Digitization, these are the challenges of organizations

Digitization has forced organizations to operate in increasingly complex and insecure environments. To face this reality, they are adopting different solutions to overcome the existing deficiencies in terms of IT skills.

This is what the F5 report, State of Application Strategy Report 2022, collects, which has detected certain barriers that can prevent organizations from being as responsive and agile as they need to be able to continue evolving.

“Our research shows that any organization is forced to manage hundreds of applications across data centers, multiple clouds and at the edge, as well as an average of more than 20 different application delivery and security technologies,” said Kara Sprague, Vice President executive and director of App Delivery at F5.

Barriers and benefits in digitization

Respondents rank maintaining visibility across environments and achieving consistent security as their top two challenges when deploying applications in multi-cloud environments.

Additionally, 90% of organizations across all industries say they intend to implement AI solutions to better serve their customers and gain valuable insights from the data they generate. However, they are aware that for AI to be effective it is necessary to improve data transparency, integration and governance.

In parallel, the survey identifies SRE solutions as a key piece of the puzzle, with 77% of respondents saying they are looking for SRE approaches for their applications and systems, although enterprise architecture must evolve in parallel to support distributed application-centric models if what is intended is that the digital transformation processes of organizations continue to advance.

Visibility and security, the two great challenges for organizations when operating in different environments and carrying out their digitization process

Other key findings from this report include:

• Modernization is spreading to back-office processes: More than two-thirds of organizations are realizing that if they want to create world-class digital interactions with their customers, they also need to modernize business processes and less visible back-office functions. Not using data quickly enough to source the raw materials your business needs, hire employees, plan production, or complete a large number of support tasks can degrade customer relationships, delay time-to-market for new products, and harm business results.
• IT and OT are converging: respondents rate the convergence between IT and OT systems as the most relevant development in the near future. Integrating OT systems, which manage industrial and business operations, with data-centric IT systems will help close the automation loop and make digital businesses more adaptive, enabling them to anticipate and deliver better response to changing customer interests and market conditions.
• Almost everyone lacks critical knowledge: An overwhelming number of organizations (95%) have plans to mine operational data for insights they hope to use to improve the customer experience and drive business growth. However, 98% of respondents indicate that they are currently unable to extract relevant information from their existing systems. Even with the increased use of AI, many organizations still lack the staff and capabilities to successfully identify key data and capitalize on it.
• Complexity is becoming untenable: With 93% of respondents using cloud-based as-a-service offerings and 84% planning to move workloads to the edge, the challenges associated with this reality range from overlapping security policies and fragmented data to deploying point solutions that ultimately add complexity, increase brittleness, or inhibit performance. A more distributed infrastructure means that security and application delivery services are no longer tied to the deployment model or location of the applications they serve, allowing enterprises more flexibility, but affecting consistency and potentially degrading the user experience.
• Security is evolving towards risk management: Although complexity has increased the number of potential failure points, performance remains the most valued factor, with more than three-quarters (76%) of respondents admitting that if given a choice, they would turn security measures off. security to improve performance. Managing a spectrum of risks with real-world goals demonstrates that companies are taking a modified approach to risk management, helping identity-based security outperform traditional application security and delivery technologies in terms of prevalence.
• Repatriation is on the rise: Organizations are forced to manage everything from a growing collection of containerized mobile and native applications to legacy monoliths that are critical to business operations. Significantly, more than two-thirds of organizations (67%) are choosing to repatriate applications, that is, moving them back to a data center environment from the cloud, or plan to do so in the next 12 months. Last year this percentage stood at 27%.