Key 2014 Trends in Web and Mobile Performance

Sven Hammar
Learn more about Apica

The key 2014 trends in web and mobile performance: a new faster Internet – with optimized protocols:

1. A new faster Internet

Internet giants like Google, AWS and Apple are investing in making the Internet faster. A faster web serves more content, adds and searches, which by end of the day, means revenues for companies like Google, Apple and many e-retailers etc.

Applications and the protocols need to be made more efficient to avoid a painfully (for users) slow web. So, in order just to keep up with the traffic, websites need to improve speed by 25 to 50 percent. HTML5 by itself is good, but the big upside comes with the use of the different binary protocols and content optimization tools.

By the end of 2014, the use of optimized protocols like WebSockets, SPDY, Protobuf, and content optimization will become mainstream.

2. Cloud downtime - online showstopper for business

With even giants like Amazon and Google experiencing web outages, we are likely to see more setbacks during 2014. The increasing traffic volume and much more complex applications will become a challenge even for the big websites. We will see some real and quite humiliating showstoppers in 2014 for online business.

E-commerce companies need to start preparing for 2014 with real outside testing failover between data center and vendors, recovery time, trigger validation, data consistency and fall-back procedure.

3. Overload traffic - CDN gets a new angle

Content delivery network (CDN) gets a new angle. Social media has brought a new level of risk to IT departments as a new type of traffic spike emerges. Now, in addition to traditional hacking, websites need to be aware of social media driven "attacks" that can change traffic levels of 100 Gb/s or more from real users. Regardless of whether the attack is a malicious hack or a Facebook post or an organized tweet – very few enterprise infrastructures can handle this load. Normal DDoS protection will not work. Only large CDN providers will be able to absorb the load without caving in.

4. Mobile hacking

With new and much improved services for mobile such as banking, gaming etc., hackers have found new targets. The combination of traditional web hacking and knowledge about apps and mobile operating systems will create a new battleground. There are no new crimes, only new venues. And with the explosive growth of mobile services, it would be naïve to think that this field will remain unobserved by the criminal hacker networks.

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Key 2014 Trends in Web and Mobile Performance

Sven Hammar
Learn more about Apica

The key 2014 trends in web and mobile performance: a new faster Internet – with optimized protocols:

1. A new faster Internet

Internet giants like Google, AWS and Apple are investing in making the Internet faster. A faster web serves more content, adds and searches, which by end of the day, means revenues for companies like Google, Apple and many e-retailers etc.

Applications and the protocols need to be made more efficient to avoid a painfully (for users) slow web. So, in order just to keep up with the traffic, websites need to improve speed by 25 to 50 percent. HTML5 by itself is good, but the big upside comes with the use of the different binary protocols and content optimization tools.

By the end of 2014, the use of optimized protocols like WebSockets, SPDY, Protobuf, and content optimization will become mainstream.

2. Cloud downtime - online showstopper for business

With even giants like Amazon and Google experiencing web outages, we are likely to see more setbacks during 2014. The increasing traffic volume and much more complex applications will become a challenge even for the big websites. We will see some real and quite humiliating showstoppers in 2014 for online business.

E-commerce companies need to start preparing for 2014 with real outside testing failover between data center and vendors, recovery time, trigger validation, data consistency and fall-back procedure.

3. Overload traffic - CDN gets a new angle

Content delivery network (CDN) gets a new angle. Social media has brought a new level of risk to IT departments as a new type of traffic spike emerges. Now, in addition to traditional hacking, websites need to be aware of social media driven "attacks" that can change traffic levels of 100 Gb/s or more from real users. Regardless of whether the attack is a malicious hack or a Facebook post or an organized tweet – very few enterprise infrastructures can handle this load. Normal DDoS protection will not work. Only large CDN providers will be able to absorb the load without caving in.

4. Mobile hacking

With new and much improved services for mobile such as banking, gaming etc., hackers have found new targets. The combination of traditional web hacking and knowledge about apps and mobile operating systems will create a new battleground. There are no new crimes, only new venues. And with the explosive growth of mobile services, it would be naïve to think that this field will remain unobserved by the criminal hacker networks.

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AI is usually talked about as a software tool, but it also depends heavily on the network behind it. Whether a company is using AI for chatbots, automation, monitoring, analytics, or employee support, all of that information has to move across the network in a reliable and secure way. That means AI is not just an application decision. It is also an infrastructure decision. Before organizations rush into AI, they should ask a simple question: Is our network ready to support it? ...

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The Network Data Problem Slowing Down Enterprise AIOps

Enterprise networks rarely behave the same way for very long. A routing adjustment in one region may unexpectedly alter application performance in another. A cloud migration may introduce hidden dependencies that go unnoticed until an outage occurs. All the while, the network is managed by several different teams, each of whom use different tool sets — and as a result, have different views of the network ... There’s usually an engineer who remembers why traffic fails over a certain way between sites, or which transparent firewall was added where. The problem is that human memory cannot scale alongside enterprise-scale networks ...

The Governance Gap Behind AI's Infrastructure Problem

Ask an infrastructure team how confident they are in their ability to govern AI, and most will tell you they've got it handled. A recent survey of 406 IT decision-makers and platform engineering leaders found 86% expressing exactly that confidence. Ask the same group whether they have a formal written AI governance policy, and the number drops to 30%, according to Spacelift's Infrastructure Automation Report ...

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Virtual Private Networks became a cornerstone of enterprise security at a time when corporate infrastructure looked very different from today ... For years, this model worked well. But the architecture behind VPNs assumed a centralized corporate environment—one where the network itself was the hub of activity. In a cloud — first world, that assumption no longer holds ...

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