In many IT organizations, the WAN does not matter. One of the primary roles of the WAN is to enable acceptable application delivery. What you do with the WAN, however, matters greatly. As will be discussed in this newsletter, we are entering a new ear of application delivery – one that we refer to as Application Delivery 2.0. As will be discussed in the next two newsletters, the challenges of the Application Delivery 2.0 era will be notably more complex and challenging than are those of the current era.
That changed a few years ago when IT organizations began to focus on ensuring acceptable application delivery. While ensuring acceptable application delivery has always been important, it historically was not a top of mind issue for most IT organizations. They did this by deploying a first generation of solutions that were intended to mitigate the impact of chatty protocols such as CIFS (Common Internet File System), to offload computationally intensive processing (for example TCP termination and multiplexing) off of servers, and to provide visibility into the performance of applications. Jim and Steve try to avoid cute marketing clichés. Hence, we are hesitant to use the phrase Application Delivery 2.0 as it sounds so much like just one more marketing cliché. However, we see distinct evidence, both from vendors and from IT organizations that we are indeed entering a second generation of application delivery. Unfortunately, the IT organization of a few years ago typically approached application delivery from a tactical, stove-piped approach. Part of the characterization of Application Delivery 2.0 is that IT organizations are beginning to face a new set of challenges.
As is so often the case in our industry, IT organizations have to support traditional or legacy technologies and challenges at the same time that they have to respond to new technologies and challenges. That does not mean that the traditional challenges of supporting chatty protocols or maximizing the performance of servers have gone away. One of the new challenges facing IT organizations stems from the changing role of the mobile worker. That is no longer the case. A few years ago, there were relatively few mobile workers and the communications needs of the mobile workers of that era were satisfied with simple cell phones. Now it is common to have 25% or more of employees be mobile at any point in time.
This introduces all of the performance and security issues associated with wireless networking into the mix of application delivery challenges. These employees have smartphones or other wireless devices that they routinely use to access business-critical applications. In the next WAN newsletter we will continue to discuss the challenges that are driving Application Delivery 2.0. We will also mention some steps that IT organizations are taking to respond to these challenges.