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Mastering Multi-Cloud Success: DevSecOps Insights for Increased Security and Application Performance

Beth McElroy Miniatur
Beth McElroy
Published December 06, 2023

Moving business-critical workloads to the cloud can provide game-changing benefits, but it also introduces security and optimization challenges. In a recent webinar, Secure and Accelerate Multi-Cloud Success with F5, Google Cloud, and Intel, a panel of experts shared their insights and discussed how F5 complements and enhances Google Cloud's robust security capabilities by providing additional protections at the application layer. They also talked about best practices and solutions for building, maintaining, and optimizing hybrid and multi-cloud environments. The speakers also focused on examining the escalating security challenges in multi-cloud and the importance of having a robust and layered security posture. The conversation highlighted the power of partnerships among leading technology vendors F5, Google Cloud, and Intel to provide integrated solutions.

Why Enterprises are Moving Business-Critical Workloads to Google Cloud

The scale, performance, and analytics provided by Google Cloud deliver a strong foundation of security capabilities covering factors like identity and access management, DDoS protection with Google Cloud Armor, and API security via the Google Cloud Apigee API Platform. These native Google Cloud services establish baseline security across the environment, offering customers broad defenses.

Moreover, the immense power of the infrastructure provided by Google enables the creation of high-performance applications. The experience in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) that Google brings to the table seamlessly integrates into many offerings. Top organizations worldwide run their applications on Google Cloud, confidently handling billions of users. Every business can access this robust infrastructure to achieve the same level of performance and scalability for their applications.

Understanding and Overcoming Multi-Cloud Challenges with F5, Google Cloud, and Intel

As more enterprises recognize the potential of moving their business-critical workloads to the cloud, this shift toward multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments can prove challenging. The webinar explored some of the key obstacles organizations face when navigating the complex landscape of multi-cloud deployments and how F5, Google Cloud, and Intel solutions can help overcome them.

Addressing Security Concerns

Security remains a leading concern for businesses in this multi-cloud era. With data and applications distributed across various cloud providers, ensuring a consistent and robust security posture can be daunting. During the webinar, our experts emphasized that a successful security strategy is a multi-layered one. A solution like F5 BIG-IP Advanced WAF addresses the more intricate layer 4-7 attacks that might bypass initial defenses. It offers a range of deployment options, ensuring that regardless of cloud strategy, IT teams have access to consistent and optimized security policies. Moreover, F5 augments its capabilities with managed services.

Reducing Complexity

Multi-cloud environments can complicate management, orchestration, and consistency. Businesses need tools and strategies to efficiently deploy, manage, and monitor applications across different cloud providers while maintaining consistent performance and security. Google Cloud offers tools like Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), which facilitates managing and orchestrating multi-cloud workloads.

Enhancing Performance Optimization

Performance optimization is crucial in delivering a seamless user experience. Businesses must ensure that their applications perform consistently across cloud environments. Along with F5 and Google Cloud, Intel offers optimized solutions tailored to meet the needs of high-performance workloads. The gains experienced by adding Intel QuickAssist Technology (QAT) when running hybrid environments are significant. By offloading cryptographic processing to the Intel QAT hardware accelerator, organizations can ensure fast, seamless encryption and decryption while freeing up compute resources for faster performance.

The Building Blocks of Powerful Multi-Cloud Environments

Joshua Haslett, Strategic Technology Partner, Manager at Google Cloud, explained how APIs are the building blocks of digital economies. They are used more than ever because of cloud computing, the rise of microservices architectures, and the need for businesses to be more agile and responsive to customer needs.

"One of the most important first steps is to adopt a cloud-native process, which means needing to get into a continuous integration/continuous delivery pipeline so that you can automate the building, testing, and deployment of your apps on cloud," said Haslett. "That's why protecting these apps and APIs is a core goal at F5."

Matthew Emes, Senior Solutions Architect at F5, further stressed this point during the webinar. "At F5, empowering and safeguarding your applications and APIs is our superpower, and our mission is clear: F5 secures, delivers, and optimizes every application and API, regardless of their location," he said.

Multi-cloud networking is an integral part of the comprehensive F5 Distributed Cloud Platform. Customers access a unified dashboard that equips them to seamlessly manage and monitor application security and performance, no matter where they reside. Whether your applications are deployed in Google Cloud, another public cloud, or on-premises, F5 solutions seamlessly consolidate all vital information and visibility into one intuitive console. This empowers customers to establish consistent policies and deploy them across their application landscape.

Take the Next Step in Your Multi-Cloud Journey

Success in multi-cloud environments requires a strategic approach to infrastructure, security, and collaboration. As highlighted by our expert panel, choosing Google Cloud provides a robust foundation, but it's the combination of the Google Cloud platform, the strong security portfolio from F5, and the dedication to performance of partners like Intel that truly unlocks the potential of multi-cloud infrastructure.

Get the complete set of insights from this conversation by watching the on-demand recording of the webinar Secure and Accelerate Multi-Cloud Success with F5, Google Cloud, and Intel.