- A Special Report by the Webtorials Analyst Division
- Jim Metzler, Principal Analyst and Co-Founder
While ensuring acceptable application delivery has always been important, it historically was not a top of mind issue for the majority of IT organizations. That changed several years ago when IT organizations began to develop a concerted focus on it. As part of this focus, many IT organizations began to deploy a first generation of solutions that were intended to protect the organization from a growing number of security attacks, to mitigate the impact of chatty protocols such as CIFS (Common Internet File System), to offload computationally intensive processing (e.g., TCP termination and multiplexing) from servers and to manage application performance on an end-to-end basis. Throughout this white paper, the application delivery challenges and solutions of this era will be referred to as Application Delivery 1.0.
However, at the same time that many IT organizations are still in the process of implementing solutions that respond to the challenges of the Application Delivery 1.0 era a new generation of challenges is emerging. These challenges are driven in large part by the:
- Emergence of a sophisticated mobile workforce
- Shifting emphasis and growing sophistication of cyber crime
- Adoption of varying forms of virtualization
- Adoption of cloud computing
Throughout this white paper, this new generation of application delivery challenges and solutions will be referred to as Application Delivery 2.0.
The goal of this white paper is to provide a reality check on the status of application delivery with a focus on optimization and management. Towards that end, this paper will identify which optimization and management challenges are currently top of mind for IT organizations and will also identify what steps IT organizations plan to take to respond to these challenges. One of the advantages of identifying the steps that IT organizations are taking to respond to a set of challenges is that this information enables an IT organization to see how their approach compares to that of their peers. That is important because most IT organizations do not want to be too far outside of the mainstream. That is particularly important at this point in time given the fundamental changes being driven by the challenges listed above.
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This is an excellent research-based report by my colleague and division co-founder, Jim Metzler.
The description above does a super job of describing the content. From an overall perspective, one of the most important aspects is that the report doesn't sugar-coat the challenges ahead.
That said, I look forward to your participating in the discussion to follow.
Also, many thanks to Alcatel-Lucent, Fluke Networks, and Juniper Networks for their support that helped make the report possible.