Application Delivery helps organisations to create flexible, service-centric network architecture for its users. In the context of the extended enterprise, it allows organisations to improve processes, presents an opportunity for innovation within organisations and offers freedom that can potentially change the way companies interact with customers, partners, and employees.

As more and more organisations continue to deploy point-solutions and technologies to facilitate greater infrastructure access and faster application delivery to a wider and increasingly mobile workforce, they become open to a variety of business and security risks. It is for this reason IT departments need to adopt a holistic approach to application delivery and extend business processes to distributed locations.

According to Mark Blowers, senior research analyst with IT research and advisory firm Butler Group, “Though more and more of the workforce is now based away from the head office and becoming increasingly mobile, organisations still need to cater for them in corporate and IT strategies. The expectation is that it will be possible to work remotely, roam freely, and be able to use any type of device. However, there is an increased business risk to this freedom, with the main issues being the security of information outside the confines of the office and the ability to effectively manage the wider environment.”

Availability and performance are critical

In this changing scenario, managing connections for the entire workforce and especially for mobile workers is a tough ask. With users connecting via a wide range of fixed and wireless networks, ensuring seamless connectivity in a cost effective manner can be a major challenge. Session persistence, airtime management, and roaming between wireless networks are also a part of this responsibility.

Often many remotely accessed applications are mission-critical but face issues such as centralisation, poor performance, availability, and security. Here, IT department should first employ the means to measure, and then implement tactical and strategic mechanisms to improve the application performance for remote users. Deploying a Wide Area Network (WAN) optimisation solution can address applications performance and availability challenges to a great extent and therefore it is important that companies with branch offices look at WAN optimisation solutions.

“Management is a key component in an application delivery architecture where policies drive availability, and visibility moves from individual point solutions to being system wide, along with the shift from fixed asset administration to dynamic asset utilisation,” said Blowers. “A cornerstone for the provision of multi-modal channels is the ability to deliver intelligent central management, enabling efficient use of the available resources. The accessibility of end-to-end Quality of Service (QoS) supporting data, voice, and multimedia, is an important first step in the evolution to an automated solution.”

Don’t forget security

When deploying solutions for mobile workforce, organisations need to ensure strong security mechanisms. A recent Datamonitor survey of 500 IT decision-makers concluded that security continues to be a significant inhibitor when it comes to organisations investing in mobile technologies. Despite vendor claims that it is no longer an issue, enterprises still list security concerns as the top inhibitor, with the scares of Internet breaches and data leakage causing enterprises to be cautious when considering or deploying mobility solutions.

With more organisations choosing to incorporate flexible user access facilities, including the use of local and remote wireless network approaches, there is a need to understand the associated risks as well as the benefits that should be taken into account when considering such a strategy. Some of these risks include data loss and data leakage, eavesdropping on transmissions, the ability of third parties to intercept wireless communications, the lack of central control, and reduced connection controls.

“Customers, employees, business partners, suppliers, and contractors need to be properly and adequately protected each time they access applications. Within this context, there is a requirement for operational security solutions that have the scalability to deal with high volume access requests, are comprehensive enough to handle all different levels of user and systems protection demands, and still retain the functional granularity that is needed to deal with each user as an individual when assessing their security status,” concluded Blowers.