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Build it yourself
Don MacVittie, technical marketing manager II. F5 Networks
ORGANIZATIONS SETOUTTO OPTIMIZE applications primarily to address cost, flexibility, security and control issues, but optimization is heavily dependent on the locality of the application in relation to the optimization mechanism. That means deploying your own infrastructure is far more corporate-friendly than paying someone else to do it for you.
Let's examine the primary drivers to adopt application acceleration and the key differences between the two approaches.
The cost of deploying an application to a hosting provider is probably lower than the cost of purchasingan application optimization controller, at least in terms of up-front costs. Yet any TCO evaluation reveals the savings to be greatly overstated and somewhat illusionary, because you will pay for both hosting and optimization every month that your application is deployed.
And that's only one application. By building your own, you can accelerate as many applications as you choose without added costs other than the admin time to configure the types of acceleration you wish to apply.
Next is flexibility. If someone else hosts your application, when you want another app to receive the benefits of acceleration, you can move that program out to the hosting service and pay them even more. With a roll-your-own solution, you make sure the application's traffic is routed through the optimization tool and configure the optimization desired. No cost. No negotiation. Just acceleration.
In terms of security, a roll-your-own solution meets the security policies you set for the entire IT organization. You are the one running it; if it does anything different it is because you chose to implement differing security policies for the given application. In a hosted environment security is, at best, a set of contractual assurances that the provider will protect your application and data. You don't control the security policy: you merely suggest and contract for results.
This in turn relates to control If you want the ability to tweak optimization parameters to suit the needs of a particular application, you need to be the one accelerating. If you want to tighten security on a given application because its data is highly sensitive or the application itself is deemed high-risk, you'll want acceleration tools that you manage, which is to say...