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F5 has released the findings of its 2022 State of Application Strategy Report, which revealed the challenges Australian and New Zealand organisations face as they transform IT infrastructures to deliver and secure digital services.
The report’s eighth iteration explores hybrid work, as it is now inseparable from people’s daily lives, such as performing job functions or consulting a doctor as telehealth becomes permanent.
With highly distributed architectures and a broader threat landscape resulting from an ongoing digitisation of previously physical experiences, organisations are turning to a variety of solutions to help manage complexity and address widening IT skills gaps, a key issue as Australia and New Zealand strive to train or retrain 7.5 million workers by 2025. However, survey results indicate pitfalls ahead that, if ignored, will inhibit progress toward making business more responsive and agile and the region’s position as a digital leader.
Organisations across ANZ are facing the challenges of delivering distributed modern digital services given the dramatic uptake in digital transformation efforts in the last two years, according to Jason Baden, regional vice-president, Australia and New Zealand for F5 Networks.
“IT and business objectives are converging to elevate technology from a supporting role to a driving role.
“Over the last few years, we’ve seen a dramatic acceleration of organisations moving into the cloud – single, multi-cloud, and hybrid cloud.
“As organisations’ portfolios grow larger and more distributed, they require consistent security, end-to-end visibility, and greater automation in app deployments to battle increasing complexity, streamline operations, and respond to threats while adding value for customers,” Baden said.
ANZ respondents ranked determining cost efficiency across different environments as the top challenge for those deploying applications in multiple clouds, followed closely by consistent security.
About 90 per cent of organisations across all industries are reportedly planning to implement AI to surface valuable insights. Yet, effective AI requires better data transparency, integration and governance than is currently available. Similarly, the survey identifies site reliability engineering (SRE) as a key piece of the puzzle, with 90 per cent of ANZ respondents pursuing SRE approaches for their applications and systems, but enterprise architecture must evolve in parallel to support distributed, application-centric models and further advance organisations’ digital transformation efforts.
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These results indicate that ANZ IT decision-makers are still coming to grips with limitations tied to modernisation, business imperatives and deployment methods as they reap the benefits of digital transformation. Organisations face a continuous balancing act between controls, costs, customer and employee experiences, extended set of application and API protections, resulting in heightened interest in sophisticated behavioural analysis, AI-based solutions that can better assess context to deliver the security, performance and insights required for adaptive applications.
To satisfy the growing demand in Australia and New Zealand, F5 expanded its global footprint in 2019 by deploying a regional point of presence (PoP) in Sydney. Over the past several years, F5 has transformed its business and expanded its software and cloud offerings to deliver a broad portfolio of solutions to help customers address complexity and risk.
F5’s 2022 State of Application Strategy Report represents nearly 1,500 IT decision-makers worldwide, including Australia and New Zealand, from a breadth of industries, organisation sizes and professional roles. The survey focused on respondents' priorities, challenges and expectations to form a compelling perspective of how organisations are evolving application strategies to better serve customers’ current and anticipated needs.
[Related: AI investment boost touted in new report]