Based on Akamai’s conversations with our customers, most organizations are in the midst of deciding priorities for 2016 as the intensity of digital transformation and associated trends for mobile, cloud, analytics and social are set to increase. This is further backed by the research gathered from reports such as Gartner’s CIO Agenda Insights 2016 and IDC’s Futurescape CIO Agenda 2016. While trends analysis are readily available for companies to take advantage of, the challenge for businesses to balance the budget between keeping the lights on and changing the game at the same time is not easy.
It’s this tension that needs to be managed, and here are three underlying dimensions of change that can help guide corporate investments for succeeding with enterprise IT going forward.
Application architectures are evolving. Life was easier when a group of in-house developers could be hired to design, develop, test and deploy applications. The earliest applications were largely monolithic custom built packages that performed multiple functions from accounting and process control to customer management. Recognizing the inherent limitations and inflexibility of that approach, architectures evolved to become functionally modular applications and moved from being custom developed to being purchased off the shelf from third-party Independent Software Vendors (ISV). This resulted in the problem of integration, which spawned a huge industry of system integrators using a range of middleware technologies and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) approaches to address this challenge. Once the adoption of Internet technologies accelerated in the late 90s, application vendors started putting browser based front ends on top of legacy applications to give a better “look and feel” and moving to Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) based delivery approaches to satisfy users and leverage newer technologies. In recent years, being able to deliver applications on mobile devices has moved from being “nice to have” to business critical. At the same time, newer approaches such as Progressive Web Apps (PWA) are increasingly coming to the fore. Bottom line is - architectures continue to evolve at a rapid pace.
Behavior of users are changing. Once upon a time, enterprise IT architectures exclusively served organizational employees, who were stationary in designated offices and given controlled access to applications and functions through a company provided computer. The focus on the IT solution was on enabling process automation and record keeping within the enterprise, to support the business operations. Today enterprise IT is expected to serve external users (customers / partners) in addition to internal employees and focus on enabling collaboration across the entire value chain. Increasingly, both types of users are largely mobile and use a variety of devices over which the organization has limited control. IT organizations are challenged to deliver secure, high performing applications in the midst of this complexity.
Corporate networks are changing. When users and applications were mostly internal, the limited external access to content could be controlled by backhauling traffic from branch offices to central data centers and back out to the Internet. This is sometimes referred to as the trombone effect. However, given the relative cost of Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) networks vis-à-vis the significant use of third-party applications and content (think social apps, video conferencing, line of business SaaS apps) in addition to in-house applications and content, the trombone effect is negatively impacting the performance and user experience. There is a pressing need to enable direct Internet access (DIA) at branches and incorporate the public Internet as an extension of the corporate network to satisfy user demands and manage costs.
Given these three changes, enterprises need to rethink how they are going to architect their IT infrastructure to deliver applications to their internal and external users in an efficient and budget friendly way. It is clear that the key to making this transformation is the ability for enterprises to embrace the Internet in all aspects of their business operations from marketing and customer service to finance, production and supply chains. They need to re-architect their business processes and enable IT applications to leverage the global power of the Internet.
A transformation to this next generation IT which is characterized by diverse, distributed mobile users accessing ever richer applications and content over the Internet needs to ensure that the levels of reliability, performance and security that traditional IT solutions delivered are sustained. This is critical to ensure adequate business buy-in for the transformation. As businesses plan investments and transformation programs for the enterprise, ask the following questions:
- Can the vendor help overcome the inherent unpredictability of the Internet and deliver fast, secure and reliable performance for the company’s customers and users?
- Is the organization charting a path to re-architecting applications for a mobile first, Internet friendly world?
- Is the organization charting a path towards transforming networks to better leverage the benefits of the Internet without sacrificing performance or security?
Answering these fundamental questions and establishing the right set of partnerships as businesses evolve their enterprise IT architectures will be the key to being able to deliver on the expectations of users and the needs of the business.
Srinivas Padmanabharao is the Director, Product Marketing, Asia Pacific & Japan at Akamai Technologies