psilva's prophecies: Available Applications Anywhere

The path to successful application delivery has been a long and winding road for many companies.

Back in the days of Y2K and the dot-coms, applications were often delivered out of a physical data center. This usually consisted of a dedicated raised-floor room at the corporate headquarters or leased colocation space from one of the web hosting vendors—or both.

Soon, global organizations and ecommerce sites started to distribute their applications and deploy them at multiple physical data centers to address geo-location, redundancy, and disaster recovery challenges. This was an expensive endeavor even without the networking, bandwidth, and leased line costs.

Enter the cloud

When server virtualization emerged and organizations realized that they had the ability to divide resources for different applications, content delivery was no longer tethered 1:1 with a physical device. Content could live anywhere. With virtualization technology as the driving force, cloud computing formed and offered yet another avenue to deliver applications.

As cloud adoption grew, along with the software, platforms, and infrastructures enabling it, organizations were able to quickly, easily, and cost effectively distribute their resources around the globe. This allowed organizations to place content closer to the user depending on their location, and provided some fault tolerance in case of a data outage. Cloud also offers organizations a way to manage services rather than boxes along with just-in-time provisioning rather than over provisioning, which can be costly. Cloud enables IT as a Service and the flexibility to scale when needed.

Today, there is a mixture of options available to deliver critical applications. Many organizations have private, owned, on-premises data center facilities. Others lease resources at a dedicated location.

Staying a step ahead

In order to achieve or even maintain continuous application availability and keep up with the pace of new application rollouts, many organizations are looking to expand their data center options, including cloud, to ensure application availability. This is important since 84 percent of data centers had issues with power, space, cooling capacity, assets, and uptime that negatively impacted business operations according to IDC. That translates into application rollout delays, disrupted customer service, or unplanned expenses for emergency fixes.

Many organizations have found that operating multiple data centers is no easy task. New data center deployments or even the integration of existing data centers can cause havoc for visitors, employees, and IT staff alike. Public web properties, employee access to corporate resources, and communication tools such as email require security and back-end data replication for content consistency. On top of that, maintaining control over critical systems spread around the globe is always a challenge.

Simplify. Scale. Secure.

The BIG-IP platform provides organizations with global application services for DNS, federated identity, security, SSL off-load, optimization and application health and availability. Together, they create an intelligent, cost-effective, resilient global application delivery infrastructure across a hybrid mix of data centers. As companies simplify, secure, and consolidate across multiple data centers, they mitigate the impact to users or applications, minimize downtime, ensure continuous availability, and have on-demand scalability as needed.