Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) Market - Growth, Trends, COVID-19 Impact, and Forecasts (2021 - 2026)

Market Overview

The Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) Market was valued at USD 2.40 billion in 2020 and is expected to reach USD 3.40 billion by 2026, at a CAGR of 6% over the forecast period from 2021 - 2026. An application delivery controller (ADC) is a computer network device in datacenters that assists in performing familiar tasks, such as those done by web sites to remove the load from the web servers themselves. Along with the most basic load balancing function, ADCs feature SSL offload, web application firewall, and proxy/reverse proxy. ADCs have gained traction over the past decade due to the growing need for legacy load balancing appliances to improve performance and to handle more advanced requirements associated with application delivery.

• More users have been surfing the web on smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices than a typical laptop or desktop machine, leading to the generation of large amounts of data. According to the GSM Association, by 2025, the United States may have the highest smartphone adoption globally (49% of connections). According to Consumer Technology Association (CTA), ‘the US Consumer Technology Sales and Forecast’ study, CTA expects that 5G-enabled smartphone devices will reach 2.1 million units and cross USD 1.9 billion in revenue triple-digit increases through 2021. This has created a performance and experience gap for mobile users since they have been accessing web sites and applications designed for high-speed internet networks and application delivery controllers to help optimize performance on mobile networks.
• Moreover, increasing data traffic with a rapid rise in cloud applications has also fastened the need for adequate content and application delivery systems, aiding the growth of application delivery controllers. Thus, with the explosion in Internet traffic, business applications, and the number of Internet-enabled devices, application delivery controllers provide the front-end intelligence that supplements and enhances business applications flow. Furthermore, regarding the application security, organizations can take user access credentials previously stored in the cloud and store them in their on-premises active directory. The ADC only needs to validate each requesting user’s identity, without storing each member of the active directory.
• Additionally, with the rise in distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, overloading, and disrupting enterprise servers, the companies can rely upon ADCs to set limits on requests and traffic hitting a single internal server resource. According to the Cisco Visual Networking Index (VNI), the estimated number of DDoS attacks is anticipated to reach 14.5 million by 2022. An ADC can be deployed physically as a hardware appliance or virtually as a software. Virtual application delivery controllers are particularly useful in large enterprise data centers and cloud computing environments. Customers need to be able to scale the capacity up and down as application demand fluctuates.
• The lag in ADC is impacting application rollouts as well. Since a new load balancer takes anywhere from days to months, the user of hardware-based ADCs has been reporting significantly slowed application rollouts corresponding to ADC change, as compared to cloud-native users. Infrastructure has been evolving along with the change in business, thereby, making infrastructure modernization the key to success With the COVID-19 pandemic lurking around, the application visibility and management have gained even more prominence as employees work from home and businesses rapidly transform their environments to keep their staff productive from any location. This could provide further impetus to the growth of the market during the forecast period.

Scope of the Report

The application delivery controller delivers application services and controls communications between clients and application servers. The controller is the function of managing (or controlling) the flow of data between computing systems, such as client devices and application services, optimizing application performance, availability, and security. With the explosion in internet traffic, business applications, and the number of internet-enabled devices, application delivery controllers provide the front-end intelligence that supplements and enhances business applications flow.

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Key Market Trends

BFSI is Expected to Hold Significant Share

• The demand for application delivery controllers in banking is on the rise due to various development and reforms. The growing technological penetration, coupled with the digital channels, such as internet banking, mobile banking, etc., is becoming the preferred choice for banking services. There is a greater need for banks to leverage advanced authentication and access control processes.
• Online banking penetration is increasing worldwide. For instance, according to the statistics from Eurostat, online banking penetration among the countries in Europe rose has risen to almost 95% in countries such as Iceland and Norway, in 2019. With a rise in internet and mobile banking, banks and financial organizations need to provide high-speed connectivity to satisfy customers.
• This rise in the banking sector also makes it prone to anonymous security threats and cyber-attacks. Thus, to avoid these cyberattacks, the application delivery network demands efficient management spurring the demand for ADCs. For instance, NGINX Plus is widely used by banking, insurance, asset management, brokerage, fintech, and other financial services companies. NGINX enables the customers to deliver outstanding end-user experiences and to extend the functionality of existing colossal applications. NGINX Plus is being used to deliver reliably across all channels and devices.
• Further, the introduction of new technological solutions using the Cisco Nexus Series at the data center has given Alfa-Bank, one of Russia’s largest private banks, the opportunity to gain a competitive advantage by significantly improving the IT system’s efficiency and reducing risks associated with the storage, processing, and transfer of information.

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