The growth in the deployment of enterprise applications such as cloud and software-defined networking among organizations is said to keep productivity rising and the IT industry evolving. This paved the way for F5 Networks, an application delivery networking provider, to re-launch its F5 brand in the Philippines through an expansion in security and cloud services to stretch out the scope of its application delivery services.
“Applications are integral part of the business. In today’s world, enterprises rely on applications to drive customer engagement, employee productivity and revenue. F5 wants to ensure that applications are secured, fast, reliable and highly available to anyone, anywhere, on any device, at any time,” said Oscar Visaya, country manager in the Philippines of F5 Networks.
With F5 services, customers will be able to leverage F5 technology for more security and scalability in their architecture.
A study about the state of application delivery in Asia-Pacific was conducted in 2015 to more than 3,000 IT decision makers-respondents; 90 represented Philippines-based respondents who are using 100 to 300 applications. The report showed a growing number of respondents in the region who embraced the “cloud-first” philosophy.
The report found that almost half or 45% of respondents currently deploy between one to 200 applications, while almost 10% now deploy more than 3,000 applications. The organizations’ cloud-first strategy is growing this year with 67% saying their companies embrace this philosophy compared with only 21% in 2014. While 41% are open to moving up to a quarter (24%) of their applications to the cloud by 2016, almost 24% are keen to move between 25 to 50%.
The study also revealed that mobile applications and big data analytics are considered more important trends than the Internet of Things, which suggests that hybrid environment across the region, with a mix of on premise and off premise solutions, are increasingly being adopted by businesses.
“Hybrid environment is the future,” said Visaya, who added that the “flexibility of cloud is irresistible”.
Although hybrid cloud is growing in popularity, its adoption rate is slow as 29% of organizations failed to identify a comprehensive identity and access management policy. Besides, 35% said the lack of internal knowledge of the scope of cloud use is a hindrance to its adoption.
“They don’t have the analytics to understand when it is best to deploy applications in the cloud,” said Visaya.
On the other hand, keeping applications secured is now the top priority for businesses in the Asia-Pacific. The study claims that security outranks the importance of availability and performance of the application as 42% believe that application services cannot be deployed without security. On the contrary, a quarter of the respondents had no plans to install DDoS protection, indicating that organizations still do not consider attack as a threat to their business.
F5 has security platform to ensure that application delivery, user access and even data centers are secured from attacks.
Visaya said that if a phishing site is detected, it takes F5 to take it down in 15 minutes.