According to AppDynamics’ App Attention Index, about 80% of respondents have asked for a discount or refund due to a poor digital experience. 32% of users reported abandoning a brand they were loyal to because of a bad experience — just once!
Many companies connect with customers, employees and partners through a vast portfolio of applications. But because of cost, risk and compliance, these applications are often a complex mix of services and features, and old and new technologies.
The security challenge is equally serious and seems to be getting worse. One reason is complexity. F5, an application delivery vendor, released its latest Status of Application Services Report in January 2020, highlighting the challenges organizations face in managing application security in today’s multi-cloud environment. Another is the rapid evolution of the threat landscape, with the cost of complex attacks falling and the cost of defending against them rising. Over the past decade, in particular, a spate of data breaches around the world has made it possible for nearly all cybercriminals to steal app accounts by looking at which sites users have re-used passwords. F5 Labs, an app delivery company, found that 86% of cyber attacks targeted apps or identities associated with them. The number of app attacks has increased year by year, soaring to record highs during the global outbreak.
Second is the visual challenge. Being able to optimize the performance of each application is one of the prerequisites for delivering a great digital experience. To understand how application traffic flows, and where and how to adjust it, sophisticated end-to-end visualization is essential. However, the infrastructure and services that support these applications are complex and isolated, so few organizations develop this capability, even for their most important customer-facing applications. Its sheer size makes all problems worse. In the era of microservices and distributed computing, an expanding portfolio of applications cannot be effectively controlled without continuous advances in advanced automation.
Application delivery vendor F5 believes that an important component of advanced automation is application adaptation. An adaptive app is like a living organism that can grow, scale, defend and repair itself according to its environment and use. Such applications are suitable for both cloud-born digital native organizations and established companies with both traditional and modern structures.
Application delivery vendor F5 is built on Shape AI to support the analysis of telemetry data from a variety of data path technology combinations. Includes big-IP load balancer, WAF solution, NGINX Web server, API gateway, application delivery vendor F5 cloud service and Silverline hosting service. With the telemetry capabilities of these components, a fine visualization of how application traffic flows can be obtained, patterns can be gradually inferred and thresholds determined to detect anomalies and signal when intervention is needed. Application delivery vendor F5 can not only flag applications or specific application services that need intervention, but also troubleshoot to find the root cause of the problem. The operator can then set rules about how to handle similar problems. In this way, adaptive applications can not only scale and secure, but also learn and improve over time.
Currently, these operations are generally not performed automatically in hybrid or cloudy environments. To determine what is an effective hard-coded adaptation, a number of policies and scripts need to be implemented manually. Most companies are now in a situation where if a customer experience is bad, they first hear about it on Twitter and then struggle to gather enough information to hammer out a solution. This approach to application management is a static process that requires organizations to manually manage resources and cannot be scaled to the huge customer experience expectations that companies face today.
In an adaptive application environment, application services can be independently extended according to requirements. They defend themselves and alert the entire system to any challenges. They can build fully adaptive end-user experiences, and have the ability to configure and orchestrate different types of experiences, resulting in an extraordinary digital experience for the end-user of the application.
With its existing capabilities and layout, APPLICATION delivery vendor F5 is making steady progress in realizing this vision for its customers. F5, an application delivery vendor, is building an application services platform that will fundamentally change the way applications are delivered and secured, ultimately helping customers deliver differentiated digital experiences that are critical to every organization.