Video: From legacy to leading edge: Transforming app delivery for better user experiences | Duration: 3296s | Summary: From legacy to leading edge: Transforming app delivery for better user experiences

Transcript for "From legacy to leading edge: Transforming app delivery for better user experiences": It's time to regain control of your modernization initiatives. Whether you're rehosting legacy apps, re architecting cloud native applications, or rebuilding to add AI, Cloudflare's connectivity cloud offers a secure distributed environment to build and deploy applications to region earth. Find out how Cloudflare can help power your app modernization journey at cloudflare.com. Product marketing manager Cloudflare's application services. He, is a member of our product and technical marketing team. He, was formerly at A10 Networks where he was focused on enterprise security and application delivery solutions. And, Bobber has a master's degree in computer science from the University of Maryland and has over 9 years of experience in the application services and cybersecurity space. Our featured guest today is Devin Dickerson, who's a principal analyst at Forrester. He serves our application he serves application development leaders and professionals. His research focuses on cloud native development, development platforms, edge application modernization, and government application development strategies. He partners with, development leaders and technology teams to create pragmatic tech delivery strategies, improve cloud maturity, and build high performing teams across their technology organizations. And Devin has a unique perspective from his US Federal Government background, leading software, engineering teams in government acquisition efforts to deliver applications in medical and defense use cases. Devon covers vital development markets, including cloud native development, serverless, and edge development, as well as associated platforms, practices, and tools within those segments. So, with that, thank you everyone for being here, and I will pass it off to, Bobber. Today. Before we actually get into the weeds of the things, let me quickly walk everyone through the agenda. The introductions are already done. So the next thing that we're gonna do is, a fireside chat, where we're gonna talk about some things like, you know, why good user experience is important, why is the cost of doing what is actually the cost of doing nothing, why you shouldn't just not do anything about the problems that your applications might be facing, what would be some of the causes, what are some of the typical causes for, you know, application performance and user experience to deteriorate? What are the roadblocks that are making solving these issues more difficult and more challenging? And then how do you overcome those challenges? What is the ideal solution? Does it exist today, or, you know, is it something, that we're gonna still be looking forward to in the future? And then I will give you a quick, overview of how Cloudflare can actually help solve some of these problems. And then if you have any questions, if you put them in the chat on the side, we can get to those at the end of the session. So with that, I'm gonna hand it over to Devin to give us a quick overview of, you know, how you see application delivery and application development, and how do how does Forrester think about those things? Yeah. And so first of all, I I wanna thank you guys for having me. Really looking forward to this discussion. So to understand how Forrester views the world in terms of application development, I'll start with the statement that software is an expression of the business. That business value of those customer outcomes, those improved customer experiences, employee experiences, that's what it's all about. But traditional software development sometimes has a hard time getting to that business value at the center, and that's because traditional development processes are rife with handoffs, delays, low value deliverables. And oftentimes, there's there are these unique little interdependencies, that that force teams to wait for things before before they can actually get things done. But software development in enterprise organizations, even at non, organizations that are not considered technology organizations, software development and the successful delivery of features, projects, and business outcomes, these are these are huge priorities. 22% of the global developers that we survey in our research, tell us that those three things are top priorities for them over the next 12 months. And so how do we get there? So over the years, certain parts of the software development life cycle have become or remain differentiating, while other parts of the life cycle have become more like commodities. The trick is in identifying those things. So the basic activities of the Forrester model, the ideate, design, build, and deliver, These are baseline to all modern development practices. Everybody has to do them. But mature organizations augment these processes with other activities, things like value stream management, cloud native development. Maybe they experiment with low code, AI, continuous, integration, continuous testing. And so it's it's really a maturity curve that sees organizations able to hone in more on on that value. And so if we look at this framework a little bit more closely, let's think about what we're trying to enable here. So the first thing we wanna we wanna think about is in in your organization, in your tech org, think about how you're empowering developers, empowering developers to compose, optimize, or make use of the best platforms and tools for the job at hand. Right? So things like cloud native technologies, edge development, platforms. These things drive innovation through development, and we can use things like event driven architecture, and to in to kind of enable some of the consistent feedback that you see in the loops here. Another thing that's important is accelerating delivery, and one of the main ways that people that organizations accelerate delivery is kind of under the bucket of agile practices. Agile it's agile is one of those things where it's easy to talk the talk, a little bit harder to walk the walk. But organizations that that obtain a level of maturity in agile delivery, they they can get to business value in part because of that iterative process of designing and improving software and getting those feedback loops, from customers and stakeholders, back into the process. And when you start adding in things like continuous testing, continuous delivery, value streams, you can really start to optimize for that accelerated delivery. And the last key point I'll mention here is internal partnerships. So the Forrester model for application delivery really hones in on software development delivery professionals partnering with infrastructure and operations. The market, of course, knows this as DevOps, and it doesn't stop there. The bridging the gap between development and operations, what it's really about is bringing both development and operation closer to the end user, right, by not firing off, just focusing on your job, throwing things over the fence, and hoping it works, by working with development and operations working together, really bridges the gap between both groups and the customer. And so just to go through the model here really quickly, so as I mentioned, business value forms the core. Everything developers create must be in the service of the value streams. Value streams in the development and operational context are about converting business hypotheses into digital enabled solutions that are that are delivered directly to the customer. And it's the platforms that really allow, development teams to create and optimize these value streams for their customer journeys. And then the 4 processes that form the critical cycle, as I mentioned, analyzing, ideating, and planning, are determining what the business needs and why. The process continues, through iteration, designing, prototyping, and creating MVPs. And from there, software is built and maintained, but the job, never ends. You you want to continue to leverage things like automation, to improve how, and what is delivered to the customer. And then it's the loops around the cycle that really differentiate mature organizations from the rest. And it's when you kind of move behind those commoditized processes, those four processes in the critical cycle, and into the real, the real value that so like I said, the central cycle, it's it's critical, but it's not enough. Mature organizations are gonna have to rely on additional tools and practices to squeeze out value, especially because, customer expectations are rising, markets are getting more competitive, And so you're gonna need, to to leverage different platforms, tools, processes, and really embrace a maturity journey. Great. I think that was an amazing overview of what we're gonna talk about today. I think, yeah, organizations as they undergo that journey of modernization, they need to think beyond just what they're gonna do today and prepare themselves and and future proof the solutions. Well, get solutions, and deploy them that is going to future proof their applications for them and not just, you know, push them into a corner where eventually they're gonna have to go through the process from scratch all over again. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. I think we can start with the fireside chat. So I have a few questions here, and I think, just for the audience, the way we're gonna do this is we're gonna go through some of these questions and then add some of our thoughts to, you know, what we wanna talk about here. The first question I have here is and, Devin, I know you touched on this a little bit in the info section, but, how how important is good user experience and good application performance for today's digital native businesses? Well, if we were to pick 1 if we we can only focus on one thing, then we would probably pick this. Right? Someone very smart once told me when I was earlier in my career as a software engineer, I used to get really deep in the weeds. I I I embrace complexity. I I enjoy it as as a nerd. But somebody told me that nobody actually cares about technology, and it really wounded me. But I think what they were what they were actually trying to tell me is that it's not about the technology itself. It's not about how cool your architecture is. It's about the product or service that you're delivering to the user. And when people think about users, they they often there's something that is that is missed. Users come in all shapes and sizes. Even if your application is not some consumer facing app out there on, you know, on the Apple Store, it could be something internal that employees use. Your customer could be another technical team in your organization. Right? User experience is the most critical thing to focus on in application delivery regardless of what flavor your customer is. Yeah. And I think one of the things that keeps, getting ignored when we talk about user experience is, lost productivity. We especially, you know, since you brought, internal applications, into the conversation. I think we usually don't really think about it on a day to day basis, but the fact that your applications are not working, the way they're supposed to or at the most optimal levels, you're going to be wasting a lot of time just or your employees are going to be wasting a lot of time just sitting around not being able to do the job that they want to do or that they're supposed to do, and you're just wasting time. And that just adds on to the the the whole idea of, you know, lost revenue in general as well. So it's not just, you know, losing revenue because you couldn't buy the tickets to the concert, on that application that went down because of a traffic surge. It's also the fact that, you know, you just can't do the job that you want to do. 100%. I think it's important to remember, as as you're indicating, air the details matter. Right? When I was when I was building applications even a decade ago, one of the things that was often lost on me and and some of our team members and and to learn this lesson, the sysadmins or the implementers, the the folks who are going to be, taking control of that part of it, the op you know, the operation side, everything impacts the end user experience at the end of the day. Right? So if if you're if you build an application and it's it's difficult to deploy or you build an application and it's difficult to maintain, performance service levels, all of these things are going to ultimately trickle down to the end user, and that end user experience can significantly impair if you're if you're a private sector organization, it can impair your business and your revenue. If you're a public sector organization, it can impair your mission outcomes. So, yeah, I I think I think it's important not to lose sight of any layer of the user experience no matter who those users are because at the end of the day, it's all going to end up impacting organizational outcomes. And I think, you know, we we kinda addressed some of the next question already, but I would like to go a little, one step deeper into, you know, what happens when your applications are not performing the way they're supposed to work and, you know, what happens when user experience is bad. So I wanna add a little bit, you know, before I hand it over to you. But, you know, at Cloudflare, we've been looking at some research, a vast variety of research, and we've also been looking at, or talking to our own customers, trying to get the answers on, you know, how how impactful good and bad user experience is. And the numbers are kind of crazy. I mean, I don't want to say it, but at the same time, the modern application user is very, impatient. And the fact that and, you know, I'm I'm the perfect example of this. I was thinking about this yesterday, and I was like, okay. What is a good example of, a poorly performing application that just frustrated me and I moved on to the next application? And ride share applications is a good example of this. Right? If you're waiting for, a right, a ride and then, you know, you aren't able to get that or the user experience is just bad because there's service traffic or whatever is going on, you are going to go to the alternate service. I have, like, 5 different applications for each and every service on my phone. I'm pretty sure everyone else is the same, and that's part of the reason why 88% of users, once they have a bad experience with an application, they're just never gonna go back to that application because there are so many alternatives available for each and every service. This isn't the nineties anymore where, you know, you were stuck with 1, organization for a word processor, one organization for something else. No. You have multiple, multiple, alternatives available to you. And, because of that, users are just going to go to the next best service and never come back to you. At the same time, you know, the window of opportunity to to win that business or keep that business, from that particular user or customer, it's shortening every single day because no one wants to waste time on applications that doesn't that don't really work well. That window, according to some research, has come down to point 0 5 seconds. So if your application does not satisfy a user within that time frame, they're just gonna move on to the next application, and odds are they're never gonna come back to you. So, you know, what are your thoughts on that? Yeah. So first of all, I I definitely agree with your core premise. Though it's, you know, it's it's not that users have become more fickle. It's as you say. It's that thing that there's just a lot more choice today. And there's also, yeah, there's a few things to think about. While users are more likely to move on, after a bad experience and it doesn't take much time, there's also higher stakes than ever before. That's the interesting thing because digital experiences are increasingly the primary way or in some cases, the only way that, that customers interact with an organization. I I I bank with a company that doesn't even have a branch in my state. Right? I I only deal with them through their through their applications. And so a bad experience with those applications could seriously impair my customer relationship with that company. The other thing is that the hypercompetitive marketplace today, as you said, there there's just so much choice. In, you know, in in the nineties, early 2000, I it's it wasn't just that there weren't a ton of choices. It was also that you're you're much more locked in. Implementing a solution took time, took energy. When when an application installs on your phone in seconds or, you know, there or there there are multiple high performance websites that can get the job done, it's just you're much you're in a much better position as a consumer. It's a great time to be a consumer in this regard. But it but on the application delivery side, it can be challenging. The rapid pace of innovation means that it's always a moving target. And even things as simple as performance and latency, I think if you go back a decade, consumer, appetite for high performance applications was always there, but our standards were just naturally lower. Right? I also think that we're getting used to a different type of experience. There it's it's somewhat controversial in a way, with the way companies leverage data for advertising and such. But I think that even even I as a consumer can take for granted the way the ways in which personalized web and mobile and digital experiences, have have impacted my standards for what I want in in an application. But and like I said, though, it's it's a double edged sword because even though we've come to rely on the enhanced digital experiences from things like personalization, we still need privacy and security. And if we find out our data is being misused or if there's a security breach, with an application, we may truly never go back and and to trust that business again. Yeah. And so and and I guess another thing I would bring up is that when we talk about things becoming more competitive and customer expectations rising, it's not you're not only competing against apples to apples, like products and services that are directly in competition with you. You're actually competing with, really just a very distracting world of there's there's other things people could be doing with their time. It's not always just about, hey. I might go to your competitor. I'm actually just competing for eyeballs and user engagement. Got it. Yeah. So I I think that's a that's a good point. So we've talked about, you know, how important good application deployment and user experience is. But now I wanna get into what causes problems around these. Like, okay, user experience is important, but what can deteriorate a good user experience? There are a bunch of things, that we can look into, but since you talked about cyberattacks and things like that, I wanna I wanna focus on one of those points. So, cyberattacks when I think of cyberattacks in terms of, application performance or application delivery, the first thing that comes to my mind at least, is DDoS attacks. DDoS attacks have become so easy and so cheap to launch. It's just it's it's, you know, it's very hard to not care about d loss attacks. And the fact that a d loss attack can, slow down or even take your application out and cost, you know, cause direct revenue losses is it makes it, in my opinion, one of the biggest reasons why we should be focusing on DDoS attacks if we want a good user experience to continue. Similarly, you know, one thing, some organizations tend to forget about, and the reason I say this is because we do see examples of this happening time and time again, is the fact that, you know, prep preparing yourself or having solutions that have the flexibility and scalability built into them so that if there's a legitimate traffic spike, you know, Thanksgiving is coming up, the holiday season is just starting, there's gonna be a lot of sales going around. There's gonna be a lot of people doing holiday shopping online mostly because that's, you know, how most of us do it now. Like you said, a lot of consumers are just interacting with these applications or these organizations online now. There's going to be huge spikes in legitimate traffic. These are not people who have any malicious intent. They're just trying to get those virtual cards full and then, you know, get some of that stuff delivered to their homes in time. So, you know, we tend to forget about that, but legitimate traffic also poses a threat if your applications are not able to cope with those sheer huge volumes of traffic. What are your thoughts on that? No. I I I think you hit the nail on the head. I'll talk about this. The security piece first is super interesting because when when you're especially in the ecommerce example that you mentioned, no one wants to feel like there is a risk of any kind of malfeasance when there is an ecommerce transaction because credit cards are involved and all that. But the performance piece of something like a DDoS attack can be equally devastating that happens during a major promotion. Not only do you have the revenue loss, but as I see here in your background slide, the brand damage the brand damage can be incredible. And not every company is Amazon dotcom. Some some of these companies are operating in profitable but relatively niche, fields where there where there is considerable competition and someone could just move on to complete their transaction soapbox a little bit because and before I say this, I acknowledge that technology is cyclical, and we go from distributed to centralized and back again over the years. But I think as applications become a little bit more data centric and as customer expectations rise in the ways that we've highlighted already, you start to get into a situation where not all use cases can can be handled by centralized computing architectures. And when I think a bit of a misnomer is when we think about just like the core public cloud, cloud native application, there's a tendency to think about this as being a distributed application, something that you where you've got a lot of flexibility to put workloads closer to end users. This might be true compared to maybe if you only had 1 data center in a specific region. Sure. The public cloud is more distributed and and maybe can get you closer. But the truth is is that it's still a centralized data center, and distribution is applied in a regional context. And so it I I think many organizations and I write in my research, when I talk to clients, I encourage this. Whenever you are approaching the design or architecture of a new application, you need to consider your performance and and latency requirements. If it's a data centric application, maybe think of you're not only thinking about where the workload needs to run, but you're also thinking about where data needs to be stored and how that how those workloads are gonna interact with those data sources because all of those things can have a tremendous impact on the end user experience. I think the geographic distance between end users and applications or the geographic distance between end users and critical data stores, especially for application transactions, is something that organizations can overlook until it's too late, and then you're trying to kind of unwind the clock. Instead, you wanna be considering that as a core design principle upfront. Yeah. Perfect. And then I think one thing, that I wanna touch up on here is compliance. You talked about, so, you know, when when I was talking about cyberattacks, I just mentioned DDoS, but that's a good point. You know, data breaches are real. We see it in the news all the time. Data breaches keep on happening. And when I think about compliance standards, especially things like GDPR, the first example that comes to my mind is a few years ago, there was a huge data breach that happened with one of the largest, airlines, international airlines, and they ended up paying I think it was it was close to a $1,000,000,000 in fines. So, obviously, you know, compliance, is a big, big thing that people need to focus on and people need to prepare for because, like you said earlier, you know, privacy is very important as we are modernizing applications. We need to make sure that, we are working privacy standards into it. We are making, we're making sure that we are compliant with any of the existing or the new standards that are gonna come, by because, every single nation at this point, seems to be coming up with their own compliance standards, as well. So if you wanna do business, if you wanna if you wanna expand your business globally and go into newer markets, that's one of the things that we've seen when we talk to our customers is that, you know, sometimes they're held back from expanding their businesses because they're not prepared to go and comply or or their application services or applications are not prepared to comply, with those local standards while maintaining compliance with global standards as well like GDPR. Yeah. You're you're a 100% right. So there comes a point for for many organizations. If if you're offering even if it's a service based business or or some kind of digital experience, sometimes going into different geographical regions is your best path to growth in terms of users or revenue. And these these walls of additional governance, oversight, compliance, and regulations can be a major, inhibitor to being able to go into those markets and offer your product or service. One thing that I think and and, you know, from the analyst side side of this conversation, this is something I'm I'm watching very closely, because there there traditionally been a lot of manual effort engineering, in platform design to understand and be able to deploy into these different regions and meet varying standards while in while there. I think that increasingly, organizations are gonna be looking to distributed application type platforms that can help take on some of the complexity of operating an application or service in a global context. Right? So if you give me more control over where my workloads run, if you give me more control over what data source a particular transaction might rely on in terms of geographic location. You are essentially abstracting if you're a platform provider in that situation, you're kind of abstracting the complexity of me operating and building for that distributed use case. You're extracting that away, and I can focus on my business logic. Because my business logic for me is the differentiating part of my service, of my business. I I don't necessarily think it's beneficial for the enterprise to have to take on the complexity of dealing with all with, all of these, compliance and regulatory issues in different environments, if there's elements of that that can be taken on by a platform. And we talk about this a lot in our edge development research at Forrester. So, Devin, a lot of what we've talked about is not new. Right? All of these challenges, they have existed for quite some time. Why aren't we why are we still talking about this? Why aren't legacy or existing solutions able to solve these problems? What's keeping, you know, these application services providers, from, addressing all of these challenges? Yeah. That's a that's a great question. I think I think that we're starting to see a movement here, but the truth is is that the legacy solutions aspect of this is is the harder problem to solve. And so, to be honest, a lot of customers are just getting to that now. I talk to when I talk to folks who are on, like, a cloud native modernization journey even, what I often find is that their their net new applications or maybe some smaller customer facing digital services have been modernized, replaced, refactored, leveraging modern architectures, modern platforms to solve a lot of these challenges. But the legacy applications are still super important, and they're extraordinarily challenging to replatform, refactor, redesign, and modernize. And so I think that from the vendor space, from the platform space, platforms are are are needing to aim more squarely at those legacy modernization use cases where the enterprise customers are struggling. And and there there are patterns and best practices that can help an enterprise along, but a lot of the complexity that's obstructed away by platforms for net new applications can be in the in the market broadly a little bit more difficult to apply to those legacy apps. There might be dependencies that just don't play well with whatever their chosen, cloud provider offers in terms of services, or it might be difficult to transform a system made with, like, bespoke homegrown, interface middleware to event driven or API driven architectures. It might be it it might be challenging to take this big monolithic application that we manage in our state of the art data center and decompose it, and deploy it in a globally distributed way. So I think the complexity is real, and it's it's up to the platform partners to help the enterprise solve the issue so that they can focus on their business. They don't need to they're they're building platform engineering practices, but they don't need to transform themselves into an internal, software software application vendor either. Yeah. And I think one of the, we we talked about legacy solution providers. So when I think legacy, I think of, you know, these distributed, networks, edge networks that are trying to kinda come together and work together. And what you end up with is a bunch of different technologies trying to speak to each other and not really doing a good job at it. And part of the reason why all of these technologies or all of these networks need to talk to each other is because, we have been doing a bit of a patchwork when it comes to, you know, solving some of these problems. Your applications are more and more distributed. You have multi multi cloud, deployments, which, by the way, a single public cloud solution provider won't be able to solve that problem. If you're going through that maturity curve, if you're going through that that whole application modernization process, you might not want to or if you're a large enough organization, if you're a large enterprise, you might not want to, you know, put all of your eggs in one basket and and just migrate all of your on premises applications to one cloud. It usually works for smaller organizations. But but, you know, the more distributed you are, the more distributed your users are, the the the more variety you have in terms of the applications that you started off with, it it becomes more and more challenging to kinda consolidate all of that onto a single, platform, whether it's Doesn't really matter. There we go. At the same time Sorry about that. I think I got cut off for a second. Yep. Can anyone hear me? Okay. Sorry. Yeah. A little bit of an Internet glitch. But, yeah, one thing I wanted to, also add here is that there's no way if you have a mix of different networks trying to talk to each other, your users are more and more distributed, and you have multi cloud deployments of applications, there's no way you're gonna have visibility across all of these pieces. And that's where things like, you know, just internal threats, 0 day attacks would become more and more easy because you're gonna you're definitely if you don't have full visibility across your entire, application delivery, or application services deployment, you are going to leave some loopholes. It's just a matter of time it happens. So, you know, in order to have visibility, that's that's part of the reason why we can't solve this challenge is because you can't have visibility across your entire deployment. You don't know where the the network is broken. You don't fully understand where you have, you know, ex actually expanded your your, the tech landscape. How many how many openings have you left into your network? So, you know, visibility definitely becomes a challenge. So, you know, with that, Devin, I wanted to ask, what's the ideal solution in your opinion? From a Forrester point of view, what do you think is that ideal solution that every organization should be striving towards, to make sure all of these challenges are taken care of? Yeah. So before I say this, there's never a silver bullet. But one thing that that you said that that struck me is about, you know, these scenarios where people think about moving everything to one one platform. And in my time advising clients, I've actually never seen this in a real in a real world enterprise. Every organization is hybrid, that I talk to anyway. The only time I this is not true is when I'm dealing with a start up that that's probably a vendor. So I think that it starts with an acknowledgment at the enterprise that in order to deliver on the customer and employee experiences that they wish to deliver, there you have to acknowledge that applications and platforms need to become more distributed. When I look at some of the things that drive organizations towards the hybrid environments that they often are in, by the time I talk to them, they're thinking about things like performance, flexibility in terms of what services they consume. They're thinking about compliance issues. They're thinking about security. And I I cover a market that I call edge development platforms. It's it's how we define, platforms that abstract away some of the complexity of building and deploying distributed applications often built on top of a content delivery network of some kind. I think that organizations, when they're go when they're setting out to build cloud native applications, they need to consider, the distributed computing paradigm as well. Right? And at Forrester, we have this concept called the 4 edges, and it's just it it it's a model to understand how we view the world. Today, we've been talking a lot about experiences, and so those experiences really kind of exist at this engagement edge. But there are, you know, there's there's a lot more to it. There are layers. Getting there might require interacting with platforms and services, the operations, or enterprise edges. You probably will still have things in your core enterprise on prem or in the public cloud. But I think really getting to the solution to a lot of the problems that we discussed today is in embracing, distributed computing and developing applications that are built from the ground up to be distributed. That means, being able to deploy workloads closer to end users, closer closer to datasets, and really being able to exercise some control over where things run and how. Awesome. So, you know, with that, I kinda wanna, talk about, the Cloudflare solution. How does Cloudflare address a lot of these challenges? Now at Cloudflare, we, have something called the connectivity cloud. The Connectivity Cloud, the idea is that, you know, you have this network that provides any to any connectivity between your users and your applications. It doesn't really matter. The Connectivity Cloud is supposed to be vendor or Cloud agnostic. It doesn't really matter where your users reside, whether they're within your enterprise network, whether they're in some remote locations or if they're just working from home. It doesn't matter if your applications are in the public cloud or on premises. The Connectivity Cloud is supposed to provide connectivity from any type of user to any, end location the application is residing in. At the same time, you know, while providing that connectivity at scale and at the best performance, possible, the Connectivity Cloud is not going to force organizations into that impossible choice between performance and security. The idea is that the Connectivity Cloud should also provide top notch security whether we're talking about solutions like 0 Trust, whether we're talking about application security. It doesn't really matter whether we're talking about 0 day attacks, DDoS attacks, everything. Connectivity Cloud should provide full visibility into those attacks and then protect you against them. At the same time, Devin, to your point, the Connectivity Cloud is also meant to help you innovate and help you modernize your applications by letting you develop applications as close to the user as is possible at the Edge and ensuring that it enables organizations to develop modern applications. We talk a lot about AI and AI based applications or applications that leverage AI in a certain way. Connectivity Cloud should ensure that those applications are developed at the edge as close to the user as is possible, and that's where Cloudflare's Connectivity Cloud comes into play. Our Connectivity Cloud is the 1st Connectivity Cloud in the market. The idea here is that Cloudflare not only connects and protects your people, your networks, your applications globally, while doing that, we also ensure that we provide solutions that can help organizations build their applications at the edge so that when the users are using these newer modern applications, they don't feel any of the effects of, you know, latency, essentially getting rid of all the, all the challenges that we were talking about, for example, like, you know, the, geographical distance. The idea is to shorten that as much as is possible. And the fact that you have full visibility across the entire platform, across all of your application deployments, leaving no loopholes in, and at the same time, making sure that there's never a compromise between performance or security. And then, you know, one thing I wanna mention here is also the fact that, our global network, which is basically spread across more than 330 cities globally, it ensures that the Connectivity Cloud is working perfectly by running every single service on every single server within every location that I've just mentioned across 330 locations. That gives us the ability to provide the best performance of any edge network out there to all of our customers regardless of whether they're, you know, running applications in Africa while their users are in North America. Doesn't matter if their applications are in LatAm while, their users are in Asia. Every single user is going to have the exact same application performance and application security capabilities, regardless of the location. And at the same time, you know, I was talking about uniform visibility and uniform threat intelligence earlier. That is enabled by the Connectivity Cloud by making sure, that we have a single, very easy to use, unified platform with a single dashboard and API. You don't have to work with multiple disparate networks that were acquired over the past decade or 2, and there's a bunch of patchwork and not all of your APIs or your network doesn't talk to each other. Providing that unified platform with unified visibility and threat intelligence is very important to the success of the Connectivity Cloud. When I say success, a lot of organizations, obviously, return on investment, you're investing into the solution. What's the return on investment with a Connectivity Cloud? A lot of organizations are going to care about this because you don't wanna, invest into a solution, that is going to take forever to give you the time to value, to get to the point where you're gonna get the value out of that solution. Or, you know, no one wants to, invest into a solution that gives you a bad return on investment. Well, we talked to a bunch of, our customers via Forrester. Forrester did this total economic impact research a while back. And by talking to our customers, Forrester realized that the return on investment over 3 years with the Connectivity Cloud is 238%. Now some of the things that are feeding into this 238% return on investment are things like, you know, a 29% improvement in security team efficiency. So I was talking about efficiency earlier. You're not wasting time by waiting for your application services or your solutions to get to a point where you can actually get value out of them. From day 1, you're getting value out of the solutions that you deploy. That is the Connectivity Cloud. Similarly, there's there was 13% improvement in IT team efficiency. Again, going back, to the idea of not wasting time and actually getting the job done immediately and in the most optimal way. And finally, there were there were things like a $1,100,000 reduction in legacy tools, spend over 3 years. We talked about application modernization. We talked about, modernizing your entire network and infrastructure. That can only be done with solutions that not only help you, did not only help you modernize your applications, but also make it easy for you to go through that process. That's what the Cloudflare Connectivity Cloud, did. Obviously, if you want to learn more about the Connectivity Cloud and how Cloudflare's application services can help your business, You can scan, the QR codes on screen. We have a brand new CXO's guide to superior application and user experience. You can check that out, or you can join our list, for, weekly live demos, and you can actually go go through those and see our product in action and see the value that you can get from the connectivity cloud. Any final thoughts to wrap the conversation up, Devin, before we get into some of the q and a? No. Let's let's get into the q and a. I I think that applications are gonna continue to become more distributed, and so the solutions and platforms platforms that enable enterprises to build applications will need to dress to match. Got it. Yeah. So let's let's get into the questions. So, I see a few questions in here. Let me see what we can get started with. So we we touched up on this a little bit earlier as well, but let's let's kinda reiterate and and provide, a bit of a summary on this one. So what are the biggest hurdles that clients face when they try to improve their application delivery and why? Yeah. I I I think if I were to sum up the hurdles, I think much much of the complexity in application development delivery is in the seams. Right? It's it's when one process or component meets another. Right? And so if if we're think if we have a developer and he's focused on code and business logic, then may the first theme that we might come across is in deployment or testing. If we're thinking about that same application, developer delivering a global service, there there are things that will be needed or things that will impact the ultimate success or failure of that application that are outside of that sometimes outside of that developer's, view. There'll there'll be impacts that in complexities that go beyond the code that he can see in that he or she can see in their IDE. And so it's it's and those are the things that we increasingly see platform engineering, teams, DevOps type teams taking on, and the way that they often do it is through, building or partnering with platforms. I think we have time for one more question. So, The last question here is you mentioned application services a few times. What solutions are considered as a part of application services? Have you put your thoughts forward on that, Devin, and then I'll wrap it up with, my answer. But when you think about application services, from or when you hear the word application services, from a Forrester point of view, what would you include within that umbrella term? Yeah. So when I think about application services, I'm thinking about what I'm what I'm actually thinking about are abstractions. Right? I'm thinking about complexities that I can take out of my core application so that I can focus on the value deriving, services that the the customer facing pieces that actually matter to the end user. And so when if I'm if I'm if I'm taking complexity out, I'm thinking about, okay. How do how do services communicate with each other? I might need an application service to help me with that. What kind of data services do I depend on? How do I deploy this application? Especially if I'm deploying or or distributing distributing in the global context, how how do we maintain that? Are there application services that help me meet my SLAs in terms of performance and latency? I'm I'm thinking about things that are outside of the core business logic, but that still have a tremendous impact on user experience. And these software today is increasingly composed, and it it's composed by a combination of your custom business logic and the way you stitch together those and compose with those application services often, offered by by some kind of platform provider. Devin, I think you said it better than I ever could, but let me just quickly provide a definition of application services from the CloudFlare point of view as well. At CloudFlare, when we talk about application services, we're generally talking about the combination of application performance enhancing solutions and then application security solutions. On the security side, you have things like DDoS protection, your web application firewall, you have bot management or bot protection solutions, and so on. On the application performance side, as Devin said, these would be solutions that complement your existing applications so you don't have to worry about these things and you just focus on building the best application for your customers. These would be solutions like CDN. This would include things like a load balancing solution and so on. When we talk about application services, that is the context in which we are speaking, a combination of both application performance and security. With that, I want to thank Devin, and I hope you guys enjoyed the talk. And over to you, Vivian. Alright. Thank you, Devin. Thank you, Bob. That was such a great overview on what modern application, should look like and how they should function. Again, thank you everyone for joining us today. We know you have a lot of places you could be. We appreciate you taking the time to, join this discussion. Again, if you are interested in any of the resources or related documentation about anything we talked about today, please scan those QR codes or scroll over to that docs tab in the chat window. Thank you, everyone, and we'll see you next time.