By Shibu Paul, Vice President – International Sales, Array Networks
In today’s fast-paced digital world, businesses must constantly adapt and innovate to stay ahead of the competition. One critical factor that plays a significant role in a company’s long-term success is its ability to deliver applications efficiently and reliably. Whether a startup or established enterprise, an effective application delivery strategy is key to staying agile, scalable, and responsive to both current and future demands. It’s no longer just about releasing apps, but ensuring seamless, secure distribution, optimal user experiences, and performance, security, and adaptability. In this article, let’s explore the best practices that will help you discover an application delivery approach that aligns with your business goals while keeping pace with the rapidly evolving digital world.
Understand the role of application delivery in your business
Application delivery is the process of deploying, managing, and ensuring the performance of software applications across various platforms. This encompasses not just the technology, but also the processes and practices that ensure users can access applications quickly, securely, and seamlessly.
At its core, application delivery is about ensuring your business is agile, able to scale quickly, and responsive to market demands. A robust application delivery strategy enables your business to roll out new features, products, or services faster while maintaining a high level of user satisfaction.
Here are some of the essential elements to keep in mind when crafting your strategy.
- Prioritise security at every step
Security is the foundation of any successful application delivery strategy. As businesses depend on apps for core operations, incorporate security from the very beginning into the infrastructure is crucial to prevent damage, including lost trust, penalties, and financial loss. This ensures your apps are protected from the outset, reducing the likelihood of long-term damage after an attack. For example, implementing an Application Delivery Controller (ADC) with Secure Socket Layer (SSL) offloading improves both performance and security by relieving web servers from the burden of cryptographic processing. - Architectural adaptability
As more businesses adopt hybrid and multi-cloud environments, your application delivery strategy must remain flexible. A solution that seamlessly works across various platforms—whether in data centres, on-premises, or in the cloud—streamlines operations and reduces the complexity of managing diverse environments. Multi-cloud ADCs, for instance, accelerate deployment, simplify management, and ensure consistent performance, regardless of where your applications are hosted. - Scalability
High performance is crucial, but scalability is equally important as your business grows. With cloud-native load balancers, unexpected traffic surges can quickly become a challenge. The goal is to find a solution that not only handles current traffic but also scales seamlessly as your needs expand. Deploying an ADC that can efficiently manage traffic spikes ensures that your applications stay available and perform optimally, even during peak usage periods, without impacting overall performance. - Performance
Performance is critical in the digital world. If your app takes more than two seconds to load, users may abandon it for a competitor. Optimising performance means ensuring every component of your system is running efficiently. One effective way to achieve this is by using an ADC that supports SSL offloading, which allows back-end servers to focus on delivering the app’s core content. For instance, offloading all SSL decryption to a dedicated ADC enables web servers to operate without delays, resulting in a faster and smoother user experience. - Leverage continuous integration & continuous delivery (CI/CD)
The pace of change in today’s market demands that businesses deliver software faster and more efficiently than ever before. Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) are two key methodologies that can significantly enhance your application delivery process. CI/CD ensures that software is developed, tested, and deployed in a smooth and automated flow. - Ensure a seamless user experience (UX)
As technology evolves, users’ expectations continue to rise, and it’s crucial that your application delivery strategy keeps pace. User experience (UX) is often the key differentiator between successful applications and those that fail. Businesses must deliver seamless, fast, and intuitive experiences to their users across all platforms, whether on mobile, desktop, or web applications. - Maintain a culture of continuous improvement
To future-proof your business, it’s not enough to implement a one-time strategy and leave it at that. The digital landscape is constantly evolving and staying competitive means fostering a culture of continuous improvement. Encourage your teams to constantly iterate on applications, learn from failures, and embrace new tools and technologies. - App requirements
No application is the same, and the one-size-fits-all approach will not be effective in all cases. The best application delivery strategies are flexible enough to meet the unique needs of each application, whether this is specific load-balancing algorithms or support for special protocols. Customisable ADCs can be tailored to fit the specific needs of each application, thus ensuring optimal performance and a better user experience.
Conclusion
For a business looking to deliver smooth, high-quality user experiences, ensure operational efficiency, and maintain security, the right application delivery strategy is indispensable. Focus on some of these major areas like security, scalability, performance, flexibility, and the ability to continuously adapt to customer demands while you are delivering your applications, which will surely make sure your applications meet your ever-changing customer’s needs.
Whether you are optimising today’s traffic or planning for future growth, a good application delivery strategy will help you stay ahead of the competition. You can reach out to industry experts to help you fine-tune your approach and take advantage of the latest technology solutions.