CIO Research Library

Today's businesses must operate in a drastically changing environment. Forrester is seeing firms challenged to efficiently handle difficult compliance requirements like SOX, HIPAA, and mandatory disclosure laws; increase the number of constituencies that have access to applications and data (including contracts, suppliers, vendors, business partners, and mobile employees); and leverage IT to provide competitive advantage. However, we have found that most companies are not well equipped to reorient IT as a critical driver of top line success while removing bottom line costs. The key for companies facing these challenges will be leveraging new application architectures to meet changes in business objectives. This is a challenge because organizations often face requirements that conflict with one another. They are tasked with increasing the application footprint to accommodate new apps, decreasing the infrastructure footprint by consolidating IT assets, and making the apps and infrastructure more robust, disaster-proof, and secure. So how do you reconcile these goals?

In April 2007, Forrester Consulting conducted an online survey of 300 IT decision-makers and influencers in North America. We believe the keys to success are to:

• Match application deployments to business objectives. This study showed that an overwhelming number of organizations are already tasking IT with business responsibilities. IT now drives business agility and relevance by extending applications that engage customers, allowing for new revenue-generating processes and increasing operational efficiency throughout the organization.
• Hold key IT domains accountable for business issues. Application developers, network operations, and enterprise architects are all key players in producing business results throughout the application deployment lifecycle. As a result, be sure to include them early and often in application rollouts and hold them accountable for successful deployments.
• Invest in an application delivery infrastructure. Enterprises can leverage a suite of network technologies that ease the performance, cost, and security woes that hamper application deployments. Application delivery infrastructure provides a policy-driven framework for effectively resolving issues throughout the deployment lifecycle. Unlike traditional networking gear, it's an overlay to the packet layer and provides the necessary abstraction layer to address application-level acceleration, security, monitoring, and control.