F5 presented its Distributed Cloud Servicesthe largest development in the company’s security and application delivery portfolio, designed to deliver security, multi-cloud networking and edge-based computing on a unified SaaS platform.
F5 also introduces the first new solution created on the platform, F5 Distributed Cloud WAAP (Web Application and API Protection), which enhances the capabilities of F5 security technologies bringing them together in a single SaaS offering.
To be competitive and meet customer demand, companies today increasingly rely on multi-cloud implementations and complex application portfolios.
In the 2022 edition of the State of Application Strategy Report, F5 found that as many as 88% of organizations today use both legacy and modern application architectures, and 70% operate across multiple clouds.
This further expands the surface available to cyber attacksforcing companies to implement multiple security controls, on different environments, giving up the homogeneity of policies.
“The applications and digital experiences that they support are fundamental today in life and in the interactions between people, also representing an indispensable platform to promote significant business innovation and to be able to open up to new markets”, he explains. François Locoh-Donou, President and CEO of F5.
“Helping organizations protect applications from a constant barrage of cyberattacks has become our mission. The launch of F5 Distributed Cloud Services is a really significant step because it allows us to offer customers an easier way to manage the complexity of the security challenge of modern applications“.
The F5 Distributed Cloud Platform provides security and delivery services for cloud-native and SaaS-based apps.
Services are centrally managed, but can be deployed wherever the app resides to increase business results and offer a superior customer experience.
Based on the combination of the platform and services acquired by Volterra with the security solutions F5 and Shape, F5’s distributed cloud services they can be natively deployed in multi-cloud, data center and edge environments.
Provide end-to-end visibility, a control of the policies on all the apps from a single dashboard and a private and integrated global networkwith presence in more than 20 large metropolitan realities.
There are already several F5 Distributed Cloud Services available to F5 customers. Such as F5 Distributed Cloud Multi-Cloud Transit, which enables multi-cloud network (MCN) functionality with secure and high-performance connectivity between different clouds, using high-performance network firewalls.
F5 Distributed Cloud Load Balancer and Kubernetes Gateway providing a load integrated with Kubernetes and API gateways, to easily deploy modern workloads and microservices across distributed clusters, different locations and cloud service providers.
The platform also has cloud native computing capabilities at the edge of the network, known as an app delivery network (ADN), that improve the end-user experience by deploying applications on the edge of the F5 Global Network.
With the launch of the new service, F5 has taken steps to integrate the customer experience across its portfolio of solutionsalso simplifying the naming of products.
Many services, formerly known as F5, Shape and Volterra are now renamed as F5 Distributed Cloud Servicesfor example, F5 Distributed Cloud Bot Defense, F5 Distributed Cloud DDoS Mitigation, F5 Distributed Cloud WAF and F5 Distributed Cloud API Security.
The first new service created on the platform is the F5 Distributed Cloud WAAP, which simplifies security and automates processesallowing application teams to focus on delivering new functionality.
The SaaS-based offer strengthens F5 web application firewall, bot mitigation, DDoS and API protection featuresbringing everything together into one easy-to-deploy solution that will enable SecOps and DevOps teams to enforce consistent security policies wherever applications need to be deployed.
The new solution brings together the best of F5 application security technologiesincluding defending applications using Advanced WAF, which more effectively protects against popular application attacks.
API security thanks to Volterra and its auto-discovery and machine learning-based anomaly detection, which automates the entire search process
and API protection and monitoring.
The defense from bots based on the AI technology of F5 Shape and global distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) protection.
F5 Distributed Cloud WAAP is available globally and will be launched in Azure Marketplace by the end of February.
