Intelligent Data Centres Issue 10 | Page 14

LATEST INTELLIGENCE MULTICLOUD AND CLOUD- NATIVE APPLICATIONS DRIVE NEED FOR ADC TRANSFORMATION PRESENTED BY I Introduction In their ongoing pursuit of digital transformation, an acute imperative worldwide, organizations are increasingly adopting hybrid IT and embracing multicloud. DOWNLOAD WHITEPAPERS AT: WWW.INTELLIGENTDATACENTRES. COM/WHITEPAPERS 14 Issue 10 They’re doing so to increase business agility and to compete more effectively against both new and established rivals across a range of industries. To an unprecedented extent, all organizations are digitizing aggressively, and all enterprises are becoming more like technology companies. The cloud, as both a destination and an operational model, is a critical means to that end, and multicloud is an increasingly prevalent posture for a growing number of enterprises. Although the benefits that can accrue from multicloud are compelling, the networking implications are profound. This is particularly true for datacenter networking. In the client/server era, the datacenter network was exclusively on- premise, but multicloud means that the datacenter (and its network) becomes inherently distributed and more complex to provision and manage. The effect of multicloud is particularly acute higher up the network stack, at Layers 4 through 7, where technologies such as load balancing and application delivery controllers (ADCs) hold sway. It makes perfect sense because as applications become more valuable to enterprises, as both systems of engagement (with customers, employees, and partners) and back-end systems of record, networking at the application layer — the layer closest to the application — grows in stature. ◊ www.intelligentdatacentres.com