• Home
• Analysis
• Policy
• Central Government
• Local Government
• Healthcare
• Education
• Digital Inclusion
• Technology
• Security

Technology

Unified Application and Data Delivery

8 February 2010

Government IT departments like their counterparts in the private sector face many of the same business challenges. They need to improve efficiency and drive down costs. Delivering high-quality e-government services for citizens is critical. To achieve their goals, these organisations need to ensure that their applications not only work – but work quickly and securely all the time. It is crucial that they align IT capabilities with e-government needs by adopting a fluid and responsive architecture for application and data delivery.

Roadmap to dynamic infrastructure
While consolidation, service sharing, and cost reduction represent the CIO’s goal of aligning business and IT, they do not provide a systematic roadmap for achieving alignment. Therefore, the new infrastructure for application and data delivery must dynamically optimise the interaction between user and resource in the face of rapidly changing conditions. It must equalise organisational pressures for security, data protection, ease of access, market responsiveness, low cost, and high performance.

Unified

F5’s Unified Application and Data Delivery architecture represents the advent of a new computing model. This architecture allocates portions of discrete resources for application and data delivery, and decouples logical access to these resources from physical locations and boundaries such as servers, storage, and data centres.

In addition to separating logical access from physical location, the architecture must also manage itself automatically and contextually. The core functions of this new model include unification, visibility, context, and action, which will be managed by specialised devices – Application Delivery Controllers and a newly emerging class of device, Data Delivery Controllers – at the intersections of users, applications, and data. Because of their strategic location, Unified Application and Data Delivery Controllers make the ideal platform for implementing business policies ranging from access control to acceleration to data protection and beyond.

Adaptable

While a unified platform is appealing, the trend towards dynamic environments – whether in the public or private cloud – and virtualisation require more than that. Successful initiatives based on dynamic virtual environments require the network and application delivery infrastructure to be just as dynamic and adaptable as the applications and architectures it supports.

Intelligent

One of the hallmarks of Application Delivery Networking (ADN) is the application intelligence of its solutions. Because ADN solutions are necessarily focused on delivering applications, such solutions must be application-aware. With a growing focus on application security and performance due to increasing demands by mobile customers and users, it is imperative that application delivery platforms be as application and data aware as possible. In addition, the deployment of new applications and new functionality must be as painless and cost-effective as possible.

By automating management, these appliances help organisations meet service level agreements for application availability, recovery point objectives, data and storage availability, utilisation, and security, even as Web 2.0, virtualisation, and cloud computing drive the scale and complexity of the infrastructure beyond the ability to manage it manually.

Conclusion
With trends pointing toward consolidation and cloud computing, the need for an adaptable, efficient application delivery infrastructure is more important than it has ever been to government organisations.

---