“It’s a trend we’re seeing at F5,” he adds. “Customers want the benefits of externally-provided cloud computing, such as increased scalability and reduced costs, without compromising on security.
“The fear of handing over mission-critical data and applications to a third party is still present, and is also totally understandable.”
For Miller however, it is important to ensure that organisation’s public cloud, whoever it is provided by, is fully integrated with its private cloud.
“Otherwise a business is left with two separate entities and the benefits of running both will be missed,” he explains.
“Integration can help with traffic balancing, for example.”
For Miller, the importance of hybrid is based largely on the reality that organisations are adopting and migrating to all of the varying cloud models, resulting in the need to manage and orchestrate application services and apps across multiple environments and architectures.
Migrating apps to a cloud environment does not alleviate accountability for performance, or security, or availability as services that assist in providing for these critical facets of delivering applications remain.
As a result, Miller says this means that organisations will have to start looking at cloud migration patterns instead of just adoption and how that impacts things like security perimeters and access control and application performance management as organisations continue to move some apps to the cloud.
“There are so many options out there for businesses depending on their size and needs,” he adds. “For example a smaller business may choose to adopt a SaaS model by signing up to Salesforce and that’s really ‘cloudifying’ their environment.
“However, that may not work for all organisations, such as the likes of a multi-national bank.
“From a bank’s perspective, it is about adopting and having a strategy around hybrid cloud and making sure that they have a good mix between public and private and on-premise as well.
“So it depends on the size of the organisation, their strategy and what is most meaningful to them for the best outcome of the business.”
But as enterprises increasingly move apps across to the cloud in New Zealand, does this mean greater importance is given to application performance?
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“Application performance is driving the need for cloud and it’s an absolutely mandatory part of cloud adoption,” Miller adds.
“The consumption of applications drives the cloud and has become more important than the network itself, which is considered more as a delivery mechanism.
“Continued migration of applications to the cloud, combined with increased mobility is causing the dissolution of the traditional enterprise perimeter.
“This in turn forces customers to deliver application services across multiple architectures using a variety of management systems. Hence greater importance is given to application performance.”
