Changing Dynamics of the ADC Market in India
Author: Shibu Paul – VP-International Sales, Array Networks
Digitization and cloud computing has become the driving force behind Networking technologies to the extent that business digitalization is becoming synonymous with agile networking. Application delivery services have become a vital part of the application infrastructure and are required to seamlessly integrate with the software-defined data center (SDDC) ecosystem for the next-generation data centers to achieve their full capabilities. ADC is chosen as the foundation for an efficient and flexible application delivery strategy and can therefore significantly affect network performance, availability, and security while providing opportunities to add business value.
Application Delivery Controllers
Application delivery controllers (ADCs) have gained traction within the last decade, largely due to the growing need for legacy load balancing appliances to improve the performance as well as to handle more advanced requirements associated with application delivery. One of the most important aspects of any ADC is the ability to view the application’s service levels and all aspects of infrastructure performance that impact it. Mission-critical ADCs manage the uptime and delivery of applications and network traffic flow. It is imperative for Application delivery fabric to provide the ability to allocate dedicated resources per new application’s service and to provision systems to fully integrate into the data center’s orchestration system. It reduces the workload of IT experts and also enables beginners to easily manage applications. Any ADC solution should provide a comprehensive SLA monitoring architecture.
Let’s take a look at the changing market dynamics that we see popping up in the application delivery market in India.
ADC as-a-service
Growth in public cloud-based workloads caused a decline in the on-premise ADC hardware requirements and shifted ADC demand to software-based solutions. IT teams are utilizing more applications and software through public clouds and software-as-a-service vendors, which potentially means lower ADC hardware sales. Cloud platforms are being integrated heavily into global networks, as they enhance the business models. Deployment of ADCs is expected to further increase due to the rise in the service executions enabled through the cloud.
Increased market demand for ADC
Digital transformation inspires new architectures and IT optimization initiatives and has a profound impact on ADCs since they are a core component of both application architectures and IT optimization.
We need an ADC that can support hybrid cloud and application delivery in new ways with new technologies to create opportunities for innovation as enterprises strive toward digital transformation. Almost any eCommerce website uses a load-balancer or an application delivery controller in front of it, to improve its availability and reliability. IT & telecom industry, through ADCs, can provide greater control over their infrastructure to leverages the existing data center resources to meet the dynamic nature of the current imperatives of business and operations.
Rising internet traffic leading to advanced application security and load balancing requirements
The virtual ADC is expected to witness a comparatively higher demand primarily on account of the increasing data traffic. The complexity of managing application traffic will increase as disparate devices are spread beyond the data center, requiring lower latency, larger data workloads, and protection from a growing quantity of security threat vectors.
The increasing number of cyber-attacks and the dynamic nature of the security industry call for the protection of sensitive financial data from breaches with minimum risk and maximum returns. As the banking institutions move towards the cloud, the segment exhibits higher potential for the deployment of these delivery controllers.
SME’s migration from manual/open-source load balancing to more advanced ADC technology
Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are progressively relying upon web-enabled services and web-based apps for running their business. These web-enabled apps are prone to the Denial of Service (DoS) attacks and attacks from intrusions and viruses as traffic enters the network through different firewalls and ports without inspection. ADCs help reduce risks related to IT security and ensure compliance with data security and privacy regulations.
Open source load balancers are increasingly finding a home on e-commerce sites and in companies. Open-source software has not affected the use of more advanced application delivery services, such as running a firewall on top of a load balancer.
The ADC product-based sales are declining therefore companies are focused on realigning their solutions to meet customer requirements and their purchasing models all the while integrating more security features.
As data centers evolve toward software-defined architectures, ADCs will catalyze IT to add application delivery and security services into the SDDC architecture. By implementing an ADC with the proper underlying functionality and integration points, IT organizations can position themselves to finally strike the balance between managing resources while delivering agility and scalability via the next-generation data centers.
