F5 Networks have recently announced the availability of new, multi-cloud-ready application services for the South African market.

With growing pressure on organisations and developers to stay relevant, companies need to find ways for greater deployment flexibility, more effective security and faster time to market.

Demands are changing at a lightning pace and security concerns are surging.

The balance of power is shifting away from businesses, creating immense opportunities for those capable of delivering apps with speed, adaptive functionality and security.

This is particularly true as apps increasingly harness the cloud and sit at the heart of complex ecosystems incorporating everything from voice and biometrics to haptics and augmented reality.

In South-Africa as applications and the cloud rapidly evolve the game is changing, and the time for businesses to adapt and adopt is now.

According to Martin Walshaw, senior engineer at F5 Networks, the adoption of cloud has become more prevalent.

“Consumers utilise the cloud all the more through services, such as iCloud, Google Drive or OneDrive, and looking at F5’s internal employees alone, there is a vast amount of applications ran in the cloud in business through services like SalesForce and Office 365 among others.

“It is safe to say that we are moving away from private cloud on-premise and more towards a public cloud,” says Walshaw.

The benefits around pushing data into the public cloud include lower cost, greater agility, better business focus and easier scalability when and where needed; however, it is not without challenges.

“One of the challenges we face with cloud and having everything connected is that we don’t keep track of every piece of information that we give out,” he adds.

“With the creation of local data centres, the adoption of cloud will become far greater.”

By looking at the transforming future landscape, it is predicted that by 2020 there will be over 500 billion connected devices globally, and by 2025, 25% of jobs will be at risk of being automated and 65% of enterprises will be using Blockchain worldwide. Today, the data generation is already 44 times higher than in 2009.

This is according to F5 Networks’ 2017 State of Application Delivery report, the third such annual study.

Featuring South African-specific insight and research, the report spans the evolution of artificial intelligence and machine learning, the need for new collaborative models to support heightened transparency demands, the rise of new app interfaces (including augmented and virtual reality) and the potential-rich influence of blockchain technologies and edge computing.

F5 asked nearly 2,200 customers across the globe about their application environments, the services they use, and the challenges they face. F5 also asked how customers are approaching security, the cloud, DevOps, and automation and orchestration.

This is what F5 has learned:

  • The need for app services is increasing
  • Cloud expertise is vital
  • Security services build confidence
  • DevOps has gone operational

Through their findings, F5 has come to believe that a new approach to collaboration across public and private stakeholders will be vital.

Industry practice must move towards a more localised and decentralised ecosystem, and the development of AI and Machine learning is set to revolutionise the functions and services provided by apps.

Furthermore, rapid advances in the capability and cost of mixed reality technology will revolutionise app interfaces.

With this in mind, F5’s Multi-Cloud Portfolio is designed to provide consistency in multi-cloud environments.

The solutions empower companies with greater deployment flexibility, more effective and consistent security and faster time to market.

Companies are finding a mix of on-premises, public cloud, private cloud, or SaaS increasingly effective in delivering applications.

While a combination of solutions does increase flexibility, it also increases the challenge of managing and securing applications across a growing number of environments — not to mention ensuring a reasonable customer experience and controlling costs.

“The business imperative to deploy applications in multiple clouds – public and private, in colocation facilities, and in data centres – is on the rise, but many are struggling with the management of different development environments, toolsets, and orchestration technologies,” said Walshaw.

As the business landscape continues to adapt to pressing performance demands and security concerns, F5’s focus is on addressing the complexity of crowd sprawl head on, tackling challenges related to managing application services, inconsistent policies, security, as well as results-driven performance optimisation in the South African market.

These challenges can be mitigated with F5 products and technologies that ensure consistent services and security in any environment.

F5 solution engineers can examine your business objectives and provide powerful demonstrations customised to your specific IT and application environment.

F5 delivers cloud and security solutions that enable organisations to embrace the application infrastructure they choose without sacrificing speed and control.

“F5’s strategy is to ensure customers have the freedom to deploy any application – anywhere and at any time,” Walshaw concludes.

For more information visit the F5 Networks Website.