT decision-markets in APAC believe that a multi-cloud deployment will constitute up to half of their web and application hosting environment in the next three years – up from the region’s average of under 30% today.
Up to 67% of APAC business decision makers found that migrating applications into the multi-cloud had a positive impact on application experiences. About 67% of respondents believe that there is a lack of visibility and predictability across their IT environments. Also, 54% cited that they lack the control they need for managing a multi-cloud infrastructure.
“When it comes to the multi-cloud hype machine, the focus seems to be centred around the hyperscale platforms for app development instead of the application delivery outcome customers actually want, which is delivering an optimal end-user experience with their applications,” said Peter Melerud, co-founder and chief strategy officer for Kemp.
“The one constant that remains is the need for a highly-flexible, load balancing interconnect to not only serve as the foundation for app experience, but to be the conduit for the cloud adoption lifecycle.”
Report highlights
- Applications will be managed in multi-cloud and on-premises environments. Migration to the cloud is not all or nothing there are many organisations who will not be moving applications to the cloud, and others who will adopt a phased approach utilizing a hybrid environment.
- While hardware load balancers still reign, cloud and software-based load balancers will overtake in the next 3 years. ZK Research found that hardware load balancers are still the most popular form factor, however more survey respondents indicated that they are moving to virtual and cloud deployments.
- Load balancers are considered the ideal location for application security services. Surveyed CIO’s were in broad agreement that load balancing and single sign on/client authentication are the most common application services being deployed. WAF, SSL VPN and DNS are also very commonly deployed.
- Most enterprises are facing application experience challenges in multi-cloud. Multi-cloud architecture eliminates enterprises’ dependency on any single cloud provider. However, significant application experience challenges are being encountered when using two or more public clouds, as well as private cloud infrastructure.
Analyst comments
Mike Fratto, senior analyst, applied infrastructure and DevOps for 451 Research said: “Application experience (AX), which focuses on outcomes, will resonate with customers that want to provide value to the business through the application of technology, and opens the door to talk about more than just load balancing – AX is about the entirety of the experience, including performance, reliability, consistency and security capabilities.”
“Enterprises are increasingly deploying hybrid cloud and multi-cloud architectures to support digital initiatives and IT transformation. 35 percent of network managers say public cloud initiatives are a major driver of their decision-making today, and another 35 percent say private cloud initiatives are a major driver. In addition, the average enterprise claims that 45 percent of its network traffic is attributable to public cloud applications,” noted Shamus McGillicuddy, research director, EMA.
Lee Doyle of Doyle Research noted that application delivery controller (ADC) functionality has evolved to meet the challenges of the multi-cloud world. ADC features now can be flexibly delivered where and when they are needed. “Application delivery resources are right sized for the workload and can be dynamically adjusted to meet changing demands (e.g. seasonal variations). Per-application or per-workload ADC deployment means that each environment can be scripted, automated and secured in a customized manner for optimal operationally efficiency,” he added.
