Whether or not you were in Las Vegas last October, you’ve probably seen the uptick in news stories and analyst reports about application delivery. It’s a market that’s predicted to be worth billions in the coming years—which will create seismic shifts in the way organizations think about applications.
“Application delivery is rapidly becoming one of the defining issues of this generation,” said Wes Wasson, Citrix VP of worldwide marketing. “Companies that are fluent in app delivery will thrive, while those who fail to make it a strategic priority will struggle to keep pace with the rate of change in today’s increasingly dynamic world.”
Application delivery is all about getting applications from the data center to the user as efficiently as possible, with technology that improves performance, availability and security. Here are three reasons why it’s important to your business:
1. The Application is King
Applications are the language of business. Whether they’re ERP or custom Web apps, email or SOA, if your applications don’t function, neither can your organization. “Without an application, all computing infrastructure is useless,” Citrix president and CEO Mark Templeton said. “And if it can’t be delivered and used for business purposes, is it relevant?”
“Virtually every business project today depends in some way on IT’s ability to get applications to the people that use them and to ensure that it is done in the fastest, most secure and most cost-
effective way possible,” said Wasson.
But the old model of application deployment and legacy technologies leave IT struggling just to “keep the lights on” in the face of frequently changing requirements. If the infrastructure you rely on to deliver business applications to end users wasn’t designed with modern application realities in mind, you end up massively overprovisioning, buying too much bandwidth, adding too many servers, and refreshing PCs on an increasingly short lifecycle just to keep up with growing application requirements. That’s not strategic, it’s reactive—and the growing sophistication of applications will eventually make such simplistic approaches impossible.
Deploying an infrastructure solution along the line of sight between data centers and end users—from end to end, with products that work great with your existing infrastructure and even better when deployed together—makes it easy to deliver any application to any user with the best performance, highest security, and lowest cost.
2. The World is More Dynamic
Mobility, globalization, offshoring, outsourcing: we’re living in an era when more than half of all workers are in some type of branch office location, perhaps separated by oceans and time zones from the data center and the applications they need. As a user’s distance from the data center increases, application performance nosedives, user experience declines and security gets much more complicated to control. And as application availability becomes more difficult to manage, costs start spiraling up.
To avoid incrementalism—many rational individual decisions that limit the effectiveness of the system as a whole—IT must move beyond the siloed infrastructure created over the past decades to face the world as it is now: in constant flux. According to technology and market research firm Forrester, IT budgets are growing just 7 percent—and only 37 percent of that is allocated to new initiatives. These numbers require throwing out the old “more is more” approach and meeting new challenges, from Web 2.0 to the next generation of MySpace workers, with more creative solutions.
A true end-to-end application delivery infrastructure lowers TCO, improves the user experience, and increases IT’s flexibility to deliver just about any environment, desktop, application, media or service to any user, anywhere. And that makes the solution less about IT, and more about what IT can do for the business.
3. Risk is Climbing
There’s a tug-of-war underway between security and availability. A more dynamic business environment demands more responsive networks be available to more users in more locations on more devices. Meanwhile, the regulatory climate and the increasing sophistication of security threats encourage limitations and greater controls.
According to Forrester, 97 percent of network architects said application security was their top priority last year, followed closely by combating network security threats.
“The need to integrate security with any approach to application delivery is becoming crucial today because there are so many ways to gain unauthorized or malicious access to information and IT resources,” Scott Crawford, senior analyst at IT management research and consulting firm EMA, explained in a Business Trends Quarterly executive interview. But, he added, “it is important to identify where you can apply security, but not in such a way that you interfere significantly with the user experience or increase the complexity of the environment to the extent that you are creating risks rather than solving them.”
Application security and data security must be a fundamental principle that’s baked into your application delivery approach. Citrix application delivery infrastructure treats security as a design philosophy, enabling strong protection without unnecessarily limiting user options. From centralized data in the data center, to policy controls that restrict users based on their role, to built-in application firewall capabilities, the end-to-end solution easily manages the complexity of the dialogue between users and applications.
Citrix’s guiding strategy is the belief that companies that make application delivery a priority are improving business processes, enhancing customer experience, and responding with agility to market forces. Click the link for more about the impact of application delivery—and why it’s important to your business.
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