Seven Key Considerations Before Your Upcoming F5 or Citrix Load Balancer Refresh

Applications in your data center, and your IT operations, demand agile, cost-effective load balancing solutions. Traditional ADC (application delivery controller) vendors such as F5 Networks or Citrix NetScaler have done little to address the needs of modern applications and cloud-native use cases. Instead, they force you down the path of expensive and inflexible hardware refreshes without addressing the fundamental challenges of elasticity, automation, hybrid-cloud use, and cost. In a recent blog post, Gartner’s Andrew Lerner advises enterprises to avoid network incrementalism. Before you commit to a multi-year license and maintenance contract with your appliance-based load balancing vendor, review these key considerations and what they will mean for the future of application services in your enterprise.