F5 Networks Survey Finds Security Top Application Deliver Priority

F5 Network’s report on the State of Application Delivery 2017 shows a continued rise in the number of application services organization’s plan to deploy with security leading the way.

The F5 study found that on average, organizations plan to deploy 17 application services in 2017, which is an increase from 2016, when the average was 11.

Four out of the top five application services deployed by organizations today are security related. The top two services—network firewall and antivirus—are deployed by 83 percent of respondents.

Looking at the top three security services that organizations plan to deploy in 2017, DNSSEC [Domain Name System Security Extensions] tops the list at 25 percent, followed by DDOS [Distributed Denial of Service} attack defenses at 21 percent and WAF [Web Application Firewalls] at 20 percent.

In terms of the top security challenges, 50 percent of respondents identified attack sophistication as a top challenge in the next 12 months, down from 58 percent in the 2016 survey.

Lack of skills was cited as a top challenge by 34 percent, highlighting an unchanged skills gap from 2016.

Using security services doesn’t always make an organization safer. That said, the study found that when a Web Application Firewall (WAF) is deployed by an organization, 53 percent of respondents are confident that it will help them to be able to defend against an attack. In contrast, only 43 percent of organizations that deploy DDoS services are confident in their ability to withstand an attack.

While many organization will continue to host the majority of their application services themselves, 21 percent of respondents to the F5 study reported that they will deploy more than half of their apps in the cloud by 2017.