Digital expansion accelerates, F5 creates ubiquitous and precise security protection

As the digital transformation of various industries has gradually deepened, corporate business has also developed rapidly. Among them, the transformation of the modern application architecture of the enterprise infrastructure has played a very important role and is an indispensable part of the enterprise transformation. At the same time, under the influence of the epidemic, the explosive growth of remote work and online transactions has led to a surge in various applications. It is far from enough to consider applications only in IT strategy. A dedicated application strategy is required to achieve success.

Recently, F5 released its annual survey report for IT decision makers, "2022 Application Strategy Status Report", which revealed several cutting-edge trends in the field of application security and delivery, and interpreted the challenges faced by enterprises and the technologies they are concerned about.

Looking at the entire report, we can see that today's enterprises are digital enterprises. The need to improve the level of automation is driving the integration of IT and operational technology (OT), which is also the most exciting development trend in the next few years that respondents believe. New challenges arise after the integration, such as how to monitor the data in the industrial Internet and the operation of equipment, so as to make a new automation vision for business operations and improve the operational capabilities of enterprises. At the same time, enterprises are very lacking in key insights into the root causes of performance degradation, interruptions and threats. These lack of insights will bring significant risks to 90% of enterprises that plan to use artificial intelligence to support business operations.

On the security side, security protection is increasingly focused on identity management. As enterprises adopt zero trust principles, identity and access management technologies (used by 96% of respondents) have now become the most commonly deployed category of application security and delivery technologies. Application security and delivery technologies are no longer limited to the applications they serve, but are deployed in different environments and can support multiple applications.

Furthermore, hybrid cloud architectures and their complexity and challenges are here to stay, as evidenced by the dramatic increase in application repatriation rates and the fact that 70% of enterprises now manage five different application architectures. While site reliability engineering (SRE) practices can help enterprises better manage complexity, actual solutions will require more strategic changes.

F5's out-of-this-world moment

In response to the above trends, F5 believes that its time to be an outlier has arrived.

As customers have more and more applications, risks are increasing, and new risks are also emerging. In such an environment, F5's capabilities can more easily provide customers with corresponding protection and delivery capabilities. As a world-class technology company in both application delivery services and application security, F5 has accumulated rich experience. Since its birth in 1996, F5 has had the gene of security. Located in the middle core position between the network and the application, F5 provides a full-agent architecture. No matter where the user comes from, which application to access, or which specific business to access, F5 can identify it well. For those that are non-compliant, unsafe, and have illegal identity verification, they can be intercepted or given corresponding authorization.

F5 also maintains an industry-leading position in the fields of WAF, VPN, identity authentication, etc. The acquisition of NGINX, Volterra, etc. has strengthened F5's distributed cloud service capabilities and met customers' requirements for diverse application deployment, including data centers, multi-cloud environments, container clouds, edge cloud environments, etc.

At this year's Multi-Cloud Application Service Technology Summit, F5 proposed to actively embrace digital transformation, embrace localization, and provide more localized service products, technologies, and solutions. F5 will also actively embrace open source, and will deliver more, better, and reliable open source technologies to customers, helping more companies use more reliable open source technologies to help them innovate and transform digitally during the digital transformation process.

F5's security strength

At a media communication meeting held recently, Chen Liang, general manager of F5's Security Division and technical director of the Financial and Enterprise Division, gave a detailed introduction to F5's core security capabilities from a security perspective.

From the cloud to the data center, to the modern application end, including telemetry technology, F5 can provide a defense-in-depth and dynamic confrontation architecture. Chen Liang said that defense-in-depth is closely related to the development trend of application layer attacks. Just like the ranks of "Honor of Kings", the bronze level is equivalent to the traditional deployment of IPS or traditional WAF in the network to deal with protocol types. The gold level uses a large number of API interfaces, the use of robots, and a large number of DDoS attacks to generate new types of attacks on users. The king level involves business logic, and you can directly enter the coupon collection and order placement without registration, or through the order information generated after payment, the attack behavior at the business level affects the business. In this case, the traditional WAF is dead, and F5 provides WAAP four-in-one prevention capabilities to deal with the security protection during the transformation of attacks from bronze to king.

F5 can monitor a large number of business-related interfaces through telemetry data interface capabilities and abnormal behaviors. For business logic, F5 provides a more reliable security strategy that reduces false alarms. Since F5 WAAP's protection capabilities can be deployed in local, cloud, edge and cloud-native environments, all prevention and control capabilities can publish security policies to WAAP product and service platforms deployed in different locations through a consistent, one-click method, thereby providing consistent security protection and effectively improving customers' protection capabilities. At the same time, the services and products of security service platforms in different locations have a large amount of telemetry data that can be transmitted to the customer's smart brain, thereby continuously discovering and blocking attacks.

Chen Liang, General Manager of F5 Security Division and Technical Director of Financial and Enterprise Division

Achieving a balance between security and performance

Of course, when companies undergo digital transformation, they often turn off security policies in order to ensure product performance. However, security is a very important lifeline, and the balance between the two is a pain point faced by companies.

The technology and solutions provided by F5 can help customers achieve a balance between the two. Because F5 itself must first solve the reliability problem, F5's security policies have been deployed on a series of end-to-end platforms. When users find security risks, F5's telemetry data can see in real time where the security risks appear. Users can activate and open security policies on F5 in a timely manner without the need for users to buy different security devices to deploy in the network. Therefore, F5 provides the ability to open on demand. Second, there must be a flexible and scalable capability, especially in private cloud-based technologies. When security risks arise, the performance of the security risk device cannot be improved, so dynamic and flexible expansion is required to meet the challenge. F5 can help users deploy the existing security devices and gateways in the form of resource pools. In this way, performance can be doubled, and the input-output ratio will increase from the original 50% to 100%.

The new environment has brought new challenges, but also new opportunities to F5. F5's in-depth defense and dynamic confrontation security architecture provide real-time risk monitoring, precise security protection for enterprise applications, and help customers solve all security and application delivery problems they encounter, as well as problems with consistent security deployment in multi-cloud environments, helping enterprises to carry out digital transformation faster and more securely.