In our last newsletter we started to discuss some of the application delivery trends that we are highlighting in the 2011 Application and Service Delivery Handbook. We will use this newsletter to continue that discussion.
One of the reasons why application and service delivery continues to be an important topic for IT organizations was highlighted by a survey that we recently gave in which approximately 75% of the survey respondents indicated that when one of their company’s key applications begins to degrade, that the degradation is typically noticed first by the end user and not by the IT organization.
The fact that it has been true for years that end users are typically the ones who first notice application degradation makes it appear as if IT organizations are not getting better at ensuring acceptable application delivery. The reality is that most IT organizations do a better job today at ensuring acceptable application delivery than they did when we published the first application delivery handbook in 2007. Unfortunately, as discussed below, at the same time that IT organizations are getting better at application delivery, the application delivery challenges facing IT organizations continue to get more formidable.
The surveys that we recently conducted highlighted the fact that IT organizations are caught in a vice. On one side of the vice are the traditional application delivery challenges that IT organizations have been facing for years. One such challenge is optimizing the performance of chatty protocols such as CIFS.
In spite of the fact that IT organizations have been responding to this challenge for several years, over 80% of the IT organizations that we surveyed indicated that over the next year that it is at least moderately important for their organization to get better at optimizing the performance of chatty protocols. In addition, over 80% of the IT organizations that we surveyed also indicated that over the next year that it is at least moderately important for their organization to get better at another traditional application delivery challenge – optimizing the performance of TCP.
On the other side of the vice is an emerging set of application delivery challenges brought on by factors such as mobility, virtualization and cloud computing. To understand the magnitude of this challenge, the respondents to a recent survey were asked, “How will the ongoing adoption of mobile workers, virtualization and cloud computing impact the difficulty that your organization has with ensuring acceptable application performance?” Almost two-thirds of the survey respondents indicated that it would make ensuring acceptable application performance either harder or notably harder.
In future newsletters we will drill down into the specific application delivery challenges brought on by the adoption of virtualization and cloud computing. In the mean time we encourage you to download the first of the serial publications of the 2011 Application and Service Delivery Handbook. It can be found here.
