Twenty-five years ago, applications were monolithic software programs that ran in huge data centers and were used by the select few. Today, with the Internet and mobile devices—and increasingly, the Internet of Things—having transformed our lives, applications are everywhere and used by nearly everyone. Your business is driven by them, your customers connect with you through them, and your employees can’t do their jobs without them. Because we rely on them so heavily, applications must be available when we need them, able to respond within a split second to meet our demands, and secure enough to protect our confidential information.

For this survey, we asked F5 customers to tell us about the number and types of applications and services they’re using, what their greatest challenges are in delivering them, which services they need more of, and which ones they plan to deploy in the future. We also asked about trends in cloud, software-defined networking (SDN), and DevOps, and how these trends are changing their approach to IT.