The foundational infrastructure built decades ago to support the then burgeoning digital economy is coming under strain in today’s hyperconnected world.
Applications are the driving force behind our connected economy. They power everything from financial systems, our homes, transportation, the flow of information, education and media as well as our emergency systems and healthcare. All the areas moving our society forward and helping us create a better world are run by applications. And as the pandemic has pushed more of our interactions from physical to virtual, our world is becoming increasingly more dependent on the delivery, deployment and access to applications.
The dependence on applications means businesses build value through applications and depend on delivering an exceptional user experience to retain and attract customers. This has caused many businesses to shift their strategies to a development first or software leading approach. It is no wonder companies are taking advantage of new deployment models, distributed application, network, device and workforce architectures, and new development operating models like DevOps.
These investments are helping companies create innovative and exciting applications. Yet, while the applications powering our connected economy continue to increase in value and importance, the foundation supporting these applications has aged and can no longer properly support our hyperconnected world.
Think of it this way - 200 years ago we built homes and buildings with fieldstone foundations. This was a vast improvement over the dirt and wood foundations previously dug into the ground. However, fieldstone foundations were not meant to support the new towering structures built during the 20th and 21st centuries. The advent of concrete foundations has allowed us to build structures that touch the sky and surpass anything civil engineers could have imagined several centuries ago.
The same is true for our technology foundation. The IT infrastructure created decades ago was not built with the advancements in application development or the volume of applications we have today in mind. These older DNS/DDI solutions have rigid deployment requirements that don’t lend themselves to automation or support modern application architectures or support new development models like DevOps. Additionally, legacy technology built for walled networks and data centers don’t easily extend to the more often used cloud deployments, distributed networks or the edge.
What is needed to support our connected economy is a modern application access network stack that addresses application deployment, connectivity and delivery in a holistic manner. The modern foundation will power exceptional application experiences for internal and external audiences when it is able to be deployed, managed and dynamically scaled as part of the application fabric. It should also provide fast, secure and resilient automated connectivity across multiple deployment surfaces, locations and devices. And finally, it needs to data-driven, intelligent and adaptive so that it can reliably and optimally delivery applications anytime and anywhere.
For more information on how to build a modern IT foundation, read the Ultimate Guide to Building a Modern Foundation for Exceptional Application Experiences.
