How a leading U.S. health insurer evolved toward F5 ADSP

Chandni DigheSenior Director, Platform and Industry Marketing | F5

One of the largest health insurers in the United States, serving tens of millions of members, depends on its applications for nearly everything it does. Claims processing, member portals, provider systems, and internal tools have to stay available and secure around the clock, because an outage anywhere in that chain eventually touches someone's care.

And healthcare keeps getting more digital. Members handle coverage questions and claims from their phones, and providers expect the systems behind them to answer instantly. Behind it all sits an application estate that keeps growing, and an IT organization accountable for keeping it fast and secure while meeting the compliance obligations that come with health data.

That reality has shaped the insurer's technology decisions for more than a decade. Since 2015, the company has built out its application delivery and security capabilities with F5 in deliberate stages, arriving at what is now full adoption of the F5 Application Delivery and Security Platform (ADSP). The journey says as much about how healthcare IT is changing as it does about any single technology choice.

A foundation for always-on healthcare

The story starts with availability. In 2015, the insurer deployed F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) to distribute traffic across its critical healthcare applications, along with F5 BIG-IP DNS to route users reliably to those applications. In practical terms, that meant member portals and claims systems stayed responsive even at peak demand, with no single point of failure waiting to take them down.

Security got equal footing from the start. A web application firewall (WAF) shielded public-facing applications from malicious traffic, protecting the systems that patients, providers, and employees rely on every day.

Those deployments did double duty. They kept services running, and they helped the organization meet the regulatory and operational requirements that come with handling sensitive health information at scale.

As the application estate expanded, managing it box by box became its own kind of work. At that scale, a single policy update means touching device after device, and a simple question about the environment can eat an afternoon. In 2019, the insurer added F5 BIG-IQ Centralized Management, giving administrators one place to standardize policies and see across the entire BIG-IP environment. Governance improved, administrative complexity dropped, and the operations team got out of the business of repetitive device-level work.

Shifting to a flexible operating model

In 2026, the insurer made a move that changed how it consumes F5 technology: expanding into subscription-based software deployments across its application delivery and security services. For a large healthcare organization, the immediate appeal is practical: new services deploy faster, and lifecycle management gets simpler.

The bigger change is the operating model. Subscription-based consumption lets infrastructure investment follow the business as it changes, scaling services when initiatives demand it and adjusting course without being anchored to hardware decisions made years earlier.

Observability completes the platform

The most recent addition is F5 Insight for ADSP, which extends the platform into observability and operational intelligence. Where the earlier investments kept applications running and protected, F5 Insight shows teams how those applications are actually behaving: their health and performance, along with emerging security signals.

That kind of visibility has become essential. Application environments now sprawl across data centers, clouds, and software form factors, and no team can realistically watch it all manually. Consolidated observability is the difference between catching a degraded service before members notice and finding out from a support queue.

That visibility pays off in speed. Issues surface sooner and get resolved faster, which matters when the applications in question sit between millions of members and their care. Deep observability also gives the insurer a stronger foundation for whatever comes next, because you can only automate and optimize what you can see—and that's doubly true as AI workloads start moving through the same infrastructure.

What a decade of steady moves adds up to

None of these moves happened in isolation. Each addition solved a specific problem at the time, and together they now operate as one platform rather than a collection of point solutions. The insurer's application infrastructure is more resilient, more observable, and easier to adapt as its digital healthcare initiatives grow.

There's a lesson in the pacing, too. The insurer modernized in deliberate steps, proving each investment before the next, and never pausing the critical services people depend on. In a regulated industry, that's what responsible modernization looks like.

For anyone weighing a converged approach, the reassurance is in what this journey didn't require: no rip and replace, and no pause in the services people depend on. The capabilities this insurer adopted one at a time now come together as the F5 Application Delivery and Security Platform—meaning the platform was proven in production before it was ever packaged. The next organization can start where this one arrived.

To explore where a platform approach could take your own application estate, learn more about the F5 Application Delivery and Security Platform (ADSP).

About the Author

Chandni DigheSenior Director, Platform and Industry Marketing | F5

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