What is application delivery?

Also known simply as app delivery, it helps improve application performance, functionality and user experience without requiring enterprises to install and maintain the underlying infrastructure themselves.

Modern application delivery allows IT managers to spread application traffic across servers, data centers and the cloud to ensure high performance. From enabling remote work to underpinning digital experiences that drive customer engagement, application delivery has become central to the business strategies of many successful organizations.  

App delivery has been forced to evolve recently to keep up with developments in newer technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), and the Internet of Things (IoT). Once deployed primarily on on-premises data centers and application servers, it can now be deployed in cloud-based environments like AWS, Azure and IBM Cloud®.

As organizations continue to modernize to keep up with market demands, app delivery continue to play an important role in their digital transformation efforts. By helping them leverage the latest technologies, organizations can now uncover insights, streamline processes and improve outcomes more easily.

The delivery of applications to end users in a modern, fully digital environment relies on modern DevOps practices, which is the combination of software development (dev) and IT operations (ops). Here’s a closer look at the key components and types of application delivery and the DevOps practices that enable them to function.

• Load balancing: Load balancing, the distribution of web traffic across application servers and data centers, is often referred to as the backbone of modern app delivery. Most modern IT environments deploy an application delivery controller (ADC)—a specialized device kept on-premises or accessed in the cloud—to improve traffic management, reduce downtime and support high availability in apps. ADCs also help increase automation and scalability because of their ability to adapt to changing workloads in real-time.

• Security: App delivery secures modern web apps in several important ways. First, web application firewalls (WAFs) constantly test network traffic for real-time threats, such as attempts by unauthorized users to exploit vulnerabilities in source code or target data while it’s in transit. ADCs and other key web application infrastructure components are equipped with robust encryption capabilities like secure sockets layer (SSL) and transport layer security (TLS). These features ensure that the data is secure and offload cryptography processing workloads from backend servers while still maintaining high-performance standards.

• Caching: Application delivery depends on caching—storing content that a user requests frequently locally rather than in the cloud. Caching involves copying data that user’s frequently request and storing it in a fast-access location like a central processing unit (CPU). Caching compresses data to reduce bandwidth consumption, improving application acceleration and lowering network latency.

• Application delivery management (ADM): App delivery management (ADM) is software that gives IT administrators real-time views into app functionality and how it is being delivered across a public, private or multicloud environment. ADM delivers insights into complex and demanding processes, making it easier for IT teams to improve their app delivery methods and workflows.

• Application delivery networks (ADNs): App delivery networks (ADNs) are collections of technologies (suites) designed to speed application delivery and app performance in complex enterprise IT environments. Demand for application delivery networks is increasing globally due to the growth in popularity of cloud-based applications and technologies. Growing at a compound annual growth rate of 10.9%, according to a recent report, the global market is expected to reach USD 27.8 billion over the next 10 years.¹

• Content delivery networks (CDNs): Content delivery networks (CDNs) are geographically distributed networks of servers that are designed to store content locally (rather than in the cloud) for easier access. Frequently used—or cached—content includes videos and images that are stored closer to a user, reducing latency and bandwidth on the networks the user is accessing.

Application delivery solutions are typically described in three categories:

On-premises

On-premises application delivery services are set up and managed from organizations’ on-premises IT infrastructure, such as a locally managed data center or private cloud environment.

On-premises application delivery is best suited for enterprises that require a high level of control and customization—for example, industries with rigorous compliance requirements like healthcare and finance.

While on-premises app delivery infrastructure does yield more control, it is often more expensive and less flexible and scalable than cloud-based approaches.

Cloud-based

Cloud-based app delivery solutions leverage the compute power and scalability of the cloud to deliver a highly flexible, highly scalable solution. Cloud-based application delivery allows organizations to scale their compute power and network resources according to spikes or drops in workloads without affecting app performance.

Also, cloud-based, pay-as-you-go pricing is often more affordable than the upfront investment required to install and maintain on-premises application delivery infrastructure. 

Hybrid

The hybrid approach to application delivery blends the benefits of on-premises infrastructure with the scalability, flexibility and cost savings of the cloud. IT managers can make real-time traffic routing decisions and scale resources up or down as needed, while also relying on on-premises data centers for certain workloads.

Hybrid application delivery solutions enable organizations to achieve an effective balance between cloud and on-premises resources, optimizing application availability, performance and scalability.

App delivery has become a fundamental discipline for most modern IT departments. Here’s a look at some of the benefits that it delivers at the enterprise level. 

Through the effective use of caching, offloading and load balancing, app delivery helps improve the responsiveness and performance of apps that businesses rely on for core business functions.

Application acceleration techniques like compression and protocol optimization improve app performance and end-user experience regardless of workload requirements.

Organizations leverage app delivery to improve their security posture against a wide range of cyberattacks, including distributed denial of service (DDos) and SQL injection (SQLi). By taking a proactive approach to preventing data breaches, application delivery protects users and devices from a wide range of potentially costly threats.

According to the most recent IBM Cost of a Data Breach Report, the global average cost of a data breach was USD 4.4 million last year.

Cloud-based and hybrid app delivery approaches are highly scalable. These approaches give IT teams access to unlimited virtual compute resources through the cloud, enabling them to respond to the demands of any workload in near real-time.

The scalability of cloud and hybrid application delivery solutions allows for organizations of all sizes and with varying budgetary restrictions to benefit from modern app delivery. 

With apps powering more enterprise capabilities, downtime can have serious consequences for enterprises, such as loss of brand reputation and diminished customer trust.

Today’s advanced app delivery solutions ensure high availability across a wide range of apps, lowering the risk of downtime with failover, redundancy and real-time alerts when workloads spike.

Finally, app delivery helps enterprises deliver enhanced experiences to the customers that rely on them. Whether delivering an app that monitors blood pressure remotely or reminds a patient when it’s time to take a certain medication or delivering a dazzling visual experience in the latest game, successful app delivery underpins many of the core capabilities of successful digital enterprises.

While there are many benefits to deploying app delivery at an enterprise level, there are also some drawbacks. Here’s a look at some of the persistent challenges that the technology faces as it evolves to meet the demands of modern compute environments.

The rise of new technologies like generative artificial intelligence (gen AI) and IoT has increased demands on network infrastructure, testing the limits of application delivery solutions.

Routing and balancing application traffic, as the amount of data transferred across networks increases exponentially, can be difficult. Furthermore, it can sometimes result in increased latency, poor application performance and suboptimal user experiences.

High-performance applications like the ones enterprises deploy to accomplish their core business processes also expand attack surfaces, a measurement of vulnerabilities in a system. Each new component or technological solution used to make an app more effective also creates new vulnerabilities that threat actors can exploit.

As a result, modern organizations need to invest as aggressively in securing their applications as they do in optimizing their application delivery process.

Many modern applications that are built to leverage newer technologies like AI and the cloud don’t integrate well with legacy infrastructure. For example, an AI-powered chatbot that depends on real-time data and scalable, cloud-based infrastructure is unlikely to function in a traditional, on-premises IT architecture.

To ensure their apps’ high performance and scalability across different environments, organizations need to perform rigorous testing during DevOps cycles and identify and resolve any issues with legacy infrastructure before release.

Despite the availability of tools that provide end-to-end visibility into app performance, many application delivery solutions still struggle with accurate analytics and reporting. Typically, these issues don’t have to do with the effectiveness of the solutions themselves, but with the sheer volume of data that modern applications depend on. The issues are also related to the difficulty of integrating, processing and analyzing the data in a way that can provide meaningful insights.

Application delivery solutions have become fundamental to most modern IT environments, enabling the core business processes of the organizations they support. From remote work to employee collaboration to delivering new customer experiences, here’s a look at the top enterprise app delivery use cases.