There are a lot of “top 10” lists in the industry. Predictions, mostly, but the ones that stick are the ones that provide insight into the top challenges faced by organizations trying to deliver and secure applications and APIs.
Well, to be fair, most of the best-known top 10 lists are about security.
The Open Worldwide Application Security Project (OWASP) has built and maintained several lists that help organizations every day keep their applications, APIs, and now LLMs, secure from the incredibly robust array of attacks that threaten to disrupt business.
But no one to date has a top 10 list of challenges that threaten the delivery of applications, APIs, and, yes, generative AI.
That changes today.
The evolution of app delivery
Application delivery may have started with the simple—but powerful—load balancing proxy, but it has evolved along with applications to incorporate a wide array of capabilities designed to ensure availability, enhance performance, and secure the increasingly important digital assets that power today’s Internet economy.
Since the beginning of application delivery, it has evolved in response to changes in application architecture.
Now, F5 has been there through every major application shift since the early days of the Internet. We’ve seen it all through the eyes of our customers. From that experience we’ve come to understand the most common challenges organizations face—and how to solve them.
Based on that, we decided it was time to share that knowledge. And thus was born the Application Delivery Top 10.
The top challenges to delivering apps and APIs
The Application Delivery Top 10 is a list of the top 10 challenges organizations encounter on their journey to deliver and secure every application and API, anywhere. From weak DNS practices to bespoke application requirements, from unoptimized traffic steering to incomplete observability, the Application Delivery Top 10 contains the, well, top 10 challenges we see every day.
It is our belief that sharing such a list will enable organizations to address—or even better, avoid struggling with—the challenges of delivering and securing a hybrid, multicloud application and API portfolio.
Like the OWASP Top 10, this list is not designed to be a “one and done” effort or encompass every delivery challenge organizations will face.
We are at the beginning of the AI era, and organizations are just now starting to strategize how to build out scalable architectures that will support their growing need to incorporate AI into their applications, operations, and business. New challenges are already rising to the fore, particularly around the incredible volume of data in flight needed to power both predictive and generative AI.
That’s why we plan to reexamine the list and, if necessary, update it on an annual basis.
For now, we are confident that this Application Delivery Top 10 list is the right list. And we’re just as confident that organizations that take the time to go through it and evaluate their own implementation and architectures against it, will be better prepared and able to deliver the fast, scalable, and secure digital experiences their customers want and deserve.
You can find the entire list right here, and we look forward to hearing what you think.
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