Kemp survey shows businesses struggling with application issues

Businesses are being plagued by a lack of notification and assistance with application issues.

Since they are not utilising the agility and uptime of per-application load balancers, routine tasks are taking longer than expected.

Their plight is outlined in a report commissioned by Kemp, which compiles industry findings from a Forrester Consulting survey data of IT and business leaders across five Asia-Pacific markets; and results from a ZK Research survey with respondents from the US and UK.

The State of Application Experience (AX) report shows that in more established environments, IT professionals are finding it increasingly difficult to add new applications.

New or separate infrastructure might be deployed to safeguard an existing application set so that they don't impact each other, increasing the time to deployment.

Some commercial load balancers are often seen to be unnecessarily complicated to configure.

These require extra time to learn how to configure, troubleshoot and test new deployments.

Cloud issues

As cloud providers have their own native load balancers, the same configuration cannot be replicated across clouds or back at home, adding to the time required to deploy applications in different locations.

However, Doyle Research's Lee Doyle says: "ADC (application delivery controllers) 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 customised manner for optimal operationally efficiency.

Concerns and challenges

The agility and uptime of per-application load balancers has not yet been utilised, and routine tasks take longer than expected. Insufficient notification and assistance with application issues are affecting businesses.

In longer-established environments, it is becoming harder to add new applications.

New or separate infrastructure might be deployed to safeguard an existing application set so applications don't impact each other, thus increasing the time to deployment.

The report shows that the majority of enterprises are facing application experience challenges in multi-cloud.

Some 66 percent have difficulty integrating and managing across third-party cloud environments, while 57 percent say siloed management brings latency in application experience.

Another 57 percent say multi-cloud is unable to cater to their unique needs.

While multi-cloud architecture eliminates enterprises' dependency on any single cloud provider, organisations encounter significant AX challenges when using two or more public clouds.

More than half of organisations receive insufficient notification and assistance with mission-critical application issues.

Close to a third of organisations surveyed experience mission-critical application downtime between an hour to a day.

While multi-cloud architecture eliminates enterprises' dependency on any single cloud provider, organisations encounter significant AX challenges when using two or more public clouds.

More than half of organisations receive insufficient notification and assistance with mission-critical application issues. Close to a third of organisations surveyed experience mission-critical application downtime between an hour to a day.

Future needs

What do IT teams need in the future?

The migration of applications to multi-cloud is enabling better application experience, control and flexibility.

Pay-per-use load balancing of applications is designed to make scalability and automation faster.

Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) research has found that enterprises are increasingly deploying hybrid cloud and multi-cloud architectures to support digital initiatives and IT transformation.

Thirty-five percent of network managers say public cloud initiatives are a major driver of their decision-making today, while 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.

The State of AX report predicts that IT Teams will continue to manage applications in both multi-cloud and on-premises for the foreseeable future.

Those applications will be both cloud-native and traditional applications.

The shift from hardware to cloud and software load balancer is very gradual.

Load balancers are seen as key to maintaining the best and most secure application experience.

"Application experience, 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, including performance, reliability, consistency and security capabilities," says 451 Research, Applied Infrastructure and Devops Senior Analyst Mike Fratto.

The report predicts:

1. Applications will be managed in cloud and on-premises. Migration to the cloud is not all or nothing. While there is lots of noise around cloud migration, many organisations will not be moving applications to the cloud.

2. Organisations will manage some cloud-native applications and traditional applications in the cloud. About a third of applications will not be modified or replaced before being migrated to the cloud.

3. Hardware load balancers still reign but only software load balancers can grow in the cloud. Hardware load balancers are still furthest along in the deployment process when compared to other form factors.

4. Organisations view load balancers as fundamental to maintaining the best application experience. Forrester spoke to organisations across five countries and asked how many applications on average need to be managed by a given load balancer, 8-10 organisations need to manager between 50 to 400 applications on a given load balancer.

5. Load balancers are seen as a key location for application security services. Organisations revealed that load balancing and single sign-on/client authentication are the most common application services being deployed. WAF. SSL, VBPN and DNS are also very commonly deployed.