State of Application Delivery Survey Finds the Cloud Driving IT Plans

How influential has the rise of cloud computing been on the state of application delivery? Hugely influential, according to a new survey of of 2,197 IT executives and technologists on topics including DevOps and security application services and standards.

F5 Networks is out with its third annual State of Application Delivery report. It covers networking, application delivery, the cloud, and more. Notably, while the report finds that DevOps is a hot topic in IT management, many companies still don't see it having major strategic impact.

Executive survey respondents reported that IT initiatives with the greatest strategic impact include SaaS (42 percent), big data (41 percent), and IaaS (39 percent). And, for the first time, application security beat availability as the number one concern for respondents. Security-minded staffers are seeing that there is  increasing sophistication of attacks and they are moving beyond simple  firewalls as hackers increasingly focus on applications as opposed to platform software.

Interestingly, the number of survey respondents with at least one framework for their DevOps efforts doubled over last year's survey, from 20 percent to almost 50 percent. Over half of respondents also said that they view API-enabled infrastructures and templates as important, up from 31 percent and 22 percent in last year's survey.

And, it's no surprise that cloud computing is a huge factor in IT plans for the next 12 months,. Eighty-five percent of respondents reported that they intend to move at least some applications to the cloud.