Cardinal Health evolves toward AI with visibility from F5 ADSP

Cardinal Health is a global provider of pharmaceuticals, medical supplies, and healthcare solutions. Dedicated to helping customers thrive in a changing world, the company delivers its applications with help from the F5 Application Delivery and Security Platform (ADSP). Recently, increased ADSP observability has helped Cardinal Health improve security, reduce technical debt, and progress toward a more AI-enabled future.

Business Challenge

From headquarters near Columbus, Ohio, Cardinal Health and its 58,000 employees supply healthcare providers around the world with everything from medicines to hospital management software. The company supports more than 90% of U.S. hospitals, coordinates more than 70,000 shipments of pharmaceuticals or other medical materials each day, and earns more than $220 billion in annual revenues.

Cardinal Health applications, deployed across a hybrid multicloud architecture, are delivered and secured with help from F5 ADSP. A wide range of F5 BIG-IP and F5 Distributed Cloud solutions comprise the converged platform at Cardinal Health. Together, they provide advanced app and API security and observability as well as high-performance load balancing and traffic management.

“We have almost everything F5 offers deployed somewhere,” says Roger Bauer, Senior Solutions Engineer at Cardinal Health. “As a large, diverse company, we have several business units all working independently and with different processes, and our technology brings it together.” His team manages that technology to support traffic routing and app availability, performance, security, and visibility across the business.

Solutions

A few years after deploying F5 WAF for Big-IP and building additional security capacity with Distributed Cloud solutions, Cardinal Health is reaping the security and observability benefits of the F5 platform approach.

“We are on a ‘set it, forget it’ mode with our BIG-IP traffic management solutions,” Bauer says. “It’s a very stable environment for us.”

In that context, Bauer praises recent features added to F5 tools, including AI support, to increase overall observability and make diagnosis faster and easier. “The updates and features being released in Distributed Cloud and F5 Insight have been invaluable,” he says. “Visibility and understanding what’s out there are crucial.”

Results

Increase hybrid multicloud visibility

For instance, Bauer says, “Over time, we have slowly, methodically worked with our application teams to understand how their applications are functioning, and we’ve been able to clean out a lot of technical debt.”

Juan Lopez, network security team manager at Cardinal Health, adds, “Partnering with F5 has not only helped us provide secure, 24/7 connectivity and the app visibility that the business needs, but also enabled my team to be creative, to support the business and provide the right solutions for customers who reach out to us with very specific problems.”

Remediate outdated ciphers

For instance, Lopez points to a specific example of how increased observability helped his team improve the company’s security posture.

“TLS remediation has been very challenging for us,” he explains. “We needed to remove older ciphers from our environment.”

As Tom Hall, Senior Network Security Engineer, notes, “That’s not an easy task when you have many, many applications.”

The proxy positioning of F5 solutions in the network and clever use of F5 iRules empowered the network security team to spot the use of old ciphers and create reports identifying them. Then they could coordinate with information security and application ownership teams to identify which early-version TLS ciphers could be removed and which were still being used by partners unable to handle TLS 1.3. Lopez notes, “F5 enabled my team to be successful with that task.”

Make secure availability easy

Bauer praises the broad capabilities of F5 technologies when he says, “F5 is a Swiss Army knife of networking and computer-based tools.” But he adds that those capabilities are also easy to use.

When they’re needed, the F5 community and experts also make it easier to adapt F5 solutions to specific needs. John Jones, IT Network and Telecommunications Engineer at Cardinal Health, praises the educational opportunities at F5 AppWorld events. He says, “It’s great to connect with people who are extremely knowledgeable, speak with them, and ask questions.”

Hall adds, “Not only are the labs beneficial, but having side conversations with experts or other colleagues in the industry keeps us informed about what they’re doing with applications that we could use in a similar fashion.”

Support increased use of AI

Moving forward, Bauer says Cardinal Health wants to do more with AI and is moving quickly to implement that strategy.

“We’re looking at how can we properly secure this environment,” says Bauer. “That’s the strength of F5—to put up guardrails around the environment and be able to secure, monitor, and regulate it.”

According to F5 survey results, a lack of AI skillsets represents a top challenge for most organizations. But Bauer notes that F5 solutions for protecting AI deployments bring the advantage of familiar interfaces. “That allows me to have somebody who is not as experienced understand the product and work with it,” he says. “That’s a great thing to dive into AI with.”

Rely on expert guidance

Lopez praises the efficacy of F5 support. “When we face issues, F5 is one partner that responds really fast, with the right expertise, and they’re engaged until we resolve it.”

The interaction goes both ways. Lopez points out, “I was at F5 AppWorld in the elevator with a senior director for one of the F5 products we use. He was inquiring, ‘How can we get better?’ That’s invaluable.”

Bauer notes that kind of collaboration is crucial to Cardinal Health’s future. “F5 and our value-added reseller (VAR) help guide us on what we’re going to do in the next year, or two or three years down the road. That partnership is crucial to us. And I trust my F5 contacts to help guide Cardinal Health into a more secure environment in the future.”