The digital transformation is driving brand-new opportunities for enterprises, resulting in an explosion in the growth of applications. That means that in this increasingly digital world, IT is a primary enabler of business.
Today, applications are deployed across public clouds, private clouds, hybrid environments, co-location facilities, and more. This increase in application production opens doors to unprecedented threats and expands the opportunity for risk. So, the more the applications, the greater the threat. Now, enterprises are forced to add more capacity to handle growing traffic and to ensure application security.
Given this shift, the whole approach to application delivery has changed from primarily traditional hardware-based appliances to a more hybrid model that includes software-based and virtualized deployment methods. As a result, the role of modern applications in delivery controllers has moved up the stack. ADCs are tackling security through DDoS mitigation and web application firewalls that are deployed as a part of ADCs. But, evolutions like these are making it difficult to manage ADCs, and when they’re mismanaged, enterprises often experience costly outages and incur extra overhead costs. One thing that network teams often mistakenly neglect is the deletion of unused virtual servers that are no longer needed. Oftentimes, these virtual servers are unintentionally left behind during migrations. This is where optimizing ADC configurations really matters. Unlike firewall optimization, optimizing ADCs does not take precedence due to the complexity involved.
While optimizing ADC configurations reduces costs, the process of removing stale configurations involves significant time and resources. However, decommissioning virtual servers without proper impact analysis – is far too risky.
So, what can be done to optimize your ADC infrastructure? Here are three key solutions that can help:
1) Automate the Decommissioning of Unused Virtual Servers
Automation enables configuration agility and paves the way for the removal of unused virtual servers. It enables self-servicing capabilities by providing access control to multiple teams, and validates the decommissioning of virtual servers using pre-validation and post-validation checks. Therefore, it enables successful implementation at every level by taking a more incremental and systematic approach.
2) Simplify and Standardize Complex Business Processes
Defining standard offerings for various services, work processes and inputs/outputs optimizes the change management process. Simplifying the deployment process reduces time-to-market for both new and existing workloads. Once the standardization process is completed, the user can sequence and align individual service requests for a multi-threaded service delivery.
3) Plan for the Future: Add More, Manage Seamlessly
Creating a truly agile data center requires different elements to be managed cohesively across subject-matter teams. The scope and scale of your application delivery infrastructure is likely to expand just as your enterprise does, so maintaining a centralized management approach allows you to do more with less.
Watch the webinar How to Optimize ADC Configurations and Reduce Operations Cost to learn how to simplify, self-service and optimize your application delivery infrastructure.
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About the Author
Anand Purusothaman
Chief Technology Officer
Anand has more than 15 years of experience in the IT industry, specifically in product design and development.
