Cloud adoption draw F5's attention

There’s no shortage of chatter about cloud computing. Everyone is talking about it, including application delivery vendors that have ideas about how to improve application performance and availability in a cloud environment.

This week F5 Networks shared the findings of a cloud computing survey it commissioned to study enterprise adoption trends and obstacles. In a nutshell, F5 found large enterprises are buying into the idea: More than 80% of respondents said they were at least in trial stages for public and private cloud computing deployments (though not all industry research has come to the same conclusion).

The idea of an agile, scalable IT infrastructure is appealing to large enterprises, but concerns remain, according to Jason Needham, senior director of product management at F5.

“…despite interest in the cloud, widespread enterprise adoption of cloud computing is contingent upon solving access, security, and performance concerns,” Needham said in a statement. “As organizations turn to the cloud to increase IT agility, it is important for them to understand the technical components of the cloud and how the cloud will affect the network before developing an implementation strategy."

Half of respondents said they’ve already deployed a public cloud computing implementation and 45% said they’re currently using private clouds. There’s even money for it: 66% of respondents said they have a dedicated budget for cloud computing initiatives. In addition, 71% said they expect cloud computing budgets to grow over the next two years.

Less certain is how enterprises define cloud computing. There are lots of definitions floating around, and when F5 presented six industry definitions of cloud computing, the survey participants were unable to choose any of them as being "just right.”

To help clear up the confusion, F5 conducted a focus group of IT managers, network architects and cloud service providers to establish a definition of cloud computing. Focus group participants debated the merits of each definition in the survey, and agreed upon this standard definition for cloud computing:

Cloud computing is a style of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources are provided as a service. Users need not have knowledge of, expertise in, or control over the technology infrastructure in the "cloud" that supports them. Furthermore, cloud computing employs a model for enabling available, convenient and on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.

F5’s survey was conducted during June and July by independent market research firm Applied Research West, which polled more than 250 IT managers in large enterprises throughout North America.

Also this week F5 Networks announced an update to its Big-IP family with the release of new Application Ready Templates to streamline the creation of application profiles and configuration settings, and a new version of Enterprise Manager to simplify device management.

Ann Bednarz is associate news editor at Network World.