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Speed up apps to drive productivity

Applications are at the heart of business, making their responsiveness and availability critical.

Christo Briedenhann
By Christo Briedenhann
Johannesburg, 17 Jun 2014

Applications are now the centre of the business world. Companies rely on them to reach customers, build products, automate back-end business processes and perform nearly every task critical to business, so the responsiveness and availability of applications is crucial.

Deloitte says mid-market companies are moving deliberately toward greater technology adoption, with 46% describing technology's role as 'strategic', and in many instances, focusing on functions such as customer relationship management and sales force automation.

Despite this, as many as 77% (1) of global companies continue to focus greater attention on virtualisation and consolidation, rather than the end-user experience.

Although it's true that virtualisation and cloud technologies can save companies money and improve efficiency, they can also make the task of managing applications more complicated, often causing performance to suffer. In an environment where business increasingly dictates IT spend and direction, performance is crucial. In fact, a recent IDC study found line of business ranks 'ease of use' as a key factor in enterprise applications - far higher than IT ranked it.

Achieving a happy balance between performance and new technology benefits may require a transition to a high-performance and more cost-effective infrastructure.

There are four steps to get started.

Attacking latency

Recently, Amazon calculated that a page load slowdown of just one second could cost up to $1.6 billion in sales each year. It also found half of mobile users abandon a page if it doesn't load in 10 seconds, with three out of five not returning to the site. So, it's clear that end-users have short attention spans and that responsiveness translates into revenue.

In the enterprise, users are increasingly being separated from their data, thanks to mobile work, the proliferation of branch offices and the move towards cloud. Now, most companies suffer from latency somewhere - usually in the WAN, but also between services and within applications.

To address these issues, IT managers must adopt a holistic approach to improving end-user experience. Network optimisation can help mitigate the negative effects of distance. Placing applications in multiple geographies brings users closer to their data and also ensures high availability. Content acceleration reduces delivery time and includes device-specific optimisations, further enhancing end-user experience and productivity.

Half of mobile users abandon a page if it doesn't load in 10 seconds.

With a performance-optimised infrastructure in place, remote workers, for example, can access SharePoint documents up to 75 times faster from centralised SharePoint server farms, regardless of connect point or distance from the data centre.

Prioritise bandwidth allocations

Not all applications are created equal, and neither are users. A good way to speed up applications is to prioritise both them and the users when it comes to bandwidth distribution.

For example: recreational Facebook traffic may be hogging a large amount of bandwidth, while productivity-enhancing applications like Salesforce.com suffer from slow load times. Advanced quality of service management allows a user to identify and protect important network traffic and restrict applications that are undesirable on the network, so making sure bandwidth is appropriately prioritised at the individual application level, and users receive the bandwidth they need to accomplish business-critical work.

Expect the unexpected

In business today, the number of users trying to access applications will fluctuate, creating a challenge for IT managers as they try to predict where the next surge in demand will come from.

To manage this fast-moving landscape, it's important that network traffic can be distributed across a pool of servers, selecting the most appropriate server for each individual request based on load-balancing policy, session-persistence considerations, node priorities and cache-optimisation hints.

Make troubleshooting more accurate

Businesses need to be confident they have access to all the information they need to achieve a well-rounded picture of an application performance problem. As part of this process, IT managers need to monitor response-time activity from the end-user, network, and application-transaction perspectives.

More and more applications are moving from the data centre to the cloud and users are accessing them from any browser-based device, making it harder to monitor end-user experience. As a result, businesses need to look towards a trusted provider than can provide them with a modern, cloud-ready end-to-end application and network performance management solution.

By making simple changes to the IT strategy and adopting a holistic approach to improving end-user experience, companies can make business-critical applications available and responsive regardless of where and when they are being accessed, so empowering management, employees and customers.

(1) "Data Centre Transformation and Its Impact on Branch IT", IDC, September 2012

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