COVID-19 has catalyzed the speed and depth of the world’s digital transformation efforts, according to F5’s latest State of Application Strategy (SOAS) report1.
Now in its seventh year, the research features survey input from 1,500 respondents from a wide range of industries, organization sizes, and professional roles.
This year’s report strongly underlines how the need to improve connectivity, reduce latency, ensure security, and harness data-driven insights is intensifying. It also points to an elevated interest in cloud, as-a-service solutions, edge computing, and application security and delivery technologies.
"The COVID-19 pandemic has vastly accelerated a global digital transformation that was already underway. Progress that might normally have taken a decade has leapt forward in a single year," said Lori MacVittie, Principal Technical Evangelist, Office of the CTO at F5.
"In a short time, more organizations than ever have modernized and distributed applications—and the application security and delivery technology solutions that support them—closer to users. Add to that the use of edge computing, and we’re starting to see incredible momentum for the emergence of truly adaptive applications that can grow, shrink, defend, and heal themselves based on the environment they’re in and how they’re being used."
App modernization efforts double and AI adoption triples
Since the last SOAS report, the adoption rate of AI and machine learning, a marker of late-phase digital transformation, more than tripled to 56%.
Furthermore, 57% respondents embraced digital expansion, which is a 37% increase on last year. The latter shows an intensifying focus on business process automation, orchestration, and digital workflows, stitching together disparate applications to create seamless digital experiences. The same objective is being achieved through the use of APIs.
There was also an eye-catching 133% annual rise in respondents saying they are modernizing internal or customer-facing applications, with 77% now doing so.
On top of that, two-thirds were using at least two methods to create modern workloads (the combination of traditional and modern app components that result from modernization). Of the respondents claiming to use only using one method, 44%, said that they were enabling modern interfaces, either via APIs or components such as containers. A mere 11%, mainly technology organizations, are exclusively refactoring applications.
In other forward-looking developments, over half of respondents said they now treat infrastructure as code. The report shows that organizations using this approach are twice as likely to deploy apps more frequently, even when using automation. They are also four times more likely to have fully automated application pipelines, and twice as likely to have more than half of their application portfolios deployed using fully automated pipelines.
Architectural trends and shifts
The vast majority of organizations will continue to manage both traditional and modern applications and architectures. This expectation is supported by the 87% of survey respondents claiming that they now juggle both—an 11% increase over 2020. Nearly half of all organizations—30% more than last year—said they are managing at least five different architectures.
According to almost half of the survey respondents, the pandemic was the main factor in accelerating movement to the cloud and SaaS. More than two-thirds of respondents (68%) are now hosting at least some of their application security and delivery technologies in the cloud. Simultaneously, organizations are positioning themselves to address the architectural complexity that results from adding SaaS and edge solutions, maintaining on-premises and multi-cloud environments, and modernizing applications.
Application security and delivery solutions were also in the SOAS spotlight. The critical roles these enabling technologies play in customer experience and service level agreements (SLAs) are now recognized by nearly four out of five respondents. SaaS-based security was identified as organizations’ top overall strategic focus over the next two to five years.
Growing ambitions at the edge
Edge computing is also set to attract plenty of attention in 2021. As many as 76% of organizations surveyed say they have implemented or are actively planning edge deployments, with improving application performance and collecting data/enabling analytics as the primary drivers. Moreover, 39% believe that edge computing will be strategically important in the coming years, and 15% are already hosting application security and delivery technology at the edge.
"Organizations are definitely starting to look at the edge with more purpose," MacVittie explained.
"Cloud data centers, while supporting ubiquitous access, are only slightly more distributed than on-premises data centers. By contrast, the edge enables organizations to deliver applications closer to users. In many ways, the edge is just the next step outward in an expanding universe of distributed applications, with benefits—and drawbacks— aligned with those of multi-cloud strategies. Data analytics represents a key edge use case, enabling the insights required for digital transformation initiatives."
Another edge use case highlighted by the SOAS report is the distribution of modern workers. More than a third (42%) will support a fully remote workforce for the foreseeable future. Only 15% plan to require all employees to return to the office.
Organizations have data but lack insights and skills
More than half of SOAS respondents believe they already have the tools they need to report on the health of high-priority applications. Nevertheless, an alarming 95% say they are missing insights from their existing monitoring and analytics solutions.
Respondents agreed that the data collected by their tools is primarily used for troubleshooting, followed by early warnings about performance problems. Worryingly, a mere 12% report the data back to business units, whereas fewer than 24% of organizations use data and insights to watch for potential performance degradations. By contrast, when it comes to monitoring components that modernize apps, nearly two-thirds of respondents (62%) are measuring performance in terms of response time.
Conscious of a need to do better, over 80% of respondents said that data and telemetry are "very important" to their security plans, and over half are "looking forward" to the beneficial impacts of AI.
Survey respondents also flagged platforms that combine big data and machine learning (also known as AIOps) as the second most strategic trend in the next two to five years.
At the same time, that enthusiasm could be blunted by a lack of emerging, relevant skillsets in the market. This is particularly true for those identifying AIOps as their top strategic trend. Half of those respondents cited a paucity of skilled professionals as their number one challenge.
The road ahead
"Only organizations with the right combination of insights and automation will be able to sort through overwhelming data, recognize looming availability and performance issues before they occur, and act quickly enough to prevent them," MacVittie added.
"Until then, many won’t be able to take full advantage of their progress in digital transformation or generate additional speed toward AI-enabled businesses. Ultimately, this will require an application strategy that includes application security and delivery technology solutions that follow the apps, even as deployments continue to be spread among multiple environments positioned nearer to users and at the edge."
