CIOIN

IT  organizations  have  two  primary  functions:  application  development  and  application  delivery. Within most IT  organizations,  the  application  development  function  is highly formalized. In contrast, within most IT organizations there is typically nascent recognition of the existence of an integrated application delivery function. 
One key symptom of  the  lack  of  a  formalized  effective  application  delivery function  is  that  in  the  vast majority  of  instances  that  a key business application  is degrading,  that degradation  is noticed first by the end user and not by the IT organization. 

Another key symptom is that when application degradation does occur, most IT organizations are unsure how to best resolve the issue.

This  report's  goal  is  to  help  IT  organizations  develop the  ability  to minimize  the  occurrence  of  application  performance  issues  and  to both  identify  and quickly  resolve those  issues when  they  do  occur. To  achieve  this  goal, Kubernan  synthesized  its  own  knowledge  with  that  of roughly  a  dozen  of  the  industry's  leading  vendors  and  a similar  number  of  IT  organizations. Kubernan  also  sur-
veyed hundreds of IT organizations. 

Given the breadth and extent of the input from both IT organizations and leading edge  vendors  this  report  represents  a  broad  consensus on an application delivery framework that IT organizations can  modify  for  use  within  their  organization.  To  make the framework even more actionable, this report contains roughly  40  conclusions  that  IT  organizations  can  use  to shape how they modify the framework.

Below is a listing of some of the factors that complicate the  application  delivery  function.    The  impact  of  these factors  is not dissipating any  time soon. If anything,  the impact of each of these factors will increase.  

In the majority of cases, there is at most a moderate emphasis during the design and development of an application on how well that application will run over a WAN. 

There is a requirement to identify and classify an organization's applications based on its network requirements and business criticality.The performance of the user's desktop tends to degrade over time.Shifting traffic patterns make it more difficult to both manage and optimize traffic flows. The deployment of increasingly distributed applications increases the number of sources of application degradation.

The Webification of applications tends to greatly increase the amount of traffic that the IT infrastructure must support.

 The movement to consolidate servers out of branch offices and into fewer data centers can result in significant performance issues.

Both the movement to reduce the number of data centers and the movement to host a given application in a single data center increase the amount of WAN delay associated with accessing an application.

 The vast majority of people who access an application do not reside in a headquarters location. 

This increases the difficulty in managing the performance of the users' desktops and insures that the latency, jitter and packet loss of the WAN will impact the application's performance.

The typical IT environment is highly dynamic.  For example, new users, sites and applications are added on a regular basis. Because there are changing paths through an IP network, IT organizations need visibility into the operational architecture and dynamic behavior of the network.