State of Application Services 2019: Applications Drive Decisions in a Digital Economy

This doesn't mean cloud isn't important anymore. On the contrary, what we see is the natural movement of a technology into mainstream use. That observation is based on the 87% of respondents whose standard operating model is now multi-cloud. More than half (52%) of organizations are using two to six different cloud providers - excluding SaaS. One in five (20%) are using more than seven. Just about one in five (19%) are in the minority and have zero cloud usage either on-premises or in the public domain.

The focus of strategy, you see, is moving toward applications and the data it generates. Business has always been concerned with consumer trends and buying patterns. But never before has it had instant access to the data that describes them. The improvements in compute and storage speed have given rise to the ability to leverage machine learning and data science in ways only academia could envision just a few years ago. This trending strategic importance of data is likely to continue as the focus moves from where to deploy applications toward how to take advantage of the data they generate.

Applications Driving Decisions

That applications and their data are at the center of the IT and business universe can be seen in the way the application drives deployment location decisions. When an application is ready for deployment, nearly half of organizations (47%) choose a cloud based on the application's type. Forty-four (44%) consider what kind of end user will be accessing the application, and another 44% make the decision on a per-application basis.

Security, too, is driven by the type of application in question. Nearly half (47%) determine whether to protect an app with a web application firewall based on what type of application it is, e.g. collaboration, media, data management, user engagement. And nearly the same percentage - 46% - based protection of the app with a WAF on the sensitivity of the data the application will be working with.

On average, organizations are using three different security services to protect applications. Network firewalls remain the most popular with 84% of respondents. Access control comes in second at 70% with WAF close behind at 64% of respondents - a 7% gain over 2018.

It's not just cloud and security decisions that are driven by applications. Nearly half (48%) of respondents told us they were moving to deliver apps more frequently as a result of digital transformation. They weren't kidding. When we looked at deployment pipeline automation based on release velocity, the results showed a staggering difference.