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F5 Networks, the global leader in Application Delivery Networking, announced the results of a Frost & Sullivan survey that looked at enterprise views towards application delivery and cloud computing with respect to their business needs as well as their understanding of the technology drivers behind these needs.
Commissioned by F5, the survey found that CIOs and senior IT decision makers in Asia Pacific (APAC) recognize the importance of Web applications in driving their businesses, and that their strong recognition of the seriousness of Web-based attacks makes security a top concern. However, the survey also exposed a need for more awareness about the differences between traditional network-based vulnerabilities versus Web application attacks as there appeared to be some confusion among respondents about the capabilities of network-based firewalls versus Web application firewalls.
Also, the findings revealed a preference for utilizing more bandwidth to overcome Web application performance issues. Since adding bandwidth does not overcome latency issues caused by physical distances between source and destination, this potentially means that the prevalent issue of application latency remains unresolved for many enterprises.
Further, the study shows that customers see an important association between cloud computing and business agility putting an onus on aspiring cloud services providers to assure enterprise-level availability, security, and performance.
“Applications are the lifeblood of enterprises today, and it is essential that decision makers take the right approach that includes creating strategic points of control that give complete visibility. Whether application protection, high availability, or performance, the business objective can only be achieved when the solutions are part of an overall Application Delivery Networking strategy that ensures full visibility and control of end-to-end traffic between users and application servers,” stated Song Tang Yih, Vice President of APAC, F5 Networks.
“As technology convergence continues unabated in the IT realm, the concept of a Server Load Balancer has rapidly evolved into a converged Application Delivery Controller capable of offering more capabilities on top of its base function and dominated by the three pillars of application delivery; availability, security, and performance,” said Nitin Bhat, Senior Vice President - ICT, Frost & Sullivan. “On the cloud computing front, the study showed that whilst perception towards cloud computing as a business enabler is encouraging, security and access control are key challenges that could potentially affect an enterprise’s willingness to embrace cloud computing as a viable business tool in the immediate future.”
The study, conducted in the fourth quarter of 2009 across Australia, China, Hong Kong, India, Singapore, and South Korea, surveyed large enterprises’ attitudes on a range of topics such application delivery, application security, application acceleration, and cloud computing.
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CIO Corner 
