Organizations are embracing multi-cloud infrastructure for many reasons, including performance enhancements, increased reliability and business continuity, and cost-optimization and flexibility from avoiding vendor lock-in. Operating critical business applications across multi-cloud has become nearly ubiquitous as 85% of organizations operate multiple application architectures and locations, with 44% using four or more.1
To realize the immense benefits of multi-cloud, organizations must secure data storage and transfer throughout their interconnected environments—a potentially complex endeavor for already time- and resource-constrained IT and security teams.
Securing those applications is paramount for business success, as a web application was the target vector for 80% of reported data security incidents in 2023.2 One effective best practice to promote safe and reliable applications is to facilitate the creation and enforcement of consistent security policies.
Together, Google Cloud and F5 help organizations achieve multi-cloud success by providing centralized control over policy creation and distribution across their entire IT landscape, easing the management burden for IT and security teams.
By embracing open source and creating pioneering capabilities around Kubernetes, Google Cloud is multi-cloud “friendly” among the major cloud providers. This open-source approach makes Google Cloud a more flexible platform to build and operate modern applications, as robust native-security policies are shared with the community for easy implementation and dispersal. With Google Cloud, organizations can automate security by setting consistent policies to improve the effectiveness of security early in the application development lifecycle.
With Google Cloud Armor, organizations can apply a set of security rules that match attributes from layer 3 to layer 7 to protect their externally facing applications wherever they’re deployed. By providing consistent layer 7 traffic filtering, Google Cloud Armor empowers reliable application performance in multi-cloud environments.
By augmenting Google Cloud with the open framework from F5 and a multi-cloud friendly portfolio of security and performance solutions, organizations can provide their dev, security, and IT Ops teams the flexibility and control to confidently develop, deploy, and operate secure and adaptive applications across all environments.
Multi-cloud organizations use F5 BIG-IP to enhance the availability, performance, and security of their entire application ecosystem. Organizations can drive consistent security policies across all data center and cloud environments by using F5 BIG-IQ Centralized Management to manage all their BIG-IP physical and virtual applications from a single point of control.
Using the powerful F5 BIG-IP Application Services 3 templates with BIG-IQ makes it easy for app teams to develop and deploy applications with the appropriate security and network services for all cloud providers.
By using BIG-IP services, dev teams can easily extend existing on-premises security capabilities when migrating applications to the cloud. Plus, organizations can seamlessly connect Google Kubernetes Engine to BIG-IP to automatically inherit rules setups by SecOps teams, improving app development speeds and promoting consistent security posture.
To learn more about how Google Cloud and F5 can drive multi-cloud success via consistent security policies, visit f5.com/gcp.
Sources:
1 2023 State of Application Strategy Report, F5, March 2023
2 Data Breach Investigation Report, Verizon, June 2023