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<\/p>\nIn harnessing IT to fulfil business needs and objectives, applications will be the key driver of transformation.<\/p>\n
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These approaches should underpin enterprises\u2019 security, mobility, and cloud initiatives. Success depends invariably on 5 key application-centric factors:<\/p>\n
1. Strong defense against advanced threats<\/b><\/p>\n
Enterprises and services providers face a variety of attacks, including DDoS, zero-day and application-level attacks. Hackers and cyber-criminals exploit application-related vulnerabilities in the multitude of applications in production environments and the range of deployment scenarios.<\/p>\n
In response, organizations have to ensure strong zero-day threat protection; comprehensive bot defense capabilities; and real-time protection against online fraud for every user, device and browser. They have to stop attackers from spoofing, disabling or bypassing security checks.<\/p>\n
2. High service velocity<\/b><\/p>\n
Business stakeholders increasingly demand efficient and fast deployments of secure, and available services and applications. IT departments have leveraged trends and technologies such as agile, DevOps, cloud, and SDN to meet these requirements across development, operations, and networking teams.<\/p>\n
Yet, organizations need an open and extensible framework that allows technology partners to collaborate and integrate provisioning and orchestration systems to accelerate compute, network and application services delivery.<\/p>\n
3. Low cost and complexity<\/b><\/p>\n
Standardizing on a common service delivery platform, organizations can centrally deploy, manage and orchestrate application service topologies in a consistent manner across data center and cloud environments.<\/p>\n
As organizations reduce manual configurations and minimize errors, they will gain enough confidence in automated deployments to kick-start self-service initiatives that significantly reduce operational costs. These require granular control over resource deployment combined with a multi-tenancy policy-based, per-application delivery approach.<\/p>\n
4. Programmability and automation<\/b><\/p>\n
A policy-based, customizable approach allows organizations to create and automate services and support emerging application and network architectures. Powerful tools are available to configure and program environments dynamically.<\/p>\n
When conditions affecting their applications and networks change, organizations simply create, deploy, modify and extend services on the fly without taking systems offline or recoding applications. For instance, they can program and automate how application traffic is handled based on specific business and user priorities.<\/p>\n
5. Cloud enablement<\/b><\/p>\n
Serving corporate requirements around security, compliance, and performance, application services can be deployed in cloud environments and managed centrally alongside on-premise services. This ensures that policies governing security and performance are deployed and enforced consistently. Additionally, REST API capabilities for web application firewall solutions promote accelerated, secure cloud migration.<\/p>\n