BANGALORE, INDIA: F5 Networks announced the results of a Frost & Sullivan survey that looked at enterprise views towards application delivery and cloud computing with respect to their business needs as well as their understanding of the technology drivers behind these needs.

The survey underscored need for proactive approach to application delivery and cloud computing. According to the survey, CIOs and senior IT decision makers in Asia Pacific (APAC) have recognized the importance of Web applications in driving their businesses.

Moreover, the survey revealed that Web-based attacks make security a top concern for the IT decision makers. It also exposed a need for more awareness about the differences between traditional network-based vulnerabilities versus Web application attacks as respondents appeared to be confused about the capabilities of network-based firewalls versus Web application firewalls.

Besides encouraging utilization of more bandwidth to overcome Web application performance issues, the findings revealed strong association between cloud computing and business agility. This put an onus on aspiring cloud services providers to assure enterprise-level availability, security, and performance.

As applications are the lifeline of enterprises today, the right approach, which includes creating strategic points of control for complete visibility, is the need of the hour.

“To achieve business objective, the solutions should be the part of an overall Application Delivery Networking strategy that ensures full visibility and control of end-to-end traffic between users and application servers,” said Song Tang Yih, VP-APAC, F5 Networks.

 Nitin Bhat, Senior VP-ICT, Frost & Sullivan added, “As technology convergence continues unabated in the IT realm, the concept of a Server Load Balancer has rapidly evolved into a converged Application Delivery Controller capable of offering more capabilities on top of its base function and it is dominated by the three pillars of application delivery; availability, security, and performance,”

On the cloud computing front, the study showed that security and access control are key challenges that could potentially affect an enterprise's willingness to embrace cloud computing as a viable business tool in the immediate future.

The study, conducted in Q4 of 2009 across Australia, China, Hong Kong, India, Singapore, and South Korea, surveyed large enterprises' attitudes on a range of topics such application delivery, application security, application acceleration, and cloud computing.