Load Balancing: The Key to Unlocking Cloud Potential
Most organizations today utilize cloud computing to streamline their workflows and deliver more cost-effective and scalable infrastructure. While some still host everything on-premises, and some are evolving to all-cloud, the middle ground of a hybrid cloud environment is becoming increasingly popular. According to recent A10 Networks research, The State of Application Load Balancing in 2025, which surveyed over 500 respondents across the USA and EMEA, a cloud-first approach is favored by 44 percent of IT professionals in EMEA, with 37 percent choosing a cloud-native approach.
Today, public cloud spend is around $550+ billion a year, with more and more enterprises moving larger portions of their workload into the cloud. However, organizations in EMEA face significant challenges when it comes to their cloud infrastructure, and particularly their load balancing capabilities. IT professionals in EMEA have reported varying degrees of success with cloud migration, and load balancing is a vital piece of the puzzle.
How Load Balancing Helps Address Priorities
When developing and implementing a cloud strategy, IT decision makers need to know that their key business needs are being met. Whether delivered through a standalone device or via an application delivery controller (ADC), load balancing helps organizations address their main priorities in several ways and helps to make sure the cloud migration is successful.
Security
With cyberattacks growing in volume and sophistication every year, and the financial, reputational and business consequences if an organization suffers an attack growing equally fast, it was not surprising that application security was top of mind for the IT professionals surveyed.
In EMEA, 40 percent of survey respondents cited application security threats as a key issue for their ADC or load balancing solution to tackle. This was the primary issue for the UK. IT professionals in the Middle East were particularly concerned with the security of their ADC, with 62 percent seeing this as the biggest issue. This is especially relevant in the current era of AI-driven threats, which allows cybercriminals to launch much more complex attacks at scale.
Scalability and Cost Efficiency
One of the key advantages cloud offers is the ability to scale resources depending on demand, and load balancing is an integral part of this. As demand increases, cloud services can automatically scale up resources (e.g., by adding more servers or virtual machines), allowing the load balancers to distribute traffic evenly.
This elasticity also allows for much greater optimization of cloud performance. Load balancers evenly distribute traffic so that servers are never under- or over-utilized, improving the overall performance of applications.
Cost is also always a key concern for businesses, and cloud delivers several advantages. It allows organizations to outsource their infrastructure and only pay for the capacity that is used.
Across EMEA, 39 percent of survey respondents stated that the cost of their load balancing solution was a major issue. In Germany and the Middle East, over 50 percent of respondents cited solution costs as a key issue, while 58 percent of German respondents stated that a hike in vendor costs would prompt them to look at changing solution providers โ the highest of any EMEA region.
Businesses Need More from their Load Balancers
While IT professionals named security as their main area of concern when it comes to load balancing and ADC solutions, this is also the area where the most improvement was needed.
While security was top of mind for IT professionals, problems on the vendor side were also dominant. Forty-four percent reported challenges adapting to recent changes in vendor licensing or support, and 39 percent had seen a significant hike in licensing costs.
IT professionals are also struggling with solution complexity that requires specialized skills, with 43 percent saying this across EMEA. This was the joint highest issue in Germany (54%) and the most pressing challenge in Benelux (48%).
Finding a Vendor You Can Trust
Vendor issues were also a key driver for IT teams to consider changing their solution. Nearly half (47%) of EMEA IT professionals stated that poor vendor response or support would be the main reason to look elsewhere. This was also the case for 64 percent of German and Middle Eastern IT professionals. It is therefore vital that your ADC or load balancing solution comes from a vendor that you trust, at a reasonable price.
To download The State of Application Load Balancing in 2025 research report, please visit: www.A10Networks.com/resources/reports/the-state-of-application-load-balancing-in-2025/
