* Forrester Research tackles the issue of improving application deployments
In today’s era of IT consolidation, ensuring application delivery is critical. More and more companies are looking to remove servers and data from their branch offices and consolidate everything in a data center — which means IT staff had better be ready to provide secure, high performing applications over the network to their distributed employees.
But it’s not always a smooth transition. In a recent study commissioned by F5 Networks and conducted by Forrester Consulting, 24% of respondents said their application deployments suffered a significant problem in the past year.
There’s no shortage of reasons for failed application rollouts. There’s software incompatibility, inadequate infrastructure, security problems and blown budgets, to name a few. But there’s one issue that Forrester’s 300 survey respondents said is most often the culprit behind application deployment challenges: Poor performance.
More than half (53%) of respondents said they had applications that suffered from performance issues during the last 12 months. The most often cited root causes of performance issues were network infrastructure and back-end infrastructure (servers, middleware and storage). In addition, the study found the majority of performance issues (71%) were emerging in production environments, as opposed to pre-deployment.
Forrester conducted the study, titled “Improving Application Deployments,” during the first half of 2007 and published it this month. One of the conclusions of the study is that products designed to improve the delivery of applications over networks can help solve deployment issues such as poor performance.
The research firm says many enterprises are looking to overlay a technology solution to ease deployment-related challenges, and it defines such an application delivery infrastructure as “technologies that streamline the connection of any user to any application by minimizing deployment burdens, reducing management costs, optimizing performance, and increasing security.”
Here are a few other interesting findings Forrester analysts unearthed in the study:
* Performance issues aren’t the only problems marring application rollouts. About 46% of respondents said they had projects not completed on time, and 41% reported projects not completed within budget.
* A wide range of application types is the norm. Forrester found that organizations have a mix of 44% packaged applications such as SAP, PeopleSoft and Oracle; 32% homegrown custom applications; and 21% open source products.
* Business goals drive IT priorities. When asked which business initiatives are a priority for IT, respondents most often cited improving customer satisfaction (74%) and improving the company’s top line (73%) and bottom line (71%).
* Making the shift to application-level security is no easy feat. Nearly 60% of respondents completely agreed that security is an important factor of application deployments, but only 39% felt they do a good job of actually securing those applications. “A layered defense model is necessary to defend against an evolving landscape of threats fueled by application-specific exploits,” Forrester reports.
The study can be found in its entirety here.
