The State of Application Services 2020

Many organizations are starting to realize the benefits of increased scale and velocity of application deployment in their businesses, according to the 2020 State of Application Services report from F5 Networks.


This value, however, can bring significant complexity as organizations maintain legacy infrastructure while increasingly relying on multiple public and private clouds, implement modern application architectures, and face an evolving and sophisticated threat landscape.

At the same time, organizations are adopting more application services designed to accelerate deployment in public cloud and container-native environments, like service mesh and ingress control. Survey data indicates this trend will accelerate as organizations become proficient in harnessing the data their application ecosystem delivers — creating advanced analytics capabilities and better business outcomes.

"Applications are not just the most valuable asset in the modern enterprise, they are the vehicle organizations rely on to deliver differentiated digital experiences to their customers," said Kara Sprague, EVP and GM, BIG-IP at F5. "This year’s report explores the ways application services are an increasingly critical component at each stage of the application lifecycle. From the code that makes up the business logic of an application to the experience on an end user’s device, application services ensure businesses can build, deploy, and manage applications across environments securely and at scale."

The report — which reflects input from nearly 2,600 respondents globally across a range of industries, company sizes, and roles — shows that as companies manage legacy, multi-cloud, hybrid-cloud, and modern architectures to deliver applications, their requirements for app services are also evolving. To address limited skill sets and integration challenges, organizations are choosing open ecosystems that offer standardization.

The report examines 5 key findings:

Digital Transformation

80% of organizations are executing on digital transformation — with increasing emphasis on accelerating speed to market.

As organizations progress through digital transformation initiatives, IT and business process optimization initiatives mature. Many organizations have moved beyond the basics of business process automation and are now scaling their digital footprint with cloud, containers, and orchestration. This in turn is driving the creation of new ecosystems and massive growth in API call volumes.

Multi-Cloud

87% of organizations are multi-cloud and most still struggle with security.

Organizations are leveraging the public cloud to participate in industry ecosystems, take advantage of cloud-native architectures, and deliver applications at the speed of the business. However, organizations are much less confident in their ability to withstand an application-layer attack in the public cloud versus an on-premises data center. This discrepancy illustrates a growing need for easy-to-deploy solutions that can ensure consistent security across multiple environments.

Automating the Network

73% of organizations are automating the network to boost efficiency.

Unsurprisingly, given the primary drivers of digital transformation — IT and business process optimization — the majority of organizations are automating the network. Despite challenges, organizations are gaining proficiency and moving toward continuous deployment with more consistent automation across all key pipeline components: app infrastructure, app services, network, and security.

Cloud Native

69% of organizations are using 10 or more application services.

As newer cloud-native application architectures mature and scale, a higher percentage of organizations are deploying related app services such as ingress control and service discovery both on premises and in the public cloud. A modern application landscape requires modern app services to support scale, security, and availability requirements.

IT Ops and DevOps

63% of organizations still place primary responsibility for app services with IT operations, yet more than half of those surveyed are also moving to DevOps-inspired teams.

Operations and infrastructure teams continue to shoulder primary responsibility for selecting and deploying application services. However, as organizations expand their cloud- and container-native app portfolios, DevOps groups are taking more responsibility for app services.

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The State of Application Services 2020

Many organizations are starting to realize the benefits of increased scale and velocity of application deployment in their businesses, according to the 2020 State of Application Services report from F5 Networks.


This value, however, can bring significant complexity as organizations maintain legacy infrastructure while increasingly relying on multiple public and private clouds, implement modern application architectures, and face an evolving and sophisticated threat landscape.

At the same time, organizations are adopting more application services designed to accelerate deployment in public cloud and container-native environments, like service mesh and ingress control. Survey data indicates this trend will accelerate as organizations become proficient in harnessing the data their application ecosystem delivers — creating advanced analytics capabilities and better business outcomes.

"Applications are not just the most valuable asset in the modern enterprise, they are the vehicle organizations rely on to deliver differentiated digital experiences to their customers," said Kara Sprague, EVP and GM, BIG-IP at F5. "This year’s report explores the ways application services are an increasingly critical component at each stage of the application lifecycle. From the code that makes up the business logic of an application to the experience on an end user’s device, application services ensure businesses can build, deploy, and manage applications across environments securely and at scale."

The report — which reflects input from nearly 2,600 respondents globally across a range of industries, company sizes, and roles — shows that as companies manage legacy, multi-cloud, hybrid-cloud, and modern architectures to deliver applications, their requirements for app services are also evolving. To address limited skill sets and integration challenges, organizations are choosing open ecosystems that offer standardization.

The report examines 5 key findings:

Digital Transformation

80% of organizations are executing on digital transformation — with increasing emphasis on accelerating speed to market.

As organizations progress through digital transformation initiatives, IT and business process optimization initiatives mature. Many organizations have moved beyond the basics of business process automation and are now scaling their digital footprint with cloud, containers, and orchestration. This in turn is driving the creation of new ecosystems and massive growth in API call volumes.

Multi-Cloud

87% of organizations are multi-cloud and most still struggle with security.

Organizations are leveraging the public cloud to participate in industry ecosystems, take advantage of cloud-native architectures, and deliver applications at the speed of the business. However, organizations are much less confident in their ability to withstand an application-layer attack in the public cloud versus an on-premises data center. This discrepancy illustrates a growing need for easy-to-deploy solutions that can ensure consistent security across multiple environments.

Automating the Network

73% of organizations are automating the network to boost efficiency.

Unsurprisingly, given the primary drivers of digital transformation — IT and business process optimization — the majority of organizations are automating the network. Despite challenges, organizations are gaining proficiency and moving toward continuous deployment with more consistent automation across all key pipeline components: app infrastructure, app services, network, and security.

Cloud Native

69% of organizations are using 10 or more application services.

As newer cloud-native application architectures mature and scale, a higher percentage of organizations are deploying related app services such as ingress control and service discovery both on premises and in the public cloud. A modern application landscape requires modern app services to support scale, security, and availability requirements.

IT Ops and DevOps

63% of organizations still place primary responsibility for app services with IT operations, yet more than half of those surveyed are also moving to DevOps-inspired teams.

Operations and infrastructure teams continue to shoulder primary responsibility for selecting and deploying application services. However, as organizations expand their cloud- and container-native app portfolios, DevOps groups are taking more responsibility for app services.

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I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

How AI Agents Are Reshaping DataOps for the Always-On Enterprise

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

AI Deepfakes: Rethinking Trust in the Workplace

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

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Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

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Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...