Multicloud data replication takes a village

Lori Mac VittieDistinguished Engineer and Chief Evangelist

If your data lives in silos, spread across S3, SaaS, and on-prem, then your AI models are starving. A popular solution today is leveraging NetApp, which cleans, normalizes, and replicates all that data via Cloud Volumes ONTAP, BlueXP, and SnapMirror. That solves one challenge.

The second challenge is your network, where many multicloud initiatives break down. That’s where F5 Distributed Cloud Services Customer Edge (CE), delivered through the Equinix Edge Marketplace, becomes strategic (and almost magic) infrastructure.

Normalize the network

NetApp gives you unified data services and replication. But replication doesn’t magically traverse hostile multicloud borders. Each link, from on-prem to AWS, from Azure to GCP, must be configured, secured, and scaled. Too often, organizations ignore network fragility: inconsistent routing, vendor-specific VPNs, shadow pipelines, and misalignments across clouds.

Enter the Equinix Fabric. As a global interconnection layer, it enables consistent, private connectivity across clouds, SaaS services, and colocation data centers, sidestepping public internet variability.

But connectivity without control is compliance theater. That’s where F5 application delivery and security servicescome in to enforce consistent policy, segment replication flows, and protect model-loading pipelines from misconfigurations or attack surface leakage.

How the pieces fit together

• Equinix provides private, consistent Layer 3 (L3) connectivity across clouds and regions.
• F5 inserts strategic control at each hop: L3 policies, quota, token inspection, traffic segmentation, observability.

This architecture lets you embed controls at the edge of the network, before traffic ever reaches an inference endpoint or large language model (LLM) repository.

The F5 Application Delivery and Security Platform brings together the application, network, and security services every organization needs to normalize the network. Just as NetApp normalizes data access, F5 normalizes networking from the bottom to the top of the stack.

1. Terminate and inspect L7 traffic before it reaches sensitive inference endpoints. AI security demands prompt inspection: bias detection, injection prevention, and compliance checks. With F5 Distributed Cloud CE in Equinix Edge Marketplace, organizations enjoy all of these: inline, latency minimized, and policy-aware. That’s not possible with traditional firewalls.
2. Enforce uniform policies across AWS, Azure, GCP or even Oracle Cloud. When 53% of enterprises cite inconsistent policies as their multicloud headache, standardization stops chaos before it starts. F5 normalizes security policies across environments, reducing potential mismatches or gaps in policy implementations.
3. Rate-limit data replication, rewrite headers, and verify authentication at every entry point. Push enforcement outward to stop burst traffic from overwhelming downstream services or exposing insecure endpoints. F5 believes that programmability is a key capability of a modern application delivery and security platform, enabling zero-day mitigation, custom policy enforcement, and bespoke capabilities to support compliance, delivery, or geopolitical requirements.
4. Insert logging, token inspection, and analytics inline. Especially critical in regulated AI use cases (such as finance and healthcare), audit-ready visibility becomes not a bolt-on but default architecture. Instrument applications and endpoints without modifying code or deploying costly agents.

This also applies to scaling retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) architectures via fast, secure routes that respect governance boundaries.

Real-world impact

Whether it's a global financial services firm tying together partner apps, or a healthcare provider syncing medical records across regions, the impact is consistent:

• Reduced operational overhead. No per-cloud VPN sprawl or inconsistent firewall rules.
• Improved governance. Every flow is logged, token-checked, and policy-consistent.
• Inferred AI trust. RAG models operate safely, with lineage and auditability intact.

Pairing intelligent data replication with F5’s edge-aware enforcement and Equinix Fabric is how you operationalize AI across hybrid environments. It stops being “cloud adjacent” and becomes a governed, scalable, cloud-agnostic architecture.

In an age of fragmented data stores and hungry LLMs, this is how you multiply compute, not complexity.

To learn more, visit our F5 and Equinix webpage.

About the Author

Lori Mac VittieDistinguished Engineer and Chief Evangelist

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