Application Centricity- The New Buzz in Town

New applications are placing demands on the infrastructure in new ways. Infrastructure is expected to become application aware and more agile to support physical, virtual, and cloud environments. As applications become increasingly infrastructure-independent, they treat the data center as adynamic shared resource pool. This demands greater network performance and scalability because multi-cloud models require the infrastructure to be secure and multitenant aware.

Meanwhile customers want to deploy applications with full freedom to take advantage of the latest private, public and hybrid cloud models. Business leaders want to enter new markets, deliver new products and services, manage risk, security threats and drive more efficiency into their business. This means business agility directly depends on application agility and IT has to provision applications in hours instead of months and resources need to scale up (or down) in minutes.

Clearly traditional approaches that take a siloed operational view will not help. Common operational models between application, network and security that deliver application agility, simplify operations, assure performance and help scale are the need of the hour.

How the application-centric approach works

Innovative architectures that radically simplify, optimize and accelerate the entire application deployment lifecycle help to overcome IT silos, reduce costs and complexity. Taking a holistic systems-based approach adds to the benefit. An approach which uses a common policy-based operating model across the network and security elements (computing, storage in future) helps redefine the power of IT, makes IT more responsive to changing business and application needs, enhances agility, and adds business value.

Integrated solutions help dissolve IT silos for application deployment, security, network services, and network configuration personnel by enabling all of them to collaborate through a common platform. This in turn helps deliver a transformational operating model for next-generation data center and cloud applications. It also ensures application velocity (any application, anywhere), provides a holistic view of applications with centralized visibility and real-time monitoring across physical and virtual environments. Such an approach also helps secure multi-tenancy, scales performance, simplifies operations and enables ecosystem integration.

Holistic architectures that come with centralized automation and policy-driven application profiles help to deliver software flexibility with the scalability of hardware performance. The future of networking with such infrastructure is about providing a network that is deployed, monitored, and managed in a fashion that supports rapid application change. It is also about reduction of complexity through a common policy framework that can automate provisioning and managing of resources.

In summary therefore, as new technologies continue to evolve, businesses need to become agile and adapt these technologies and processes. In the new application centric world, the ability for physical infrastructure to support the new paradigm will dictate the very pace of innovation and business sucess!