This week we had the chance to come together as a team, toast last year’s success and discuss our ambitious plan for the new fiscal year. As with any high growth company, we do not always take the time to celebrate. Moments to pause and reflect are often lacking as the next mile-marker rapidly approaches on the horizon.

When Adobe needed fast and efficient application delivery, it ran its Adobe Experience Cloud solutions on Microsoft Azure. But for Adobe, the on-ramp to cloud transformation was Avi Networks.

Hardware used to be the foundation of IT. You couldn’t deploy an application without configuring dozens of servers and hardware appliances. But modern enterprises can’t be held back by a walls of knobs any longer. Proprietary physical hardware is expensive, slow, and works counter to your digital transformation.

The Holiday Season is upon us, and if you do business online, you understand the importance of performance and availability. We love the holidays because they prove, year after year, Avi Networks is the Next-Gen Application Delivery Platform. Many of the world’s largest retailers and financial services companies use Avi Networks specifically due to the value our software delivers during the holidays.

One hundred and twenty-two years ago German physics professor Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen discovered the power of X-rays with the “X” signifying “unknown”. The hand on left on the image below is the first X-ray “radiograph” that Roentgen created of his wife’s hand in 1895. In today’s modern society it’s easy to take things for granted but prior to the invention of X-Ray machines, broken bones, tumors, or the location of shrapnel were all diagnosed by physical examination. Yikes! Exams involved guess-work, were prone to error, and were dangerous to the patient. I am grateful to live in today’s world of modern medicine where physicians have improved tools to diagnose and help treat illness and trauma without as much guesswork.

The tech stack has a problem. It’s serious. It’s pervasive. And it’s insidiously hard to spot.

Look at a typical tech-stack diagram; infrastructure at the base, platforms and middleware services above, applications at the top.

Everything seems in order? The parts are all there. The diagram reflects how most organizations approach IT: infrastructure first, then platforms and services, finally applications.

We all can agree that cyber attacks are on rise. Be it Yahoo's data leak in 2013 where 1 billion user accounts were compromised or the more recent Equifax data leak which affected its 143 million customers, these events show the increased risk each web application is facing. Web applications are the bones and flesh of today’s businesses, and are often soft targets for damaging attacks. Unfortunately, applications need to access, collect, process, and relay sensitive data to execute business logic. Web application security is paramount for businesses that provide services using sensitive data. To understand the problem in more detail, we should examine what occurred in the case of Equifax—the attack is mind boggling in its scale and damage.

Without good APIs Google would fall to the likes of Amazon, Microsoft, and Facebook, claimed Steve Yegge in his seminal 2011 internal memo. Although the intention was to emphasize the importance of APIs for webscale service providers, the need for robust, scalable, and secure APIs has increasingly gained traction among today’s enterprises seeking to “digitize” their organization.

Citrix NetScaler’s recently exposed security exploit, which allows attackers to bypass authentication and take full control of the load balancing infrastructure, is frightening. But it is hardly a standalone incident. Every product from every company may eventually succumb to a critical vulnerability. This raises some good questions around security. How does a vendor test the security of their product? If vulnerabilities are inevitable, what is the vendor response and customer strategy?

More specifically, virtual load balancers are just legacy load balancers trying to find a home in your data center or the cloud.

As your enterprise begins to migrate to the cloud, legacy load balancers are left out in the cold. You can’t take your F5 or Citrix NetScaler hardware with you. Operationally, they just don’t function in cloud environments.