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EMEA eyes massive app service deployments

Staff Writer
By Staff Writer, ITWeb
Johannesburg, 10 Mar 2017
Martin Walshaw, senior engineer at F5 Networks.
Martin Walshaw, senior engineer at F5 Networks.

The Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region is expecting a dynamic year as organisations eye massive application service deployments.

This is according to F5 Networks' 2017 State of Application Delivery report, the third such annual study. It surveyed over 2 000 IT, networking, application and security professionals worldwide to examine the role application services play in allowing enterprises to deploy apps faster, smarter and more securely.

According to F5 Networks, the average EMEA organisation plans to deploy 18 app services in the next 12 months, compared to the 2016 global average of 11.

As the threat landscape continues to evolve in complexity, speed and availability were ? for the first time ? deemed less important that overall application protection, with the most important services cited including network firewalls, anti-virus and SSL VPN solutions, says F5 Networks.

According to the research, the highest area of investment for 2017 in EMEA was the use of on-premises private clouds (46%). Almost half of respondents (48%) stated the private cloud would have the most strategic importance to their organisation in the next two to five years, and that three-quarters (76%) of their apps would be in the cloud by 2017.

In the region, the most important security feature was that the cloud should provide the same level of security and auditability as other similar on-premises services (61%). This hints that organisations are concerned about the disruption moving to the cloud can have on operations, says F5 Networks.

Nevertheless, respondents indicated a shift towards a more agile, multi-cloud world is gaining momentum. Globally, four out of five respondents indicated they are adopting hybrid cloud models.

"Businesses are putting their money where their strategy is when it comes to cloud," says Martin Walshaw, senior engineer at F5 Networks.

"There are still challenges to overcome but the global shift to embrace a hybrid scenario clearly shows a growing recognition that agility and speed can be achieved without compromising security, provided there are consistent policies and solutions in place."

F5 Networks says a new era of security vigilance is required as security teams expand beyond traditional firewalls and legacy enterprise perimeters. Organisations with a Web application firewall and DDOS mitigation services had the highest confidence in their ability to withstand an application-level attack and interestingly, cloud-first organisations have more confidence in their security, it notes.

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