10 Takeaways From ESG & Radware's Application Delivery Controllers Report

The Emergence Of ADCs

Application delivery controllers (ADCs) are becoming a critical component strategy as enterprises fine-tune security policy and enforcement to align with their sensitive business applications, according to a report released this month from the Mahwah, N.J.-based vendor Radware and the IT research firm Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG).

Radware, who touts itself as a global leader of application delivery and application security solutions for virtual and cloud data centers, partnered with ESG to conduct a collaborative research project about the current use and future strategies of ADCs based on a survey of nearly 250 IT professionals.

The research showed that organizations are deploying ADCs as virtual appliances at an increasing rate, and the role of ADCs has expanded beyond the historical perception of hardware-based load balancers, according to Radware.

Here are the top 10 key points to the report, titled "The Expanding Role and Importance of ADCs."

10. ADC Common In Network Architecture

The report shows that ADC is a common component in the network architecture of small to large enterprises, with 51 percent of enterprise organizations saying they have at least 21 ADCs in use today. Organizations believe that the total number of ADCs will increase.

"Interestingly, almost half of respondents use ADCs for network-level security tasks like firewalling and network segmentation," said Nir Ilani, director of application delivery at Radware, in an interview with CRN. "This indicates that ADCs have a role within network engineering and operations."

9. Experts Think ADCs As Hardware, But Virtual ADCs Increasing

Although physical ADCs are more common, two-thirds of organizations have deployed a combination of physical and virtual ADCs, according to the report. IT professionals are implementing virtual ADCs as they align ADC processing power with application performance requirements. They can be customized for multitenant environments and provisioned easily and in the same fashion as virtual workloads, said IIani.

’Organizations now rely on ADCs as an important part of their overall security strategy, and like other layers in infrastructure, ADCs are moving from physical to virtual -- providing added and necessary flexibility in network management,’ said Jon Oltsik, senior principal analyst at ESG, in a release.

8. ADCs Seen As Last Line Of Defense

Nearly one-third of respondents to the survey said it was ’likely’ that a malicious attack would penetrate their network perimeter -- leaving the ADC as a last line of defense. Just over half said they feel the impact to their network would be a data breach, and 48 percent said they would expect a disruption of network services.

"As ADCs have proven to be more than just load balancers, IT professionals are looking to their ADCs to not only help protect during a data breach, but have the ability to operate while under attack," said IIani.

7. Important IT Priorities Will Focus On Cloud

IT professionals from organizations with 1,000 or more employees with $500 million or more in revenue said that the use of cloud infrastructure services will be a "priority" over the upcoming year, as well as building a ’private cloud’ infrastructure and an increased use of server virtualization.

"This shows that virtualization will be a prime focus," said IIani.

Approximately 70 percent of respondents in the report also said they have a strategic initiative to automate provisioning of IT infrastructure resources.

6. Security Problems Provide Challenges

Roughly 40 percent of respondents listed their security problems as the most common challenge in terms of meeting application service level agreements over allocation of staff to meet project schedules or compatibility issues with applications.

"As security overshadows the ability to meet [service level agreements], this shows why ADCs are playing a role to bolster the security within the network," said IIani.

5. Collaboration Needs To Improve

Respondents were asked to characterize the day-to-day collaboration between IT security and networking groups. Out of the 149 who responded, slightly more than half felt that the collaboration was good, but not all of the time.

"As these two groups have a disparity between goals, they may not see eye-to-eye on prevalent issues that challenge their organization -- or use entirely different tools and reports on the status of network security," said IIani.

More than one-third felt that leadership is ultimately responsible for aligning collaborative efforts with both groups.

4. Programmability And Automation Are Key

Another interesting statistic was the need for IT infrastructure automation, which includes network operations automation. Approximately 90 percent of respondents said their organizations have a strategic initiative of automating the network operations processes, which essentially includes ADCs.

"With ecosystems such as Cisco ACI, VMware NSX and OpenStack, this is clearly a strategic move towards being part of a next-generation, automated and programmable data center," said IIani.

3. Multi-Tenancy Here To Stay

The vast majority of applications that are supported by ADCs run in multitier environments, according to the report. IIani said this doesn’t mean that all of these applications run on top of multitenant ADCs, but there are still challenges in deploying ADCs to support multitenant applications. The top four challenges include configuration issues at 35 percent; operational complexity at 30 percent; performance issues due to shared tenant environments at 29 percent; and the ability to scale at 28 percent.

2. ADCs Moving Beyond Load Balancing

The report shows that enterprises are using numerous ADC features today and obtaining more value out of their "load balancing" investment.

"Network professionals are using the programmable interfaces on their ADCs for performance tuning, application monitoring and security," said IIani.

ADCs also are being used for web application firewalls to protect critical applications from attacks, according to the report.

1. ADCs Are A Must-Have

ADCs have become a mandatory component of the enterprise network, according to the report. When asked about future deployment, 82 percent of organizations believe that the number of ADCs will increase at their organizations over the next three years.

"ADCs have evolved well beyond the historical perception of hardware-based load balancers to allow for enterprises to be creative with their ADC deployments for performance tuning, application-specific services and critical system protection," said IIani.