Shift Security Left with BIG-IP Next Access

Today’s digital transformation journey looks strikingly different than it did even a year ago. Modern businesses are experimenting with new forms of AI while increasingly relying more on microservices and containers to gain agility in the app development process. This new trend is paving the way for an increasing reliance on APIs and a desire to make nearly everything app-related more CI/CD-friendly.

While each company’s path to modernization is different, there’s a common thread among them all: the need to secure apps and data in a more robust yet flexible and affordable way.

The practice of protecting applications, especially access to them, has been rapidly evolving alongside new app development practices. Security is far more effective when it is built in—and tested early in the development process—versus bolted on. It’s become imperative to have a standardized security policy extend to all apps, no matter where they’re deployed, and no matter where the user is requesting access to them. And modern authentication is paramount for every app, no matter the protocol, to reduce the risk of cyberattacks in today’s threat landscape.

In short, app security must progress to become as agile and adaptable as the business itself.

F5 has engineered a solution to harmonize with the way apps are developed and deployed today, and to protect them from the new ways cyber attackers attempt to compromise them. Introducing BIG-IP Next Access, the next-generation of F5's BIG-IP access control, designed to be 100% automatable.

If you’re familiar with, or currently use, BIG-IP Access Policy Manager (APM) you’ll see similar core access security use cases now provisioned into a common set of declarative APIs.

This API-first approach enables secure app access as code—in other words, capabilities can be integrated directly within your CI/CD pipeline. By shifting access security left, you can simply write to an API or embed APIs into your dev process to extend modern auth, SSO, and MFA to every app.

Prefer a guided approach to policy creation? The highly intuitive Visual Policy Designer within BIG-IP Next Central Manager (part of any BIG-IP Next Access deployment) will simplify policy management—from creation to deployment—no matter how basic or advanced your use case. This means that BIG-IP domain knowledge is no longer necessary. Whether you're automating your access policy insertion using AS3 or tackling it on a case-by-case basis via the UI, both are achieved seamlessly using the BIG-IP Next Central Manager as your single point of control.

Licensing is also easier and more flexible. With a shared CCU (concurrent usage) license pool available with BIG-IP Next Access, you can pull licenses from the pool and apply them to virtual and physical BIG-IP Next Access workloads as your needs change. This interchangeable licensing ensures you’re not locked into product-specific license terms once you sign agreements.​*