Survey: Load Balancing Vendors Fall Short for Finservs
Financial services organizations are under pressure to innovate but they’re being held back by their load balancing solutions. In a recent series of industry surveys, firms shared their challenges with key priorities from cloud migration to compliance—as well as their growing frustration with their load balancing solutions and vendors.
A new report by A10 summaries the findings of the two surveys:
- An A10 and Gatepoint Research survey of U.S. executives, Modern Application Delivery Strategies for Hybrid Clouds.
- An A10 and Opinion Matters survey of in-house IT professionals in EMEA, Network Load Balancing Technology Trends.
The findings show a clear gap between the load balancing requirements of today’s finservs and the value they’re getting from their load balancers.
Competitive Pressures Call for Hybrid Cloud—but Migration is Falling Short
As born-digital upstarts push the pace of financial industry innovation, agility has become a key competitive requirement. Hybrid cloud environments offer a way to accelerate modernization and deliver new services more quickly, but it’s not an easy transition to navigate. In fact, only 25 percent of U.S. firms report highly successful application migration to the cloud.
Legacy environments will continue to be essential for some firms due to factors like regulatory compliance; it’s not surprising that 81 percent continue to use on-premises data centers. But 33 percent of firms rely exclusively on on-premises infrastructure—a critical competitive liability in today’s fast-moving financial industry. Load balancing, whether delivered through an application delivery controller (ADC) or as a standalone solution, can simplify hybrid cloud migration and management, but too many firms remain reluctant to make the move.
AI Opportunities Demand Better Performance and Availability
Artificial intelligence will have a massive impact on the financial services industry, but it also puts unprecedented demands on technology infrastructure. GenAI workloads can crowd the network and degrade performance for other critical applications, while real-time inference demands optimal performance with minimal latency. Hybrid cloud can provide much-needed scalability and flexibility, but as we’ve seen, many firms have yet to tap into it.
Survey participants also named faster troubleshooting and root cause analysis (20%), analytics and application insights (20%), and faster application performance (13%) as areas where they need more from their solutions to ensure business success.
New Initiatives Focus on Cybersecurity Threats and Resilience
As a new generation of AI-powered threats increase risk, finservs need stronger defense against everything from DDoS attacks to malicious insiders and ransomware. Forty-six percent of EMEA firms plan to implement protection against AI-related threats, and 38 percent will invest in developer security tools.
In addition to data privacy and protection mandates like GDPR, CCPA, and the EU AI Act, finservs now face DORA requirements for higher levels of operational resilience following a breach or disaster. In response, 29 percent of EMEA firms intend to improve security and resilience. Thirty percent of U.S. firms are prioritizing resilience, while 28 percent of U.S. firms are focusing on better security.
Firms Aren’t Using their ADCs to the Fullest—and Complexity is an Issue
Given the security and compliance requirements finservs face, you’d expect them to be making full use of the relevant features in their ADCs and load balancers. But according to survey data, relatively few U.S. firms are using these solutions for key use cases like application-layer security (16%), access control (12%), and TLS/SSL offload (10%).
If firms aren’t getting full value from these solutions, it might be technical factors that stand in the way. Asked about the issues they’re facing with their ADCs or load balancers, participants put solution complexity (44%) and integration difficulties (29%) at the top of the list.
Vendor Issues Lead Firms to Look Elsewhere
It’s not just solutions that can be hard to work with. Frustrated with their vendors, EMEA firms named complaints ranging from licensing and support changes (28%) and significant cost increases (26%) to vendor lock-in (22%). For many firms, such issues can be enough to look elsewhere. Fifty-six percent of EMEA respondents would change solutions due to limited or poor vendor responsiveness—far higher than the 35 percent who would do so due to increased latency, lag, or downtime. U.S. executives shared this position, with more naming superior vendor support (20%) than any other consideration when evaluating an ADC or load balancing solution.
To remain competitive and gain share in a fast-evolving market, financial services firms need technology partners who enable transformation—not hold it back. To learn more about the friction they’re encountering today—and what they might do about it tomorrow—download the full report here.
