Treat your apps better

Applications are the lifeblood of your business. It’s important that delivery of applications is optimised and secured in order that user experience is maintained at a suitably high level.

The reality is a little more rudimentary. In the main, organisations still devote their attention and resources around what can be characterised as packet delivery networks. That is to say, application performance relies on server load balancing.

Server load balancers came about as a result of a specific need: to distribute load around servers responsible for delivering a Web application. Later, attention focused on outbound traffic too; at improving the performance and security of applications on the network. At this point, the term 'Application Delivery Controller' or 'ADC', was coined by the industry analysts Gartner. What started out as a network technology became something that touched the server, application, security and operations functions as well as the networking team.

ADCs are currently in place within many organisations. The kicker is that they are used only as if they were no more than server load balancers. Does this matter? No organisation utilises the full capabilities of each and every one of their purchases, software or hardware. In the case of optimising and securing application traffic, though, yes, it matters.

ADC platforms sit in a critically important position in the data centre. Firms that think of a device that sits in-line with all application traffic and that can manipulate, accelerate and secure that traffic as something that is best used to balance load between servers are missing out on years of innovation. ADCs are the only device in the data centre that can provide a real-time view, across all applications of resource requirements and data flows and patterns.

There is a need for change. Web 2.0, virtualisation, the need to reduce power usage within data centres, cloud computing - these approaches, imperatives and technologies all place increased strain on the infrastructure. Without techniques to manage this strain, they are almost certainly going to be challenging to implement effectively.

Technologies to address these issues are in place and proven within the best ADCs. Bluntly, basing application delivery policies on server load balancers is a waste of time and resources. Incremental investment in an ADC, whether that involves buying one or switching on unused functionality and learning how to use it, should be easily covered by the benefits: reduced server and bandwidth needs, much improved end-user experience and productivity.