An Approach to Future-Proofing

How to design applications for scale, efficiency, and change.

In the IT industry, we have become immune to messages of change. But we are counting on technology to fuel the next waves of growth. This forces technology leaders to think about new operating models to enable growth, profitability, and agility.

It’s imperative that IT bring to the table options that will lower cost and add business value by a deep understanding of new technology. The key to responding quickly to industry changes and dynamic customer needs will be solutions that are future-proof– designed to quickly and effectively respond to change.

Companies can respond quicker by shifting from a silo approach to a fabric approach. F5’s services fabric model enables consolidation of services onto a common platform that can be deployed on hardware, software or in the cloud, reducing operational overhead by standardizing. With a fabric model comes a future friendly design that is able adapt to new technology without touching each application or server.

New innovations, technologies and standards are emerging. High performing organizations track them and leverage them as soon as possible. For example, the IETF is scheduled to release HTTP 2.0 later this year, with the goal to deliver a faster web. Today’s web is built with modern applications that consume more bandwidth and is more complex. Latency and blocking are notorious for causing slow page loads giving users a poor experience. With BIG-IP v11.6, F5 is the only ADC vendor to support HTTP 2.0 gateway (built to the draft standard) and SPDY 3.1 gateway. By utilizing HTTP 2.0 thru F5, organizations can reduces page load times by up to 50% by minimizing protocol overhead and making multiple parallel requests to overcome unnecessary latency and blocking to different web servers like Apache or IIS.

HTTP 2.0 and SPDY switches to an encrypted SSL connection by default to protect data. Unfortunately, as applications default to SSL, IT becomes increasingly blind to their outbound application traffic making it difficult to manage. F5 enables SSL visibility and control to give businesses the power to eliminate blind spots and protect investments in existing security infrastructure. The SSL key lifecycle is easily managed and protected with policy enforcement for operational efficiency.

The technologies that power modern web applications are very different today. To build a future-proof architecture it’s important to take advantage of the technology to adapt to the changes in modern applications -- whether in your own data center or in the cloud. You need a design that meets the needs of your users, not just today, but can also evolve to support the future.