2015 – The Year of Cloud-Client Computing - Instart Logic

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2015 THE YEAR OF CLOUD/CLIENT COMPUTING
BY MANAV RATAN MITAL
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This is the time of year to pontificate on the
year gone by and make predictions for the future.
There are lots of trends that are being talked
about in this context, those whose time has come
and others that are starting to peek through and
show promise for the future. Id like to talk
about one in particular that I believe is going
to have significant impact on the industry at
large and disrupt the application delivery space
in particular, creating the next compute
application model. Cloud/Client Computing.
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Seeds were sown in 2014 and I will go out on a
limb to say that 2015 will be the year of
Cloud/Client Computing. Cloud and mobile
architectures are enabling a new way to design
and deliver applications and content that provide
faster time to market, a personalized end-user
experience, and improved business agility. With
rising consumer expectations for online content
that can be accessed from a plethora of mobile
devices, from anywhere and at any time, companies
need to rethink their online strategy or risk
being left behind and losing competitive
edge. In this new world where IT departments
leverage private and public cloud, and
applications are designed mobile first, based
on a cloud/client architecture, we are faced with
new and interesting challenges around speed,
security and scale. Legacy application delivery
solutions that were designed on a centralized
architecture are unable to cope. To speed up
applications companies traditionally used CDN
services that accelerated content delivery from
the datacenter to the edge of the Internet. Now
with cloud/client, the bottleneck has shifted-
the wireless last mile between the edge and
client is now the principal performance
bottleneck. To secure applications, companies
used firewall appliances that protected the
perimeter of the datacenter where the application
ran. With cloud/client architecture, the network
perimeter has disappeared and attack surface has
increased to include client and third party
backend services, which are beyond the scope of
the firewall. IT now needs a unified, holistic
solution that provides end-to-end view and
control.
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To scale applications, companies used an ADC
(Application Delivery Controller) that functioned
as a load balancer and reduced the cost of
scaling the application. With cloud/client
architecture the backend services run across
different clouds and thus, along with the client
services, make ADC appliances inefficient. To
address these challenges, an application delivery
service itself needs to be based on a
cloud/client architecture. Software-Defined
Application Delivery (SDAD), an innovative
approach we pioneered, is the infrastructure
solution for cloud/client computing. It is a
single delivery solution that can be used to
speed, secure and scale applications. Gartner
clearly agrees with me based on their top 10
strategic technology trends in 2015. What are
your thoughts on this, and what are some of the
key issues at stake, that we as an industry need
to focus on in support of cloud/client computing?
Look forward to your comments and
dialogue. Cheers to the year of cloud/client
computing!
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