There are many ways to measure the impact of application performance. In the age of instant gratification, seconds can have a big impact. Think about revenue, reputation, returning customers, sales conversion, loyalty, productivity, and lost customers. No matter how you measure the impact, there is no doubt that applications need to perform, and perform well, for the business to be successful.
While everyone agrees that application performance goes hand-in-hand with business success, the conversation on how to achieve optimal performance remains contentious. Application performance can be affected by numerous factors and influences. This has given rise to a plethora of niche solutions that deal with various issues, and use different technologies.
However, none of these niche solutions are designed to deal with the whole delivery chain, and therefore cannot totally solve the poor application performance conundrum. To solve the problem, a wider approach is needed to remove the bottlenecks that ultimately are responsible for poor performance.
Make it happen
Consistently high-performing applications need to be maintained; however, making this happen when there are so many contributing factors to poor performance is another story. Many solutions aimed at speeding up performance focus on optimising content, using caching and geolocation to bring the content nearer to the user. They also use compression to make the content smaller, as well as implement protocols to lower the amount of network traffic overhead that can slow down transfer times.
Although these technologies are still applicable, and can help to boost performance, they don't address all the challenges that go hand-in-hand with the emergence of new Web application architectures, capabilities and deployment models. The Web is growing exponentially, as is the number of applications, the number of users, and the number of devices from which these users are accessing the Internet. Alongside this, the content and media themselves are no longer mostly text-based, but highly interactive, rich content, full of pictures and videos. The complexity of Web pages is playing a central role to response times, and the need to optimise applications.
End-users are not interested in justifications for poor performance.
In addition, the slew of mobile devices is contributing towards congestion of core IP networks, which have limited bandwidth; this also impacts significantly on performance. Next, security needs to be considered, which wasn't a major issue a decade ago, but now competes with performance for top priority. Although it is tempting to do so, security cannot be sacrificed for performance. There is no room for trade-off here. The application-layer threats that are occurring today can easily slip through the security net, and cause far bigger problems in the long run.
Mixed bag
The enormous variety of user device options, deployment challenges and support makes dealing with the performance of cloud-hosted applications an extremely onerous task that is near impossible to manage. Application delivery solutions must be able to handle all these issues, and address these challenges at the same time.
The majority of business-critical applications were developed to be delivered in company networks or data centres where the cost of LAN bandwidth is low and the latency experienced by users is less than 1ms. The advent and surge of cloud has changed the equation, as businesses are drawn to the myriad benefits gained when consuming their business-critical applications from global cloud infrastructures. These days, many of the applications businesses use are delivered from data centres in the US or Europe, which impacts on user experience due to high latency and expensive bandwidth.
End-users are not interested in justifications for poor performance. They don't want you to make your problems theirs; they just want the problem fixed. Business applications need to be fast, reliable, always available and not vulnerable to threats, either external or internal, even when access devices, delivery methods and protocols change over time.
This is where optimisation comes in. Optimisation focuses exclusively on the delivery of global applications through a dedicated and optimised telecommunications network. Optimisation enables business to get fast, flexible and reasonably priced access to their business-critical applications with an experience comparable to using the application over a LAN or accessed from their own data centre. In addition, optimisation enables the ability to speed up specific Internet applications or just the Internet, using the Internet access bandwidth companies already have.
With performance improvements of up to 95%, depending on the application, can your company afford not to look into the benefits of optimisation?
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