Today’s increasing IT burdens demand an end-to-end application delivery strategy – a strategy that includes infrastructure solutions deployed along the line-of-sight between datacenters and end-users – a strategy that makes it easy to deliver any application to any user with the best performance, highest security, and lowest cost. A well thought out and deployed application delivery strategy brings the following benefits to the organization as a whole :

Control Applications At Their Source

An end-to-end application delivery strategy should start with infrastructure products that are deployed in the datacenter, directly in front of applications – products that control the initial delivery of these applications as close as possible to their source.

To ensure the best performance, security, and TCO of web applications, you need application delivery controllers designed from the ground up with web technologies in mind. Web protocols are extremely verbose and tend to carry far richer content than client-server applications, creating massive increases in the volume of application traffic. Web applications are also far easier to exploit, opening up many new data security risks. The combination of these factors can dramatically slow down application performance, drive up the cost of servers and bandwidth, and increase data security risks. To address the challenges of web application delivery, companies need to look to integrated application networking products that go beyond traditional load balancing; products that optimize application traffic over the network by incorporating advanced technologies like compression, caching, and security. The Citrix NetScaler product line is a good example of a solution in this area.

When it comes to Windows applications, the issues are a bit different. The traditional approach is to install each unique client on every end user’s PC, then attempt to manage, upgrade, patch, and maintain them at the endpoints. This model quickly creates huge problems with cost and complexity that grow exponentially as applications and users are added or changed in any way. A far better solution is to install all clients one time in the datacenter and virtualize their delivery over the network so that the only elements crossing the wire are pixels, mouse movements, and keystrokes. This approach dramatically improves the cost, simplicity, and security of managing Windows applications without compromising the end-user experience in any way. An adjacent technology known as application streaming can be used in a similar fashion to stream Windows desktop applications to end-users on-demand, similar to how you might stream an audio or video file. The Citrix Presentation Server product line is a good example of a solution that uses virtualization and streaming technologies to deliver Windows applications.

Secure Access to Applications

A second key consideration in developing a successful application delivery strategy is making it easy for users to securely access their applications from any location. Traditional secure access solutions such as virtual private networks (VPNs) are focused primarily on access to networks. Next generation SSL VPNs are typically much easier to install and are specifically designed to provide application-layer access to the exact application resources each user needs. Citrix Access Gateway is a good example of a product in this category. When evaluating secure access solutions as part of an end-to-end application delivery strategy, IT executives should look for solutions that go beyond simple network access, giving IT control over which actions a user can perform within each application based on his or her unique access scenario. A user accessing a corporate application from an office computer, for example, might be able to use all application functions, while that same user connecting in from an untrusted external location might be able to view application data, but not save or print.

Optimize Applications Over The Wide Area Network

As a result of trends like user mobility, globalization, and outsourcing, more than half of all employees at mid to large sized enterprises now access all of their applications from branch offices. Traditional networks were never designed to deliver the kind of application traffic they are expected to handle today, especially as companies consolidate datacenters and start pushing applications like voice and video over the network. WAN optimization products address this problem by automatically optimizing all application traffic over the wide area network, an approach that can dramatically improve application performance and reduce bandwidth requirements by as much as 75 percent. When evaluating WAN optimization solutions, companies should place a high premium on products that are entirely transparent, can be easily dropped into an existing environment without changing the network or applications, and require no new configuration when new applications are rolled out. The Citrix WANScaler product line is a good example of a solution in this space. 

Monitor The End-User Experience

The success of any application delivery strategy also rests on the ability of IT to truly monitor the experience of end users, especially with regards to application performance. Giving IT visibility into exactly what the application experience feels like for end-users makes it much easier to maintain service level agreements with business stakeholders, spot bottlenecks before they become issues, and quickly diagnose problems when they do occur. Citrix EdgeSight solution is a good example of a product in this category. Unlike a few short years ago, businesses today run on applications. In an increasingly volatile world where you face a dizzying array of changes to applications, users, and business climates, making application delivery a strategic imperative is no longer an option. If you keep these four best practice objectives in mind, chances are, you will be well positioned for success.