Hybrid: The Future of Application Delivery and Security

This is true irrespective of the insertion point for delivery and security services in these application architectures. Whether north-south, east-west, or one of the emerging insertion points in the new AI compute complex, organizations clearly use the type of application to drive decisions regarding what form factor they will use to serve the scalability, performance, and security needs of that application.

What's more, our research indicates that this holds true regardless of which delivery and security service they're deploying. We asked about form factor preferences for a dozen different delivery and security services and the results were the same. API security for modern applications? Software. AI gateways for AI applications? SaaS, please. Any service for traditional applications? They want hardware.

Are there exceptions? Of course. But across the board the trend is clear: the application delivery and security portfolio of enterprises will be as hybrid as their application portfolios. And while modern applications have finally reached an inflection point and breached 50% of portfolios, it will be a while before traditional applications peter out-if they ever do. And of course, AI applications will only grow from here. Which means organizations will be using a mix of hardware, software, and SaaS to deliver and secure their applications for the foreseeable future.

So, if you ever wondered why F5 maintains all three options for its application delivery and security offerings-that's hardware, software, and service -now you know. Because customers want and need them all to deliver and secure their heterogenous application portfolios.