F5 Newsroom

A Journey to Gender Equity: Q&A with Kara Sprague on Breaking Through as a Woman in Cybersecurity

In the sixth Q&A installment of the “A Journey to Gender Equity” blog series, F5 EVP Kara Sprague shares how she ended up in cybersecurity and her advice for women and other underrepresented groups building cybersecurity careers.

F5 Provides Cost and Performance Enhancing Technology in Support of Open Source Telemetry Project

Code contribution improves protocol compression ratio by 2x and reduces bandwidth costs for high-volume telemetry initiatives and AI-driven projects.

F5’s OpenTelemetry Contribution Advances Our Adaptive Apps Vision

At F5, we envision a better digital world in which customers can focus on delighting their customers and growing their business without getting overwhelmed by security and application performance risks. Telemetry is key to making that happen.

The Use of Generative AI Tools in the Workplace Demands More Security

Uncover key risks of generative AI tools in the workplace and how organizations can safeguard and maintain data security.

AI in Operations: Enhancing Efficiency and Impact

Explore the role of AI in operations as a force multiplier, debunking myths, exploring ethics, and highlighting its potential to enhance efficiency.

Generative AI and the Urgency to Accelerate Digital Transformation

If organizations can’t harness game-changing innovations like generative AI, they will undoubtedly be left behind. Digital maturity indicates whether or not an organization is positioned to take advantage of such technologies.

F5 Reports 4% Third Quarter Fiscal Year 2023 Revenue Growth; Delivers Significant Operating Leverage and Strong EPS Growth

F5 President and CEO François Locoh-Donou: “Over the last several years, through the combination of organic innovation, acquisitions and technology integration, we have created a converged portfolio uniquely capable of simplifying the complexities our customers face operating today’s hybrid, multi-cloud IT environments.”

Kara Sprague, Chief Product Officer, Talks About Simplifying Multi-Cloud Security

With organizations’ apps and APIs increasingly distributed across on-premises, multiple public cloud, and edge environments, the already challenging objective of securing those assets is even more difficult. Solving for app security with disparate tools in each environment—on-premises, individual public clouds, and edge—is complex, costly, and risky. F5 is the only company that can secure any app and any API, anywhere.

F5 Safeguards Digital Services with New AI-Powered App and API Security Capabilities

F5's enhanced API defenses, granular machine learning capabilities, and new managed service offerings provide comprehensive protection across distributed environments.

The 2023 Digital Enterprise Maturity Index

There are maturity markers that can help leaders understand how they've progressed on their digital transformation journey. But despite spending decades focused on digital productivity and experiences, most organizations are still only dabbling in what's needed to thrive as a digital business.

A Journey to Gender Equity: Q&A with Jenn Gile on Navigating a Successful Career in Cybersecurity

In the fourth Q&A installment of F5's “A Journey to Gender Equity” series, Rachael Shah and Jenn Gile, head of product marketing for NGINX, dispel myths about cybersecurity careers and discuss tips and benefits to closing the gender gap in cybersecurity.

F5’s Secure Multi-Cloud Networking Solutions Simplify Operations for Distributed Application Deployments

F5 Distributed Cloud Services securely connect apps and APIs across cloud, hybrid, and edge environments.

Secure Multi-Cloud Networking: The Key to Hybrid, Multi-Cloud, and Edge Success

F5 is uniquely positioned to provide a comprehensive solution for secure multi-cloud networking that connects both cloud locations and the actual applications that reside in them.

State of App Strategy 2023: Security at your Service. Literally.

By shifting the responsibility to detect and neutralize attacks at the edge, businesses are effectively gaining two kinds of “speed” benefits—that of response time to emerging attacks and the real-time performance of apps and APIs.

F5 Announces Partnership with Visa to Empower Merchants to Create a Secure, Personalized, and Seamless Online Experience

F5 announced it is partnering with Visa, the world leader in digital payments, to help merchants securely reduce login friction for customers.

A New Approach to Login Authentication—Without Fire Hydrant Puzzles

CAPTCHA and MFA defenses often introduce substantial friction to the customer journey, cutting into business revenue and irritating users. As consumers increasingly expect fast, seamless interactions and experiences, e-commerce merchants need a smarter, more personalized approach to allow customers to login safely.

The Experience of F5 Employees and Contractors in Ukraine and Russia

With F5ers in Ukraine and Russia facing the trauma of war, F5 has been extending a lifeline—providing everything from visa and relocation assistance to financial and mental health support.

F5 NGINX Plus Helps CANAL+ Meet Surging Demand for Video Streaming

NGINX Plus enables media group to reliably process 50,000 requests per second without using extensive cloud resources.

PUMA Dunks on Bots with an Assist from F5

Bots plagued important launches of new basketball shoe drops and other hot products from PUMA North America, but an assist from F5 Distributed Cloud Bot Defense helped the company beat the bots, protect site availability, halt revenue loss, and improve the customer experience. 

F5 Announces General Availability of NGINXaaS for Azure

With F5 NGINXaaS for Azure, an integrated solution co-developed by F5 and Microsoft, developers can now achieve consistency in performance and security across their portfolio of on-prem and Azure cloud applications.

Trinity Cyber Stops Bad Guys with Help from F5

Trinity Cyber protects customers with a first of its kind technology and a unique service line that deeply inspects full session network traffic to expose and automatically mitigate malicious content. The flexible, high-performance, and centralized decryption of F5 BIG-IP SSL Orchestrator is an integral part of delivering this service to customers.

F5 Employee Helps Defend Ukrainian Homeland

F5's Bohdan Olinares shares his reaction to the invasion, decision to go to Ukraine, and reflection on the experience.

F5 Reports Revenue Growth in First Quarter of Fiscal Year 2023

F5 President and CEO François Locoh-Donou: “We are enabling our customers to deliver the dynamic digital experiences that drive their businesses. At the same time, we are helping them consolidate solutions and use fewer resources to manage and secure their hybrid and multi-cloud applications.”

What Hybrid IT Means for App and API Security

The reality of hybrid IT on security is that the patchwork, à la carte approach to securing apps and APIs is not going to work long-term. We need a better approach, and it needs to recognize that IT and the enterprise are, and will be for the foreseeable future, hybrid.

F5 Expands SaaS-Based Security Portfolio with Launch of F5 Distributed Cloud App Infrastructure Protection

F5 announced the launch of F5 Distributed Cloud App Infrastructure Protection (AIP), a cloud workload protection solution that expands application observability and protection to cloud-native infrastructures.

Q&A with Chief Product Officer Kara Sprague

We recently caught up with Kara Sprague to learn more about her new role, F5’s adaptive applications vision, and what steps she and F5 are taking to help customers simplify their operations and secure, deliver, and optimize their applications—today and in the future.

Ana White: Making F5 a Great Place to Work

F5 Chief People Officer Ana White is spearheading an ambitious plan to transform F5’s culture—making the company both human-first and high-performance.

Three Reasons Adopting Zero Trust Leads to Bot Protection and Web and API Security

Zero trust security is not achieved with the implementation of one specific technology product. It is a mindset that embraces a set of assumptions, which results in the use of distinct tools and technologies, such as bot protection and web and API security.

New Study Reveals What’s Driving—and Limiting—TLS 1.3 Implementation

To understand why—or why not (yet)—companies have implemented TLS 1.3, F5 sponsored the Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) research report, “TLS 1.3’s Fourth Anniversary: What Have We Learned About Implementation and Network Monitoring?”

Expanding STEM Career Paths for Women and Girls of Color

As we mark National STEM Day, Executive Vice President Kara Sprague honors F5’s 2022 STEM Education Grant partners—10 nonprofits working hard to encourage more women and girls around the globe pursue STEM careers.

F5 Reports 4% GAAP and 3% Non-GAAP Revenue Growth for Fiscal Year 2022; Expects 9% to 11% Revenue Growth and Double-Digit Non-GAAP EPS Growth in Fiscal Year 2023

F5 President and CEO François Locoh-Donou: “F5’s solutions automate, secure, and manage our customers’ rapidly expanding application footprints and evolving hybrid IT environments, enabling customers to focus fewer resources on managing their IT infrastructure and more resources on running and growing their businesses.”

FNHA Builds Trust in Healthcare with Scalable F5 Cybersecurity

The First Nations Health Authority works to overcome issues of trust as it improves health outcomes for First Nations communities and citizens across British Columbia while relying on F5 solutions for security, scalability, and responsive support.

F5 Named Best in Class for Bot Management in Aite-Novarica Matrix of Leading Bot Detection and Management Providers

As a Best in Class vendor, F5’s approach integrates bot and fraud detection capabilities to secure organizations from a breadth of automated attacks while reducing user friction and allowing for the continued operation of good bots.

Blog: F5 Distributed Cloud Bot Defense Highlighted for Bot Management Capabilities in Analyst Report

Criminals can retool bots within minutes to bypass defenses, utilize millions of valid IP addresses, rapidly solve CAPTCHAs, mimic human behavior, and introduce subtle randomness. Aite-Novarica Group’s report reviews leading bot management offerings, recognizing F5 Distributed Cloud Bot Defense as a Best in Class solution.

F5 Adds Marianne Budnik to Board of Directors

Marianne Budnik is an accomplished leader, with extensive marketing and cybersecurity expertise, as well as more than 25 years’ operating experience in the technology sector.

Cybersecurity could be the Metaverse’s Kryptonite—or its Cornerstone.

On behalf of F5, YouGov surveyed 500 IT decision makers to get a snapshot of priorities as they balance the need to empower people and organizations today. One key takeaway: All the Metaverse’s potential to fuel growth, innovation, and emerging industries is at risk if we don’t make security foundational to its evolution.

It's Time You Get Serious About Ransomware

As F5 CEO François Locoh-Donou put it, ransomware is an epidemic the entire world’s facing. Rachael Shah contextualizes how serious a threat ransomware continues to be and why she can’t stop thinking about it.

The Cost of Cybercrime on Our Emotional Wellbeing

Today, our digital personas are deliberately curated, highly visible, and tightly managed as we wed ourselves ever closer to the devices in our pocket. So, when accounts get taken over because of credential stuffing and bad actors take advantage, the results can be devastating on a very personal level.

F5 Earns Top Marks in KuppingerCole’s 2022 Leadership Compass Report for Web Application Firewalls

F5 announced that it has been positioned as an Overall Leader in the 2022 KuppingerCole Leadership Compass report for Web Application Firewalls (WAFs). The report compares multiple WAF vendors across criteria such as Security, Functionality, Deployment, Interoperability, and Usability.

Blog: F5 Named an Overall Leader in KuppingerCole Leadership Compass for WAF

In a recent report, KuppingerCole evaluated many vendors' Web Application Firewall offerings. F5 scored high for attributes including API protection, core WAF capabilities, bot management, DDoS protection, and Admin & DevOps support.

‘Enterprise Architecture for Digital Business’ Outlines Why and How to Modernize IT for a Digital-First World

As businesses and their brands become indistinguishable from the digital services that represent them, key processes, governance guidelines, organizational structure, and strategy must adapt. A new book from F5 CTO Geng Lin, Principal Technical Evangelist Lori MacVittie, and several members of the Office of the CTO clarifies why companies struggle with digital transformation and what it takes to change IT to become a data-driven, AI-supported digital business.

F5 Reports 4% Revenue Growth in its Fiscal Third Quarter, Including 38% Software Revenue Growth

F5 President and CEO François Locoh-Donou: "Customers depend on F5 to secure and deliver extraordinary digital experiences that drive their businesses and fuel their brands...With our intense business transformation efforts over the last five years, we have built a stronger and more resilient F5, as evidenced by our 72 percent revenue from recurring sources in the quarter."

I’m a former CIA cyber-operations officer who studies bot traffic. Here’s why it’s plausible that more than 80% of Twitter’s accounts are actually fake—and Twitter is not alone.

Dan Woods: When I consider the volume and velocity of automation we’re seeing today, the sophistication of bots that a given set of incentives is likely to attract, and the relative lack of countermeasures I saw in my own research, I can only come to one conclusion. In all likelihood, more than 80% of Twitter accounts are actually bots.

BlueShore Financial Makes Financial Wellness Secure with F5

Credit union BlueShore Financial secures its web assets with F5 SaaS-based security that aligns with the company’s “financial wellness” concept and spa-like atmosphere. By deploying F5 Distributed Cloud Web App and API Protection (WAAP), BlueShore protects both its clients and its employees.

Adding F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition Load Balancing for Container Network Functions in Amazon EKS

Solutions architects for the F5 Service Provider team Kostas Skenderidis and Mark Rosche share how to improve functionality for telcos using F5’s BIG-IP VE Load Balancer to optimize CNFs in an Amazon EKS environment. This AWS Partner Network blog highlights new Layer 4 capabilities for a successful container deployment, especially when deployed at an edge site on AWS Outposts.

The Third Wave of the Internet is Driving the Need for a New Edge Platform

Edge computing is under pressure to simultaneously evolve with each wave of the internet. As we ride the third wave, this next evolution demands the creation of a platform to support new capabilities within the edge ecosystem. A platform that cannot simply be bolted together, but requires a new approach with design considerations at the architectural level.

The Commodification of Cloud

Cloud’s introduction of differentiated services (load balancing, security, acceleration, identity, etc.) was the first indication that cloud was entering a stage of standardization, as the value was no longer in the compute, but in the app security and delivery services one could access with ease. Now we see the industry shifting toward those same services offered as competing products delivered via cloud-based platforms. The hype cycle for a new iteration of cloud—XaaS—is on the rise.

Automation Makes Vodafone WAF Management Faster, More Agile

As one of the world’s largest technology communication providers, Vodafone serves hundreds of millions of users around the globe. Seeking to improve the speed, efficiency, and visibility of WAF management and address slow application onboarding, Vodafone Digital made swift progress with help from F5 Automation Toolchain for the F5 BIG-IP platform.

Q2 Uses Security Automation to Block 97% of Malicious Traffic with F5 Distributed Cloud Bot Defense

Q2’s financial experience platform supports more than 1,200 financial institutions and over 22 million account holders worldwide. With the growth in mobile and digital banking, and the increasing volume and sophistication of cyber attacks on financial institutions and their account holders, Q2 needed a way to provide stronger security without disrupting the customer experience. F5 Distributed Cloud Bot Defense was the answer.

The Courage to Ask, “What If?”

F5 announces its 2022 Tech for Good grant recipients. As part of our commitment to global good, F5 annually awards these grants to nonprofits that serve majority Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) or underrepresented communities. These grants are designed to help nonprofits accelerate their digital transformation efforts so they can increase their social impact.

FNHA Builds Trust in Healthcare with Scalable F5 Cybersecurity

The First Nations Health Authority works to overcome issues of trust as it improves health outcomes for First Nations communities and citizens across British Columbia while relying on F5 solutions for security, scalability, and responsive support.

Snam Powers its Energy Pipeline Network with F5 BIG-IP and F5 NGINX Plus

Snam S.p.A. is one of the leading energy infrastructure operators in the world. Underpinning its critical role in energy security and operational modernization is a digital transformation that leans heavily on the development of an API ecosystem. Having experienced frustrations with its previous infrastructure providers, Snam turned to F5.

F5 Collaborates with SoftBank Corp. to Offer Advanced Edge Computing Solutions

F5 solutions adopted by SoftBank will enable enterprise customers to move more of their business-critical applications to multiple edge locations and enjoy the benefits of reduced latency, enhanced security, and flexible application deployment.

F5 Enhances Protection for the Apps and APIs Driving Today’s Digital Experiences

F5 Distributed Cloud Services provide a platform-driven approach to secure the essential elements of connected experiences through a comprehensive set of web, mobile app, and API protections. New capabilities extend the reach of Distributed Cloud Services for easy to deploy SaaS-based security.

F5 Unveils NGINX for Microsoft Azure to Deliver Secure, High-Performance Applications for the Azure Ecosystem

New F5 NGINX SaaS offering provides a native experience that is tightly integrated with Microsoft Azure for application delivery, helping customers deliver modern applications on Azure with just a few clicks.

Catalysts of F5 NGINX for Azure

Christine Puccio looks at market and industry trends that point to the value F5 creates in broadening the ways customers can leverage popular commercial marketplaces to procure, consume, and expand the use of solutions from the company’s growing software and SaaS portfolio.

F5 Reports 40% Software Revenue Growth in its Fiscal Second Quarter

CEO François Locoh-Donou: "Momentum in our software business is strong, driven by customers’ growing need for multi-cloud application security and delivery...We have clear visibility to continuing strong demand drivers across our software and systems portfolio. We continue to work every possible angle to expand our supply availability to match the demand from our customers."

Ericsson Wallet Platform Drives Financial Inclusion and Empowerment with F5

The Ericsson Wallet Platform is now used by more than 20 mobile operators worldwide to serve nearly 300 million registered users. Supported by F5’s traffic management and security solutions, the platform is currently handling around 50 million transactions every day.

A Passion for Giving Back

CEO François Locoh-Donou highlights F5 volunteer activities: "When we first established our Global Good program, we felt it was critical for employees to drive our efforts. It moves me to see our people investing so rewardingly in the lives of others, and it amazes me to witness the resilience and transformation these efforts are fostering in communities around the globe."

State of Application Strategy 2022: Performance Trends

Performance reigns supreme, so much so that businesses would exchange security to see its improvement. In addition, performance presents a significant obstacle to realizing the benefits of multi-cloud strategies and is definitively driving businesses to extend to the edge.

F5 Distributed Cloud Services Bring Cloud-Native Capabilities to SoftBank Corp.’s Private Infrastructure

Learn the unique benefits that SoftBank Corp. gained by containerizing its applications and running them on a fully managed private cloud infrastructure from F5 Distributed Cloud Services.

Standing Firm in Support of the People of Ukraine

F5 President and CEO François Locoh-Donou: "Like most of the global community, we are witnessing the intensifying war on Ukraine with a mixture of shock, grief, and anger. Our hearts go out to the people facing the invasion of their homeland, separation from loved ones, and displacement from the land they love. While world governments determine how to respond to this act of aggression, those of us in the business sphere must address the war on Ukraine as not just a commercial concern, but as a moral imperative."

F5 Research Reveals Tradeoffs of Accelerating Digital Transformation

F5 introduces its 2022 State of Application Strategy Report, highlighting the ways organizations are evolving their IT infrastructures by deploying AI and SRE solutions, balancing modernization with security, and repatriating applications.

State of Application Strategy 2022: The Future of Business Is Adaptive

EVP Kara Sprague: While organizations are racing down the road of digital transformation, many find that significant additional progress requires adopting new approaches for managing telemetry, data, and application security and delivery technologies across today’s distributed architectures.

Circumvent iSeries Supply Chain Delays: Five reasons to Switch to BIG-IP Virtual Edition

Accelerated digital transformation initiatives coupled with a ferocious desire to drive competitive differentiation has placed increasing pressure on application teams to deliver apps to market faster than ever. However, IT organizations are also being hampered by lengthening component lead times brought about by a global semiconductor shortage—much to the frustration of developers.

State of Application Strategy 2022: Time to Modernize Ops

It's become clear that to continue the momentum of their digital transformation journey, organizations need to renew their focus on business functions. While customer-facing experiences are still priority, enabling business functions such as legal, HR, and finance to digitize is necessary. This means CIOs are taking the driver's seat as digital transformation transitions from modernizing aps to modernizing ops.

Rakuten Symphony and F5 Accelerate Supply Chain Diversity With Availability of F5 Cloud-Native Solutions in Symworld™

Rakuten Symphony and F5 announced they will bring F5’s new BIG-IP Next Cloud-Native Network Functions (CNFs) to a global customer base through Rakuten Symphony’s Symworld marketplace. Representing the evolution of a longstanding relationship that began with F5 providing security functions to Rakuten Mobile, this collaboration aims to simplify the deployment of fully cloud-native security and networking functions for telecom operators.

Microsoft blog: F5 builds value with easy identity management via Conditional Access

Sue Bohn, Microsoft Vice President of Program Management for Identity and Network Access, offers a Q&A with F5 security experts Jay Kelley, Erin Verna, and Namita Signh discussing topics like Zero Trust and the ways joint customers benefit in using F5 BIG-IP Access Policy Manager (APM) and Microsoft Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) together.

Secure, Simplify, Innovate: Charting a Path to Adaptive Apps

EVP Kara Sprague articulates F5's approach to adaptive applications, noting that digital acceleration punctuates each set of opportunities and challenges that organizations face. Business leaders seek to improve customer experience, transform the business, and differentiate through application portfolios. At the same time, IT operators wrestle with ever-growing security threats, legacy applications and infrastructures, and crushing complexity.

Understanding and Addressing Spring4Shell and Related Vulnerabilities (CVE-2022-22965, CVE-2022-22950, CVE-2022-22963)

Just when we all thought it was safe to dive back into application development after the pain and churn caused by the Log4j vulnerability and the Log4Shell attacks, here comes yet another beast of a vulnerability to take a chunk out of security and devour valuable resources.

Dirty Pipe and the Importance of Application Infrastructure Protection

Dirty Pipe, a vulnerability that takes place in the Linux kernel, allows for overwriting data in arbitrary read-only files, which can lead to privilege escalation by injecting code into root processes. This means that Dirty Pipe can focus on the infrastructure level, but with a comprehensive view of the full environment, F5's Chris Ford discusses how Threat Stack helps customers stay protected.

Asian Paints Empowers Transformation with F5 Silverline Web Application Firewall

F5 Silverline Web Application Firewall helps Asian Paints protect its web applications and data hosted on-premises and in the cloud through a centralized platform.

The Evolving Need of Proactive Cybersecurity

Building a strong and robust cybersecurity posture should include availability, i.e., one can still use critical applications if they are under attack. Achieving security with resiliency and undisrupted availability are the benchmarks of proactive cybersecurity, with the understanding that threats (and mitigations) will never stop evolving.

How F5 Engineers are using AI to Optimize Software

AI is quickly being recognized as integral to the success of digital business with adoption across business, operations, and security. An area not as extensively discussed is the benefits of incorporating AI into development for pattern recognition and modeling.

F5 Strengthens Protection of the Digital World with F5 Distributed Cloud Services

F5 announced a major expansion of its application security and delivery portfolio, providing services on a new SaaS platform that expands the company’s security solutions with simplified management and security for all applications in all locations.

How to Combat Complexity and Elevate Modern App Security

From EVP Haiyan Song: The modern application landscape continues to evolve into a world of multi-cloud, microservices, and APIs coexisting with legacy, data center-based apps. Security practices are far more challenging because of process complications and increased time pressures on app development. Organizations need to simplify their approach, with F5 Distributed Cloud Services poised to help.

F5 Distributed Cloud WAAP and Rich Partner Ecosystem Deliver Security and Value

The launch of F5 Distributed Cloud Web Application and API Protection (WAAP) represents significant opportunities for our partner ecosystem and joint customers. This new SaaS offering marks the latest evolution in application security and extends our commitment to securing your enterprise apps—including instances where you work with our partners to maximize security and value.

F5 Introduces Comprehensive SaaS-based Security for Web Apps and APIs

F5 Distributed Cloud Web Application and API Protection secures web apps and APIs deployed in multi-cloud and distributed environments, bringing together four key components critical to securing the digital experience for today’s modern enterprises: Web Application Firewall, API Security, Bot Defense, and DDoS Mitigation.

F5 to Report First Quarter Fiscal Year 2022 Financial Results on January 25, 2022

F5, Inc. today announced it will report its first quarter fiscal year 2022 financial results on Tuesday, January 25, 2022, following the market close.

F5 Adds Microsoft’s James Phillips to Board of Directors

James Phillips, President, Digital Transformation Platform Group at Microsoft, has been appointed to F5's board of directors. Phillips joins F5’s board effective January 5, 2022, and will sit on F5’s Nominating and Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) Committee.

Protection against the Apache Log4j2 Vulnerability (CVE-2021-44228)

Vulnerabilities, exploitations, mitigation, and remediation are always disruptive, and it’s F5’s mission to do what we can to provide expertise and support for customers. Teams across F5 have been actively working on tools and guidance to help already overburdened application and security teams mitigate this significant industry threat.

The Top 10 Top 10 Predictions for 2022

As December comes to a close, tech pundits dust off their crystal balls and share their predictions for the coming year. For Peter Silva's annual list, he's compiled a collection of what the industry is saying (and anticipating) for 2022.

Connect Poland's Schools with Fast, Free, and Secure Internet Services

The Nationwide Educational Network (OSE) is a public telecommunications network program that gives schools all over Poland the ability to connect to fast, free, and secure internet services. The operator of the program, NASK, used select F5 solutions to create the OSE.

The Bots are in Business and Business is Good

As organizations are evolving within the digital world, so too are the threats against them. Through the utilization of bots, attacks have moved beyond exploiting CVEs due to increased value in targeting businesses inherent vulnerabilities of operating a digital presence. Identifying and stopping these bots requires security powered by AI and machine learning.

F5 Safeguards Digital Experiences with Comprehensive Account Takeover Protection

Security and fraud protection have become increasingly intertwined in the current threat landscape. At the same time, industries are continuously extending their services with applications, APIs, and tools touching multiple organizations. F5's new security offerings bridge security and fraud team operations that help customers block automated and human-driven malicious activity, shield valuable user details, and stop fraud.

UK Department for Work and Pensions Secures Access and Monitors Crucial Services with NGINX Plus

The Department for Work and Pensions is the United Kingdom government department responsible for welfare, pensions, and child maintenance policy. When the department needed to provide its IT teams with a secure and reliable way to access backend tools for monitoring and managing its platforms and technologies it turned to NGINX Plus.

How Data Governance Enables DBS Bank to Focus on Customer Experience

Data governance can negatively impact consumer experiences. See how DBS Bank scaled data governance with automation to address security risks.

FinTechs Grow in Popularity Among Consumers and Criminal Organizations

As the digital economy grows, so does the processing of payments through financial services institutions, and malicious actors have taken notice. The digital payment ecosystem relies on APIs to facilitate digital financial transactions, and the number of API security incidents continues to rise annually. Digital firms, especially those in financial services, are increasing focus on APIs to better protect their customers (and their business).

Say Hello to the New F5

What we call ourselves in this world matters. And when our lives and identities change, our names often do too. In the quarter century since F5 Networks was founded, we’ve gone through many evolutions, but our name hasn't. It’s time for a change.

CX is a Human-First Approach to Technology

Customer experience is impacted by perception, which stems from the overall interaction, not just whether or not the power is on. And CX is not relegated strictly to customer-facing apps. Apps primarily accessed by non-human entities (machines, script, etc.) still have a human somewhere in the process. The result: CX is an increasingly important part of digital transformation and development lifecycles.

F5 Reports 11% Fourth Quarter Revenue Growth and 11% Fiscal Year Revenue Growth Fueled by Strong Software and Systems Demand

“With software revenue representing 45% of product revenue in the fourth quarter, and 80% of this software revenue coming from subscriptions, we continue to mark milestone after milestone in our rapid transformation to a software led business model,” said François Locoh-Donou, F5’s President and CEO.

Award Recognition: For(bes) The Culture 50 Honoree

For(bes) The Culture 50 Champions are models of business excellence in their own various industries who also uplift Black and Brown communities through their crafts and philanthropic efforts.

Multiple Clouds Versus Multi-Cloud: Making it Easier to Bridge the Gap

Multi-cloud strategies are taking hold in the enterprise. But those strategies come with a formidable challenge—how to securely manage workloads across multiple cloud providers.

Closing the Digital Business Loop: Adaptive Apps

Observability, aka Monitoring 2.0, is a significant step forward in this technology journey for operators and digital business as they strive to understand and stabilize the relationship between user experience and business outcomes. But it’s only half the battle, and the other half involves analytics and automation.

Scottish Government Maintains Security Edge and Drives Multi-Cloud Transformation

The Scottish Government’s Agriculture and Rural Economy Directorate manages the payment of around $1 billion in subsidies to farmers each year. As a customer of F5 for almost 20 years, it has implemented solutions that enable it to maximize the security and delivery of applications that process payments on which Scotland’s agricultural industry depends.

F5 Completes Acquisition of Threat Stack to Enhance Cloud Security Portfolio

The addition of Threat Stack’s cloud security capabilities to F5’s application and API protection solutions will enhance visibility across application infrastructure and workloads to deliver more actionable security insights for customers.

Constrained Compute: The Case for Hardware Optimization at the Edge

Compute power in not limitless, and if there’s a limit to our ability to increase size and space as we move to the edge, then we must instead focus on optimization. When we have needed to improve capacity in the past, there’s been an introduction of optimized hardware components. Hardware-optimized computes will be a necessary capability for any application-centric platforms looking to support organizational enablement at the edge.

F5 Enhances Cloud Security Portfolio with Acquisition of Threat Stack

F5’s application and API protection solutions combined with Threat Stack's cloud security capabilities and expertise will enhance visibility across application infrastructure, making it easier for customers to apply consistent security in any cloud.

How Security Automation Can Mitigate the Risk in Cybersecurity

The banking and financial services industry has been experiencing digital transformation for several years and customer digital expectations combined with COVID-19 are accelerating key initiatives, such as Open Banking and Platform Banking.

Digital as Default: Dealing with Unintended Consequences

As businesses continue to move toward a “digital as default” operating model the ease of operations results in an increase of complexity – task automation requires more code, digital expansion requires more connections, AI-assisted business requires more data. And complexity is the enemy of security. Therefore businesses will have to adapt their security stack to keep up.

F5 Silverline Mitigates Record-Breaking DDoS Attacks

Malicious attacks are increasing in scale and complexity, threatening to overwhelm and breach the internal resources of businesses globally. Often, these attacks combine high-volume traffic with stealthy, low-and-slow, application-targeted attack techniques, powered by either automated botnets or human-driven tools.

Ahrefs Optimizes Plateform Performance with F5 NGINX Plus

As Ahrefs continued to grow and expand its subscriber base, it needed to enhance its internal services and significantly improve business workflows to deliver exceptional customer experiences.

Hybrid Work is Driving a Shift to Identity-Centric Security

The explosive growth of automation and digitization along with a trend toward hybrid work models will accelerate the momentum away from IP-based security toward identity-based access strategies.

Modern Hire and NGINX Deliver Modern App Security in the Cloud

Modern Hire, a science-based hiring platform that serves clients in more than 200 countries, turned to NGINX when the organization needed to migrate its disparate SaaS technology platforms into one modern, unified, and fully cloud‑based solution while still providing security backed by a hardware security module (HSM) for customers who required it.

Most Missing Insights are Due to Data Bias

As business approaches a default-digital model, it necessarily relies more and more on data. Eliminating bias in that data will be a critical step in ensuring that decisions based on that data will lead to the best outcome possible for customers and the business.

F5 Named Microsoft 2021 Commercial Marketplace Partner of the Year

The Microsoft Partner of the Year Awards honor companies that demonstrate excellence in innovation and implementation of customer solutions based on Microsoft technology. This is an especially meaningful award for the company because it recognizes F5’s marketplace sales and marketing expertise, as well as consistent, high-quality, predictable delivery to marketplace customers.

Audi Future-Proofs Tech Vision and App Innovation With NGINX

Audi’s Kubernetes Competence Centre conceived Kubika O as a cloud‑independent Kubernetes platform operating as a seamless application environment. The big challenge ahead of launch was deciding how to secure everything. Audi needed a proven WAF solution with certified Red Hat OpenShift interoperability, plus robust, 24/7 technical support.

NGINX Plus Authorized by U.S. Department of Defense’s Iron Bank

It was recently confirmed by the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) that NGINX Plus has received formal authorization from the DoD’s Enterprise DevSecOps Initiative, Iron Bank. This gives DoD teams expanded capabilities as part of a verified digital infrastructure, while also signaling the company’s growing presence in the Federal sector.

Íslandsbanki Accelerates and Secures Digital Transformation with NGINX Plus

Íslandsbanki underwent a multi-year transformation to become a “digital companion” for its customers and turned to NGINX Plus to help meet its particular needs.

Hands-Off Security Empowers Hands-On Innovation for Hamline University

Hamline University is unique for its emphasis on students’ contributions to community needs and social service organizations across its programs. This means getting hands-on learning working with students at a local elementary school, for example, or interning for an environmental cleanup organization. This educational philosophy shows up in its IT department as a constant need to expand and innovate on technology services for students and faculty. Facing this need, but constrained by a small staff and budget, Hamline IT turned to F5 for help.

HTTP: The Sequel

The Dark Night. Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. Thor: Ragnarök. The Empire Strikes Back—sequels are frequently better than the originals. Sometimes writers need an additional opportunity to build out a fictional world or refine plots and characters. Similarly, in technology it seems the story is never quite over, with solutions like F5’s SSL Orchestrator well positioned to take advantage of industry narrative developments.

Adaptive Applications and Event-Driven Infrastructure as Code

Most organizations employ automation with infrastructure as code but still retain control over deployments. Looking forward, we’ll see more of an event-driven approach, where the trigger itself is automated based on an event. This is a significant part of what will make applications adaptive in the future—the ability to react to automatically to events and adapt location, security, and capacity to meet service-level objectives.

Zipwhip bridges the gap between legacy tech and cloud with F5, NGINX

As more and more customers opt-in to texting as their preferred method of business communication, organizations have scrambled to enable text messaging support at scale without over-extending internal teams that are already stretched thin with day-to-day IT projects and maintenance needs.

A Conversation with Black Leaders in Tech

A year after companies around the world pledged to make the workplace more inviting and equitable, what has changed? F5 CEO François Locoh-Donou and top Black leaders in tech discuss the opportunities and potential pitfalls of navigating a career as a Black professional in technology, with perspectives on how successful Black leaders in tech use challenging moments to build career momentum.

Supporting Pride Month Through Action

This Pride Month, Scott De Buitléir reflects on life lessons he's learned on his LGBTQ+ rugby team, and reviews some projects undertaken by NGINX and F5 over the past year to benefit our local and global communities: "At NGINX, we have always taken pride in our LGBTQ+ employees, and since joining F5, we’ve strengthened that commitment to the community even further."

Application Edge Integration: A Study in Evolution

The path that application delivery has taken over the last 20 years is a story of convergent evolution. More specifically, this era has seen the development of multiple delivery technologies that—when looked upon in hindsight—have revealed themselves to be the initial, nascent evolutionary steps toward what is becoming the application edge.

Infrastructure is still an attractive attack vector

Cloud computing has long sought to remove the need to deal with infrastructure, with APIs and drag-and-drop configuration tools to help keep those adverse to the network and infrastructure from getting their hands dirty. But we can't just ignore it either, or its profile as a key attack target.

F5 Delivers Second Consecutive Quarter of Double-Digit Revenue Growth with 19% GAAP and 18% Non-GAAP Product Revenue Growth

CEO François Locoh-Donou: Business and consumers’ increasing reliance on applications has accelerated all prior expectations about the pace of digital transformation and our customers across the globe are scaling their digital assets faster, resulting in growing demand for F5’s application security and delivery solutions.

DNS Management Just Got Easier with General Availability of Primary DNS Service on F5 Cloud DNS

As enterprises pursue DNS solutions capable of supporting adaptive applications, they look for solutions that match their need for automation, speed, and ability to respond to infrastructure changes in seconds rather than hours. F5 Cloud DNS promotes modern DevOps practices, helping to speed new application rollouts by adding DNS updates seamlessly into surrounding process elements.

3 Tips for Maintaining a High-Performing App Portfolio

EVP Kara Sprague: Maintaining a healthy application portfolio is a like maintaining a healthy body. Both are subject to endless stresses and unanticipated conditions. Both require specific care, proactive maintenance, and targeted interventions. Over time, eating right and exercising regularly go a long way toward keeping your day-to-day running smoothly, and the same is true metaphorically for your apps.

NGINX Is the Foundation of Modern App Performance

Our goal at NGINX has always been to provide the foundation our customers and community need to deliver modern apps. Based on Abraham Maslow's famous hierarchy of needs for humans, here we show how NGINX offerings satisfy an app's hierarchy of needs at multiple levels.

F5 Secures the Applications and APIs Driving Modern Digital Experiences

New solutions highlight F5’s progressive approach to application security, enabling customers to deliver safe, frictionless, and modern digital experiences as consumers increasingly rely on applications, bolstering F5’s technology leadership position in combining multi-cloud application security and delivery with bot mitigation and anti-fraud capabilities to guard against sophisticated threats.

Secure Your Apps and APIs. Everywhere.

EVP of Security Haiyan Song: Delivering comprehensive security that doesn't slow the speed of innovation isn't easy given the complexities of the modern digital business. Our vision is simple, clear, and comprehensive. F5 helps you to secure your applications and APIs by providing visibility and control wherever you need it from L4 to L7—and across clouds, data centers, and a growing set of edge locations.

F5 Collaborates with NVIDIA to Accelerate and Secure Cloud and Edge Computing

Digital transformation and the associated data generation are threatening to overwhelm the systems and companies that rely on data to create value. Accordingly, organizations are looking for more efficient, modern computing architectures that can support multi-tenancy and deliver applications at data center scale with all the necessary levels of performance and security.

NGINX Steps Up to F5 Agility 2021 with App-Driven Events

F5 Agility 2021 takes the virtual stage on April 20–22 this year, and the NGINX team will be there in full force. Don't miss our sessions and demos on production-grade Kubernetes, real-time API management, and synergies between F5 and NGINX products.

The Future of the AI-Based Enterprise

We are living in an unprecedented time. Technology innovations routinely disrupt existing business models, and in some cases, completely replace existing industries—continuously and fundamentally changing the way we live and interact with each other. This post identifies three areas where AI is currently having a major impact on the enterprise.

Living on the Edge: How We Got Here

The first in a series of blogs that looks at application-related technologies whose tide will be coming in during the next few years, especially as we evolve toward a more fully dispersed application delivery fabric and the emergent role of the edge. We’ll begin by examining where we are today (and the paths taken so far).

Fighting for a Radically Inclusive World

F5 CTO Geng Lin: The fight for anti-racism in support of our friends, family, and coworkers of Asian and Pacific Islander ancestry is part of a much bigger battle. We are fighting for a world that is radically inclusive—where we, as a global community, don’t just tolerate differences, we celebrate them.

The Rise of the Modern Monolith

While there’s a tendency to focus on applications that directly implement a customer experience, every business domain will see the rise of applications that ultimately become critical to their digital presence. These applications, then, become the modern equivalent of a monolith.

F5 Teams with IBM to Help Enterprises Manage Hybrid Cloud Workloads

IBM Cloud Satellite is designed to bring cloud services to where clients’ data already resides—and help them bridge to where they want to go. This aligns with F5’s ambitions for Edge 2.0 and our vision of distributing applications—at the data center, in the public cloud, and at the edge—to help assure a seamless, consistent, and secure user experience.

Investing in the Next Generation of Black Leaders

Education is the key to changing a life trajectory—and F5 is thrilled to support Rainier Scholars as it prepares students of color for long-term academic success and lives of leadership.

F5 Annual Survey Highlights Accelerated App Modernization and Edge Computing

In its seventh iteration, F5's State of Application Strategy report identifies several converging trends, many of which have been significantly impacted as organizations revamp digital experiences to address the evolving realities of COVID-era consumers. With limited in-person interactions, applications—and the digital experiences they facilitate—have become synonymous with an organization’s presence and ability to thrive.

The State of Application Strategy: Enabling Adaptive Apps

EVP Kara Sprague: The pandemic has affected every aspect of our lives, including the way we work, how we learn, and the ways we connect with each other. That's why it's striking to me that the results of our State of Application Strategy report show not so much a sea change as a dramatic acceleration of the digital transformation initiatives that were already in motion well before COVID-19 swept across the globe.

NGINX blog: Welcome to Microservices March!

For much of the Northern Hemisphere, March signals an important time of growth, new beginnings, and preparation for the coming season's blooms. To celebrate, NGINX is hosting “Microservices March,” a month-long virtual festival of microservices-themed activities. Whether you’re already using Kubernetes in production or your interest is just blossoming, you’re sure to find sessions that will pique your interest.

F5 Invests in Cloud Edge “Real Estate” with Volterra

From the ONUG blog: Volterra enables F5 to bring to market a new SaaS-based platform for the dual trends of multi-cloud and edge. Developers and infrastructure teams in the enterprise market can now consistently deploy advanced security to the edge and across applications, with a build-once-deploy-global approach to orchestration. This enables multi-cloud scale without the significant added expense of bloated operational teams.

Extending Our Recognition of Black Leaders Who Shaped History

As Black History Month comes to a close, EVP Scot Rogers pays tribute to 7 LGBTQ+ Black American activists, artists, and writers who broke barriers, fought for equality, and made significant contributions to our national discourse.

Tailoring Kubernetes for Telcos

Flexibility and scalability are fundamental to the modern telco cloud vision, advising that 5G networks will become a versatile platform for a wide range of services and apps developed by third parties. As it enables telcos to deploy apps in portable containers, Kubernetes can bring services to the edge of the network, closer to end-users, reducing latency and yielding additional advantages.

OK 2021 Ox, Now What?

According to the Chinese zodiac cycle, the year of the (Metal) Ox has arrived. As the second animal in the zodiac, the stabilizing influence of the Ox points to a calmer atmosphere. Peter Silva gives his thoughts on the months to come and what they might hold for the industry.

QUIC Will Eat the Internet

QUIC has broad industry support and the potential to be the basis of most applications that deliver business value over the internet. Anyone delivering applications over the internet should start thinking about how their operations should change to reflect the new threats and opportunities that these protocols bring.

Edge 2.0 Manifesto: Redefining Edge Computing

F5’s completion of its acquisition of Volterra marks the beginning of the next phase of edge computing, ushering in the Edge 2.0 era. We envision that in the Edge 2.0 era, digital business in every industry sector will adopt edge computing platforms to deliver applications and to process and analyze data. The edge platform will be an essential component of the user experience for all digital services.

Your Product is My Digital Experience

It's no surprise that we all have at least a few devices in our homes that can and do connect to the Internet. What's surprising is that most of us—and most businesses, too—don't include the "IoT" as part of digital transformation. They should because digitizing products is absolutely a part of the business journey.

F5 Completes Acquisition of Volterra

With the addition of Volterra’s technology, F5 is creating an edge platform built for enterprises and service providers that will be security-first and app-driven with unlimited scale. The F5+Volterra Edge 2.0 platform will be designed to address challenges found with current edge solutions that are built on CDNs and have limited security features.

F5 Delivers 10% Revenue Growth in its First Quarter Fiscal Year 2021

“Our investments over the last several years have fueled innovation, enhancing our strategic position with customers at a time when they are experiencing explosive application growth, and contributing to revenue growth in the first quarter," said François Locoh-Donou, F5’s President and CEO.

5G, Farming, and Economic Recovery

In partnership with the 5G Open Innovation Lab and additional vendors such as Microsoft, T-Mobile, and VMware, F5 is providing technology support for The Food Resiliency Project in Snohomish County, Washington, with ties to the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act. A recent blog from F5's James Feger helps put these efforts in context.

5G Open Innovation Lab launches application development field lab for real-time data to support agricultural logistics and food resiliency

[Press Release] "Because farming is a critical business which may lack easy access to certain technology advances due to terrain and geography, F5 is collaborating with other leading technology companies to source and co-develop local networks to improve supply chains and more efficiently get food on tables," said James Feger, VP and GM for Service Provider, F5.

AI and Protecting against the Next Generation of Privacy Threats

You are likely quite familiar with the most common threats that put your data at risk, such as using insecure passwords, sharing passwords, and not installing required security updates on your devices. But there are many other privacy risks that go beyond these typical cases.

How to Ensure Data Privacy and Organizational Security

With the level of encrypted traffic today, the need to ensure user and consumer data privacy, and the computationally intensive task of decryption and re-encryption, leveraging a traditional security solution to pull double-duty to deliver security by simply decrypting and re-encrypting traffic can be a very bad idea.

Extending Adaptive Applications to the Edge

EVP Kara Sprague: Volterra's universal, multi-cloud technology enables industry-standard containers to execute anywhere, across any public cloud, private cloud, or enterprise data center. Together with F5’s industry-leading application security and delivery technology, we will introduce the first Edge 2.0 platform, providing an edge that meets the demanding needs of enterprises and service providers.

Strategic Benefits of a Robust Data Architecture

The payoffs of a well-constructed data architecture go beyond operational process. The benefits extend into strategic operational efficiencies, deeper business insights, and the ability to reach adjacent business opportunities, all executed in a more agile manner.

Stop Phishing and Cut Encrypted Exfiltration and Communication

Phishing and spearphishing attacks drastically increased in 2020, driven by the threat of a worldwide pandemic, nations under quarantine or lockdown, work from home mandates, and contemporary political events. Jay Kelley examines modern threats in the context of F5 Labs' recent Phishing and Fraud Report, as well as how organizations can better protect users, applications, and data.

Machine Learning for Product Managers

Written by F5's Taggart Bonham, this article walks you through the five steps of building and deploying machine learning models, using time-series anomaly detection to demonstrate a real-world example. The best part: this distilled approach will apply to any product or feature.

F5 to Acquire Volterra to Create the First Edge 2.0 Platform for Enterprises and Service Providers

With the addition of Volterra’s technology platform, F5 is creating an edge platform built for enterprises and service providers that will be security-first and app-driven with unlimited scale.

Enabling the Edge 2.0 Revolution

With Volterra, F5 will transform how customers deliver digital experiences and address the application security and delivery challenges we’re seeing from existing edge technologies. F5+Volterra creates a new paradigm that unifies security and applications across cloud and edge with global consistency.

Open Banking Will Unlock Opportunities in the Platform Economy for Financial Institutions

Today, financial institutions are ripe with opportunity to participate in a broader ecosystem of services. The demand from consumers for new ways to manage their money and facilitate payments has never been higher, in part due to the accelerated rate of digitization brought on by COVID-19. But it's also driven by the arrival of digital natives to the marketplace.

The Unfiltered State of Application Survey Respondents

Whether we’re talking digital transformation, application architectures, or the importance of telemetry in maintaining a digital business, the soon-to-be-released results of our annual survey help shape F5's understanding of the market and strategic decisions. This year, we gave respondents a bit more latitude in providing freeform answers. They did not disappoint.

The Top 10, Top 10 Predictions for 2021

As each year comes to a close, tech pundits blow the dust off their crystal balls and share their predictions for the coming year. For Peter Silva's annual list, he's compiled a collection of what the industry is saying (and expecting) for 2021.

How Multi-Cloud Made Automation a Necessity

This is the reality of cloud properties. They all use the same mechanisms—APIs, consoles, processes—to perform common operational tasks. This is one of the benefits of cloud. And in terms of onboarding new technology professionals, it can dramatically reduce time required for onboarding.

A Friction-Free Experience with F5 Professional Services in AWS Marketplace

Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers can now find and purchase consulting and training services from F5 in AWS Marketplace, a curated digital catalog of software, data, and services that makes it easy to find, test, buy, and deploy software and data products that run on AWS. As a participant in the launch, F5 is one of the first AWS Partners to quote and contract services in AWS Marketplace to help customers implement, support, and manage their software on AWS.

Transforming Network Services with F5 Cloud DNS – Primary DNS Service

Given DNS is a foundational networking service, it’s not a stretch to claim that digital transformation begins with DNS. Unfortunately, DNS is the last frontier of networking technology modernization. F5 Cloud DNS Service empowers network operations teams and DevOps teams to take advantage of these tectonic shifts in culture (DevOps) and technology (elastic consumption of computing and networking infrastructure).

The Fourth Wave of Cloud is Imminent

We recently crested the third wave of cloud. Concurrently, the pandemic has shifted a lot of enterprise attitudes. One has been the approach to remote work. Another is that toward public cloud. In fact, just about every survey out there now says the market is full steam ahead on cloud migrations—but, while certainly related, an important distinction exists between cloud migration and cloud adoption.

Insights: There is more to it…

At F5, our vision for your application portfolio is continuously adapting to its changing environment. With our SaaS solution, F5 Beacon, we enhance your application visibility posture irrespective of the actual architectures and data planes in use. Beacon provides you with the right level of insights that are easy to consume in order to support your adaptive applications.

F5 Introduces Solutions for Cloud-Native 5G Infrastructure Enabling Service Providers to Accelerate Delivery of New Digital Experiences

BIG-IP Service Proxy for Kubernetes and Carrier-Grade Aspen Mesh help bridge 4G and 5G networks while monetizing new capabilities for Kubernetes. The solutions feature scalable performance, visibility, and security advancements that enable service providers to deliver innovative 5G-based services to consumers and enterprises.

Bringing the Adaptive Apps Vision to Life for Traditional Applications

EVP Kara Sprague: F5 is delivering on the vision of adaptive apps for both traditional and modern applications. We define “traditional applications” as those that have a monolithic, client-server, or three-tier architecture. In contrast, “modern applications” are architected as distributed cloud- or container-native services that interact via APIs.

How to Capture Packets that Don’t Exist – Blog post from F5's Aspen Mesh team

Aspen Mesh Packet Inspector enables users to capture packets even in Kubernetes. That’s the part you need to address to power all the existing tools you probably already have. Leveraging these tools is important because customers are often heavily invested in them. And not just monetarily, as their reputation for reliable apps, services, and networks relies on the usefulness of their tools, procedures, and experience powered by a packet view.

Veterans Day 2020 at F5

Nathan Kurtz, VP of Performance & Strategy at F5 and Executive Sponsor for the company’s Military Veterans Employee Inclusion Group, reflects on the significance of Veterans Day in the U.S., expands on what it means as an F5 employee, and identifies related resources.

How Cloud-Based Infrastructure Enables 5G Innovation

When it comes to 5G and innovation, one's imagination is the only limit. We all know that 5G is largely meant to satisfy the insatiable appetite for lightning-fast speeds and real-time (sub-millisecond) latencies. But it’s also the fundamental basis for enterprise vertical industries and academia enabling the development of some really remarkable technological advances.

Aviatrix and F5 SSL Orchestrator Simplify Public Cloud Security

Public cloud solutions offer a lot of well-known benefits, but they also pose the occasional challenge. For example, organizations are used to having precise control over all the network traffic in their data centers, and they count on that level of control to perform critical security checks. As corporate workloads move to the public cloud, IT operators are challenged to ensure that their security measures come along as well.

Delivering Deeper Insight and Visibility for BIG-IP with Splunk

BIG-IP excels at inspecting, analyzing, filtering, and reporting on network traffic, it creates a lot of very useful data. However, parsing and extracting insight from this stream of information can be no small feat. This was one of the primary drivers for the development of the Splunk Add-on for F5 BIG-IP.

What is SOAR and How Can Agencies Leverage it in their Cybersecurity Efforts?

By its industry definition, SOAR (Security Orchestration, Automation and Response) comprises “technologies that enable organizations to collect inputs monitored by the security operations team…SOAR tools allow an organization to define incident analysis and response procedures in a digital workflow format.” But it is far more than just a set of tools.

National STEM Day: Closing the Gap for Women and Girls of Color in Technology

Kara Sprague: While I enjoyed many advantages and privileges growing up, the fact remains just as it does today—girls are chronically under-represented in STEM. And the situation, I am sorry to say, is getting even worse, and most especially when it comes to girls and women of color.

Credential Stuffing Increasingly Targets Video Games

Gaming accounts and microtransactions are valuable enough to have become substantial targets for hackers. Given that these accounts—like those in other industries—can be used across platforms (website, console, mobile phone), they can pose lucrative opportunities with multiple attack vectors for those savvy enough to go after them.

Edge is Driving an Infrastructure Renaissance

As organizations ramp up their generation of data and seek to extract business value from itanalytics and automation powered by AI and ML will certainly be on the table as technologies put to the task. These are exactly the type of workloads that will benefit from optimized infrastructure, and yet they are the ones least likely to be able to take advantage of it today.

F5 Delivers 5% Revenue Growth in Fiscal Year 2020 on Building Software Momentum

“F5 is well on its way to becoming a software-led business, with customer demand for our multi-cloud application security and delivery services driving 5% GAAP and non-GAAP annual revenue growth in fiscal year 2020,” said François Locoh-Donou, president and CEO of F5.

Cloud Native and Open Source (without the Hassle)

It’s hard to find an enterprise company who hasn’t considered cloud native technologies to help meet user demands or to be more agile. So, what's holding organizations back? Some are wary of the critical parts of the cloud native stack that are open source. Others hesitate upon finding the cloud native market saturated. The choices can be overwhelming—and the downside of making the wrong bet on a soon-to-be-obsolete technology can outweigh the potential upside.

What Government Organizations Need to Know about Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC)

CMMC, as it’s rolled out over the course of five years, is meant to reduce, if not eliminate, vulnerabilities and address a critical national security challenge. The defense industrial base (DIB) includes more than 300,000 companies, over which there has been a glaring lack of previous oversight. These companies access and store sensitive defense information on their own systems. CMMC represents an important step toward protecting this information.

Why a Structured Data Design Strategy Matters: An Example

A thoughtful and deliberate data strategy is fundamental to enabling the quality and cost-effectiveness of the most important business workflows. Further, when the workflows are instrumented to transmit their observed data exhaust to a collection and analysis infrastructure, the workflows themselves can be continuously analyzed and improved, resulting in constantly adaptive and optimized business workflows.

Announcing F5 Essential App Protect and Amazon CloudFront Integration – Secure, Fast and Available as a Service

Many companies have seen years of transformation take place in just the past several months. While adapting to a global crisis has been a catalyst, the long-term requirements have remained the same while the urgency has increased. Organizations want to deliver a superior customer experience. They want business agility, the ability to respond rapidly to changing market conditions. And, ultimately, they want return on their investments.

Hispanic Heritage Month 2020: Opportunity, Welcome, and Family

This blog concludes a two-part series celebrating National Hispanic Heritage Month through the voices of our employees and members of F5’s Latinx e Hispanos Unidos Employee Inclusion Group (EIG). Alejandro (Alex) Figueroa, a manager at our Security Operation Center based in Guadalajara, shares his story and thoughts on the importance of this celebration.

Scaling DDoS Protection at the Edge

While it's true that 2020 has seen different DDoS attack patterns emerge, what is also true is that DDoS attacks at the infrastructure layer are still DDoS attacks. They are what we might call "traditional" attacks. What is changing are targets and opportunities that come with a distributed workforce, along with considerations around 5G and Edge computing.

F5 Introduces AI-powered Solution that Blocks Fraud Missed by Existing Technologies and Improves Online Experiences for Users

F5 introduces Shape AI Fraud Engine (SAFE), a new SaaS solution that eliminates fraudulent online transactions that get past existing fraud tools. SAFE utilizes a battle-tested AI engine to evaluate each online transaction across a variety of telemetry, environmental, and behavioral signals to accurately understand user intent and block human fraudsters before the fraud occurs.

Adaptive Applications are Data-Driven

There's a big difference between knowing something's wrong and knowing what to do about it. Only after monitoring the right elements can we discern the health of a user experience, deriving from the analysis of those measurements the relationships and patterns that can be inferred. Ultimately, the automation that will give rise to truly adaptive applications is based on measurements and our understanding of them.

Reducing Time to Know with F5 Beacon

In most fictional stories, whether told through text or on the screen, there is a point at which a main plotline is seemingly but not actually resolved. The same thing happens in IT organizations. The clock is ticking, and too often just when IT thinks they've seen the last of an issue, it returns and they have to redouble their efforts while a customer grows more and more frustrated.

It’s Time to Get Cloud Smart about Application Security

Back in 2018 the Office of Management and Budget introduced a new strategy designed to provide organizations with a roadmap to migrate their applications to the cloud, dubbed Cloud Smart. The message is clear: the traditional definition of a network perimeter has eroded; applications are the new network edge. We have entered into a new phase of digital transformation that is dominated by cloud services and multi-cloud applications.

EXIM Bank creates a more seamless and secure customer experience with F5 solutions

The Export Import Bank of Bangladesh Limited (EXIM Bank) transitioned into a full-fledged bank with activities that adhere to Islamic law and use a real-time banking application called Temenos Transact. To ensure it could scale this solution across its branches and enhance the security of online banking transactions, EXIM Bank leveraged F5 Advanced Web Application Firewall (WAF) and Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM).

COVID-19 Illuminates New Digital Sales Realities

COVID-19 has forced many to tear up the rulebook and (virtually) start again, as the lines between field sales and digital operations continue to blur beyond recognition. The pandemic has put a rocket behind sales’ natural evolutionary trajectory, just as previous societal and technological shifts moved organizations away from Rolodexes to Salesforce, or from landlines to mobile phones and videoconferencing.

Making Security Cool: National Cybersecurity Awareness Month 2020

National Cybersecurity Awareness Month is happening now. For nearly 20 years, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has devoted every October to telling Americans how to be safer and more secure online. In all that time, has anything changed?

Why Telcos are Exploring ‘Best of Suite’ over ‘Best of Breed’ Solutions

In the 5G era, the ability to maintain deterministic low latency is an unavoidable must-have. As a result, some operators are refocusing efforts to embrace a ‘best of suite’ approach in which they deploy a consolidated set of virtual functions/solutions to simplify network service delivery, rather than trying to stitch together a range of separate products.

Virtualization and flexible licensing help fuel CSG’s dramatic modernization

CSG, a 35-year-old provider of customer engagement services for the telecommunications and cable industry, leveraged an F5 Enterprise Licensing Agreement to facilitate its digital transformation journey.

F5 Appoints Elizabeth Buse to Board of Directors

Elizabeth Buse, former CEO of Monitise PLC, a global mobile banking and payments company, has been appointed to F5's Board of Directors. Ms. Buse brings broad financial services industry expertise and public company board experience to F5.

Detecting Fraud in Digital Workflows Requires More than Data

The industry saw nearly 250,000 attempts of credit card fraud in 2019. That breaks down to about one attempt every two minutes. Detecting fraud today requires a correlation of data, collected from as many points in the digital workflow as possible, and the ability to analyze it at speeds far greater than manual data processing can offer.

Hispanic Heritage Month in 2020

F5's Lupita Vallejo provides thoughts and personal context on this monthlong celebration: "Mexico is a country rich in culture, language, music, artifacts, and far more. We are more than our world-renowned food, historic landmarks, and perfect weather. What really defines my Mexico is something far more important: the people."

NGINX Announces Eight Solutions that Let Developers Run Safely with Scissors

Rob Whiteley: We're announcing solutions that unleash developer speed without sacrificing the control infrastructure teams require. Get the details on NGINX Controller, App Protect, Ingress Controller, Service Mesh, and Analytics Cloud Service; F5 DNS Cloud Services; and Red Hat integrations.

Slow is the New Down

The central problem with measuring site performance today can be summed up as: "We don't measure the cost of slow. We measure the cost of downtime." Humans tend to work toward what they're measured on. This is not a new concept and, in fact, it's one of the tenets of DevOps and the reason the methodology includes a shift in measurements toward what matters most. Today, that means more than just available—it means fast and reliable too.

Apps in the Firing Line: DDoS Attacks on the Rise

The first known incident resembling a denial of service attack reportedly occurred in 1974 when a 13-year-old took down a room full of terminals connected to a learning management system at the University of Illinois. Times have obviously changed since, but DDoS attacks have continued to evolve and wreak havoc. This is particularly true in the wake of COVID-19.

Impressions of the virtual Sprint conference from Gus Robertson, SVP & GM, NGINX, F5

We explore three factors that hamper the speed of software development and delivery: dev teams are battling fatigue, tools aren't automated, and infrastructure is too complex. Find out how NGINX Open Source, NGINX Plus, NGINX App Protect, and NGINX Controller can help.

At U.S. Federal Agencies, the Time is Right for Zero Trust

Nearly half of federal government IT executives reported that their agencies are shifting toward identity-centered, or Zero Trust, security strategies to protect their digital resources. The accelerated use of this model coincides with the growing realization that traditional methods to secure a network’s perimeter are no longer sufficient.

National Coding Week – A Q&A With Kara Sprague, EVP and GM of BIG-IP and Girls Who Code Board Member

It’s National Coding Week in the UK! To mark the occasion, we connected with Kara Sprague, EVP and GM of BIG-IP and a board member at Girls Who Code, to talk about the way coding is viewed, its role in her professional development, and its continuing impact on industries of every type.

Using the Modernizing Government Technology Act to Improve Cybersecurity (Now)

When the Modernizing Government Technology Act (MGT Act) was signed into law in 2017, its purpose was so agencies could apply for support from the Technology Modernization Fund, designed to help them move on from legacy systems and invest in agile, transformative technologies. Over time, the establishment of the MGT Act has proven even more visionary than anyone could have imagined.

How AI will automate cybersecurity in the post-COVID world

Shuman Ghosemajumder: By now, it is obvious to everyone that widespread remote working is accelerating the trend of digitization in society that has been happening for decades. What takes longer for most people to identify are the derivative trends. One such trend is that increased reliance on online applications means that cybercrime is becoming even more lucrative.

Should TIC 3.0 Guidance Change Your Security Approach?

The Trusted Internet Connections (TIC) initiative’s 3.0 guidance marks an excellent opportunity to review your security approach. Because of evolving threats, federal government security experts know it’s important to stay vigilant. While technology changes, the ultimate goal remains the same—to protect your agency, partners, and customers.

Lifewire Helps Domestic Violence Survivors Find a Lifeline through Remote Digital Support

With help from an F5 Global Good Tech for Good grant for COVID-19 response, LifeWire was able to quickly transition to remote services for victims of domestic abuse.

Consistently Control Access to Multi-Cloud Applications with F5 Access Manager and Equinix

Consistency of policy across multiple cloud properties has been the top challenge facing organizations for as long as we've been asking about multi-cloud challenges. The recent diaspora of applications and access control only serves to exacerbate the importance of implementing a unified access control point able to enforce a consistent set of access policies.

Packing Up and Moving to SaaS

While SaaS is not really all that new, what is new is the range of activities being commoditized and packaged as SaaS. All manner of business functions are joining CRM, SFA, productivity, and communications as SaaS offerings. And we anticipate that organizations will quickly jump at the chance to offload the operation of such software to a provider.

Cloud-Native Architectures Accelerate Need for New Ways to Solve Security Challenges

Despite changes in architectures and location, security problems do not change. Customers still need to protect applications, ensure availability, and defend against DDoS attacks. Application security is just a bigger challenge now due to the expanding attack surfaces and vulnerabilities.

United Way Bay Area Helps SparkPoint Centers Adapt During the Pandemic

With the help of an F5 Global Good Tech for Good grant, United Way Bay Area was able to transition to virtual service delivery for its clients during the pandemic. This infusion of funds helped expand the digital infrastructure of the SparkPoint Centers and supported virtual training for helpline volunteers.

We are Entering a New World of “Adaptive Applications.” Here’s What that Means.

F5 believes an important element of this more sophisticated automation is enabling applications to adapt. Much like a living organism, adaptive applications grow, shrink, defend, and heal themselves based on the environment they’re in and how they’re being used. This applies to born-in-the cloud, digital-native organizations as much as established companies with a complex mix of traditional and modern architectures.

The Advantages and Necessity of Open Source

Agile processes enable rapid releases to deliver customer value quickly and seamlessly; and new technologies make it viable to deliver daily releases, particularly for customers operating on a massive, global scale. Open source provides a model that offers the flexibility, agility, and stability companies need to efficiently deliver applications to their end-users—without the restrictions of vendor lock-in.

Beyond Visibility is Operability

There are two walls in the delivery path for applications. The first (which has been the cause of much friction) is between development and production. And while DevOps methodologies have begun to break down this wall, the other—the one between production and delivery to consumers—is not so easily breached.

As the Cloud Wins over the Financial Sector, Keeping Customers Secure Requires Technology and Talent

F5's Chad Davis: Digital disruption has arrived for notoriously cautious financial services firms. Applications are one of the most important competitive differentiators in the industry today, powering everything from accounting systems to transaction engines to the customer experience. What’s more eye-opening is that those apps are increasingly running in the cloud.

Multiple Clouds? Multiple Risks.

Most organizations are operating in multiple cloud properties in addition to their own on-premises, private cloud. For the past three years we've asked about the challenges and frustrations professionals in every role within IT experience while operating in this mode. Every year the top answer is the same: consistency.

F5 Delivers 4% Revenue Growth on Continued Strong Software Demand in Third Quarter Fiscal Year 2020

F5's CEO: "Customers continue to look to F5 to enable their mission-critical application needs and deploy a combination of solutions spanning our F5, NGINX and Shape multi-cloud application services portfolio. In a challenging COVID-19 environment, our deep incumbency and close alignment with customers' investment priorities are proving distinct competitive advantages and driving resiliency in our business.”

Digital Transformation: Progressing from Automation to Workflows

In the three phases of digital transformation, the first phase is all about automation. The focus on digitizing of workflows in phase two will ultimately offer businesses a path forward to the third phase, where data-driven services will generate actionable insights that improve efficiency, reduce process friction, and increase both productivity and profits. 

A Nonprofit Pivots from In-Person to Digital Relationships to Serve those Hit Hard by the Pandemic

Big Table is dedicated to caring for those in the restaurant and hospitality industry who are in crisis, in transition, or in danger of falling through the cracks. They applied for and received an F5 Global Good “Tech for Good” COVID-19 Response grant, upgrading laptops and purchasing cameras, lighting, backdrops, a teleprompter, and other equipment to enable live-streaming events.

The Changing World of Encryption: TLS Deployments in 2020

Online privacy is no longer about simply staying away from prying eyes. Encryption on the web plays a key role in affording us our privacy, and it is constantly changing.

Lancashire Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust banks on F5 for secure remote access during COVID-19

Due to COVID-19, Lancashire Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust required significantly more staff to work from home. F5 and its partner, Full Proxy, rapidly combined forces to ensure that even a ten-fold increase in remote users had no impact on the user experience.

Traffic Management User Interface Vulnerability: How to Mitigate

[F5 DevCentral Article] A new Remote Code Execution vulnerability announcement that affects several versions of BIG-IP was just released on June 30, 2020. Because of the severity of this vulnerability, we recommend immediately installing the latest patched version in order to protect your BIG-IP system from compromise. 

Video from F5's Security Incident Response Team (SIRT)

Peter Silva walks you through the details, and why locking down the Management Port is F5 SIRT’s top tip for keeping your BIG-IP and your network secure from intruders.

New F5 Solution Defends Customers’ Websites through Protection against Bots and Credential Stuffing

Silverline Shape Defense, a fully managed service from F5, helps customers better focus on their users and safeguard businesses against bots, credential stuffing, scraping, and other automated attacks that result in fraud and abuse—leading to compromised efficiency, loss of revenue, and damage to the brand.

F5 Adds AI-Powered Anti-Bot and Fraud Prevention to Popular F5 Silverline Managed Services

Gail Coury: With Silverline Shape Defense, companies get the visibility, detection, and mitigation outcomes they need to slash fraud; reduce cloud hosting, bandwidth, and compute costs; improve user experiences; and optimize their business based on real human traffic.

The Next Phase of Application Monitoring is Predictive

First confined to the data center, Application Performance Monitoring (APM) has become increasingly context-driven around web-based user experiences. Today, it isn't enough to identify what went wrong after the fact. Businesses need to identify where trouble might occur before it happens.

Shape makes it ridiculously easy for Fastly users to identify threats and deliver targeted mitigation

If you’re a Fastly CDN user, Shape’s industry-leading log analysis capabilities are just a flip of the switch away. There is zero impact on production traffic, so there is no risk of negative consequences—just straight up information gathering. F5's Frank Strobel takes a closer look.

A letter from the F5 Appreciates Blackness (FAB) employee inclusion group in response to Black Lives Matter

We want to share this powerful message to F5ers from our FAB employee inclusion group leaders as a blog post to help channel our collective energy into concrete action. F5 stands in solidarity with the Black community and those who protest in support of social justice around the world.

Fireside Chat with F5 CEO François Locoh-Donou

Originally published for Black History Month, François Locoh-Donou talks with F5 Appreciates Blackness co-chair Monique Thompson about his personal journey, what it’s like to be a Black man in corporate America, and how to foster dialogue and understanding about the challenges Black Americans face.

Read F5's Pledge against Racism and Discrimination

At F5, our commitment to the fight against racism is a foundational part of our culture as a company. We consider diversity and inclusion part of being an F5er. Accordingly, our F5 Appreciates Blackness (FAB) employee inclusion group, the Diversity & Inclusion team, and executives are sharing the steps we are taking as a company, and the pledge we are taking as individuals.

The Third Wave of Cloud is Cresting

There is an ebb and flow to technology cycles. Its inevitability is extant in many theories, such as the S-curve of innovation and a certain well-known analyst firm's hype cycle. Cloud is subject to these same waves. We've seen two very strong cycles over the past ten years, and it appears that a third wave is beginning to crest.

F5 Fortifies Partnership with Rakuten Mobile to Provide Advanced Application Security Services for the Rakuten Communications Platform

Yuichi Gonda, Regional VP at F5 Networks Japan, commented: “We are delighted to be supporting Rakuten Mobile on their 5G journey to becoming a global telco provider. This demonstrates how F5 solutions deliver and protect apps—from code to customer, reducing telcos’ operational complexity and costs.”

The Technology Playbook for COVID-19 and a More Agile Future

EVP Kara Sprague: The pandemic has raised the stakes overnight on digital experiences. The playbook for thriving has four distinct phases, which I’ve heard consistently from both customers and industry observers. Several organizations are applying this approach to enhance their operations with new digital processes that will drive ongoing differentiation.

Improving Business Outcomes and Application Experiences with a Cloud Gateway in Equinix

Equinix addresses the challenges of distributed applications with connectivity, latency, and capacity at the network layers with its cloud edge locations and networking magic. With security and full visibility of traffic flows, it also acts as a control point between users, locations, clouds, and data in which organizations can deploy and enjoy the benefits and capabilities of a cloud gateway (such as F5 BIG-IP).

How Containers Change Scalability

In the cloud era, the focus has flipped from vertical to horizontal scale. We still need more bandwidth and compute and processing power, but we've learned how to distribute that need. It's the way resources are assembled that changes the game. And make no mistake, the game has changed thanks to containers.

Mitigate DDoS attacks up to 300x greater in magnitude in Cloud environments: Introducing BIG-IP VE for SmartNICs

For service providers and enterprises transitioning to 5G network infrastructure and modern cloud architectures, virtual environments can now be hosted on low-cost, standards-based servers while moving specific functions to a Smart Network Interface Card, thereby boosting performance and lowering latency in the core and at the network edge.

International Women in Engineering Day 2020 – Q&A with Sara Boddy, Sr. Director, F5 Communities

To mark this year’s Women in Engineering Day, we connected with Sara Boddy, Senior Director of F5 Communities (F5 Labs and DevCentral), to discuss her career to date and why we need to continually strive for more diversity in tech.

Embrace All People for Who They Are: Life Lessons from Uncle Johnny

Scot Rogers, Executive sponsor of the F5 Pride employee inclusion group (EIG) shares his thoughts on advocacy for the LGBTQ+ community at F5, and how the experiences and perspective of a close relative illustrated "the importance of embracing all people for who they are, as they are, and wherever they are on their life’s journey.”

Why NFV is More Relevant Than Ever

While it is true that adoption rates have fallen short of initial predictions, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that NFV is as relevant as it’s ever been. Perhaps even more so.

F5's Shape Security Wins Award for Application Security

Fortress Cybersecurity Awards highlight the world’s leading companies and products that are working to keep data and electronic assets safe among growing threats from hackers.

Privacy Matters in a Data-Driven Economy

Data comes from a variety of sources across the code-to-customer path. Applications. Platforms. Application services. Infrastructure. Devices. All are capable of emitting data that can be turned into business value by the right solution. The elephant in the room during any discussion on the use of data is, of course, privacy.

How COVID-19 is Testing Telcos’ Mettle

We live in testing times. For telecoms operators, the COVID-19 pandemic is throwing up challenge after challenge. These range from a major mismatch between network configuration and the new traffic patterns, to physical attacks on 5G infrastructure and elaborate forms of fraud devised by a new breed of bad actors. At the same time, under-employed customers are querying bills and questioning their tariff plans.

The Foundational Role of Data Architecture (in an analytics-focused world)

The first step in a discussion about data architecture is to define what the concept of “data architecture” encompasses. Unsurprisingly, the answer turns out to be nuanced—it is layered and multifaceted. To help ground the discussion, it is useful to start by thinking about it in terms of the journey of collected telemetry data.

Corporate Payments Go Digital in the Wake of COVID-19

Digital payments have become as common as cash used to be. Shutdowns due to the COVID-19 pandemic have only accelerated the rate consumers rely on such services. But it has also accelerated digital payments on the corporate side. After all, businesses still have accounts payable and receivable whether they're open to the public or not.

Improving Support for Containerized Apps: Announcing Container Ingress Services 2.0

With the development of container orchestration technologies, working with containers is easier and more programmatic than ever. But orchestration is only half the battle. Effective container strategies also require solutions for the different elements tied to applications, such as networks, storage, security, traffic management, and DNS.

F5’s Path to a Multi-Purpose Application Analytics Platform

CTO Geng Lin: Today, F5 offers the most comprehensive application services along the code to customer path. For the future, we are doubling down on application telemetries and analytics to help our customers discover insights about their applications, business flows, and user experiences. As we build out our cloud analytics capabilities, we'll further leverage ML/AI to help our customers to improve their business services.

Don’t Leave Security Behind – 6 Months of SaaS-based Web App Protection Free for Healthcare, Non-Profits, and Education

In a get-it-done-now kind of environment, you need a fast and easy way to make sure your web apps are covered by fundamental protections. F5 recognizes the pressures those on the frontlines of the COVID-19 crisis are under, and we don’t want new technology to be another one.

Zero Trust in an Application-Centric World

Zero Trust is a powerful strategy that can help a business go faster and be more secure. While not a new concept, it is one that has taken on particular relevance for today's application-driven businesses and multi-cloud environments.

F5 Names Tom Fountain as Head of Global Services and Strategy

F5 announces the appointment of Tom Fountain as Executive Vice President of Global Services and Chief Strategy Officer. In this role, he will head F5’s global support, professional consulting, educational services, customer success, manufacturing, and technology services operations.

The Two Questions You Need to Answer to Achieve High Availability

Demand for digital experiences is up. And there’s very little more frustrating to a user than an app or website failing to load. To be honest, there's very little more frustrating to an operator than an app or website failing to load. Achieving high availability is not just a matter of inserting a load balancer into the data path. That's part of the equation, but it's just one of the steps needed to ensure an app or website stays available.

Securing Remote Access While Protecting Against Encrypted Threats

Jay Kelley looks at how organizations are beginning to shift their technology concerns from application access and maintaining user productivity toward application security. The article also notes how cybercriminals are adapting and what you can do about it.

The Evolution of Load Balancing is Tied to Application Architecture

It should be no surprise that as there evolves a new generation of application architectures that a new generation of load balancing accompanies it. Since the birth of load balancing, just before the turn of the century, the technology has moved in a predictable pace, which means it is time for innovation.

F5 Accelerates Customers’ Digital Transformation with End-to-End Application Visibility and Control

F5’s Beacon, BIG-IQ, and NGINX Controller solutions give customers end-to-end visibility into the health and performance of applications, along with integrated traffic, security, and API management controls to take action based on those insights, surfacing new ways to lower operational overhead and achieve faster time to market.

Light It Up: A Look at F5’s New Tools for Application-Centric Visibility

With F5’s portfolio of visibility solutions, customers can collect and analyze application metrics no matter where the application or app services are deployed. They can connect to applications wherever they live, scale analytics natively, and close unknown gaps in application visibility to expand and strengthen security and reliability.

Supporting our Partners and Customers Through Change

As we begin to grapple with the fact that our rebound will not happen as quickly as we’d all like, we are coming up with innovative ways to keep businesses moving forward. We are offering new tools and resources for our partner community to help solve customer challenges with remote access and security.

Maintaining Pride and Unity in Uncertain Times

It may seem like a million years ago since we hosted our first EMEA LGBT+ @ Work Symposium in London (which included the official launch of the UK & Ireland branch of F5 Pride), but our work behind the scenes has continued apace. In many ways, our mission is only just getting started.

The Importance of Calibrating Application Health Measurements

Lori MacVittie: Much like the health of our household reef tank, the health of applications requires careful attention to key metrics. Deviations, especially wild fluctuations, can indicate a problem. Manual adjustment of metrics is not a process you want to mimic when it comes to applications (as the average organization maintains 100–200 applications in its digital portfolio).

F5 and Microsoft: Simplifying the User and Administrator Application Access Experience

Together, Azure Active Directory and BIG-IP APM offer unified security and user experience between modern and classic applications, providing a single identity control plane and delivering SSO from any device to all applications, whether they are hosted on-premises or in the cloud, and whether or not they support modern authentication and authorization.

Microsoft and F5: Together Addressing Secure Remote Access and Productivity

With the impacts of COVID-19, now home-based and remote employees require secure and seamless access to the applications they need to be productive—especially with all the new challenges they’re facing every day. F5 BIG-IP APM and Azure Active Directory simplify the user experience for application access by enabling users to log in once and access all applications they have the right to access in any location.

Agility in a Time of Disruption

Mika Yamamoto, Chief Marketing and Customer Experience Officer, discusses F5's virtual Agility conference, the industry-leading event for architects, engineers, and developers to learn how building, managing, and securing applications in multi-cloud environments can accelerate digital transformation and deliver better customer experiences.

How a Crisis Reveals the Value of Human-Centered Systems

Culture is not something that can be switched on in response to a crisis. Digital transformation, first and foremost, is a response to a business need. So, the initiatives that support it need to be designed with business outcomes in mind. F5’s Teri Patrick looks at how business outcomes have been informed by organizational culture in the context of the current pandemic.

Powerful Choices for Service Providers: F5 Partners with IBM Telco Network Cloud Ecosystem

James Feger, GM, Service Provider, F5: This new partnership area is significant as it casts a global spotlight on the shared values of both F5 and IBM to enable Service Providers with broader choices of modern architectures and infrastructures—with both hardware and software options to enable open source hybrid cloud containers and innovate toward rapid network transformation.

Microservices will be the new COBOL

Amid this pandemic, the systems processing unemployment claims in many U.S. states found themselves in peril. Developed using COBOL, the systems faced overwhelming demand, prompting urgent calls for those proficient in a programming language dating back to 1959. In parallel, many applications driving contemporary digital transformation efforts are microservices-based. These apps, like their COBOL forebears, are likely to be so critical that they, too, may still be running in 50 or 60 years. 

Security is (Still) Everyone's Responsibility

The expansion of applications tied to organizations’ digital transformation efforts also increases the number of attack surfaces for bad actors to target, with the effects of the current pandemic further accelerating this growth. Coupled with users’ tendency to reuse passwords, you’ve got an unfortunately prime environment for credential stuffing attacks. In this article, Renuka Nadkarni from F5’s Office of the CTO highlights best practices that can help both businesses and consumers protect themselves.

Visibility: Where Effective App Service Management and Troubleshooting Begin

In light of digital transformation initiatives quickly becoming a “checkbox” for modern enterprises, effective management of app services—and the devices that power them—is paramount. It’s also not easy, simple, or straightforward, especially in the multi-cloud world. That's why F5 is so dedicated to delivering end-to-end app visibility and control from code to customer with BIG-IQ 7.1.

F5 Delivers 7% Revenue Growth in Second Quarter Fiscal Year 2020

“We saw continued rapid acceptance of our software and subscription-based offerings as enterprises and service provider customers worldwide look to F5 to ensure consistent application access, delivery and security,” said François Locoh-Donou, CEO and President of F5. “In the last month of the quarter, we also saw increased demand for capacity as customers looked to quickly and, in some cases, massively scale remote access capabilities to keep their employees safe and their businesses running.”

Partner News: Fortanix Data Security Platform Now Available on Microsoft Azure to Enhance Private Data Protection in the Public Cloud

Frank Strobel, Director, Cybersecurity and IoT Alliances at F5: “Customers running BIG-IP and NGINX solutions in Azure now have an additional choice for key management that preserves scalability while providing full control in securing website traffic.”

Control versus Execution in the Data Path

The rise of cloud and continued adoption of containers points toward dynamic data paths through which apps are delivered. A single, strategic point of control and execution is often no longer operationally—or architecturally—feasible. But that does not mean that a unified point of control is no longer possible, provided that one chooses a proper tool.

Taking a ‘Human-First’ Approach as Customers Swiftly Adapt

In prioritizing health and well-being, organizations worldwide are finding out how they can work effectively when employees are separated by physical distance. Ian Jones, head of F5’s global Professional Services and Training Services teams, highlights the ways organizations are meeting today’s demands, and surfacing lessons that will apply long after the pandemic ends.

F5 and AlgoSec Enable Holistic Network Security Management

In today's heterogeneous IT environments, it’s all too easy for the rules and objects associated with the devices that make up the network to proliferate, adding complexity and risk. To help address this, AlgoSec has worked closely with F5 to extend rich visibility and orchestration capabilities across the entire multi-vendor network security fabric.

Mika Yamamoto Discusses Removing Friction and Adding Delight in Leading Marketing and Customer Experience Organizations

Audio and transcript from the F5 CMCXO’s recent guest appearance, also touching on digital transformation and the significance of “code connects us all.” (Podcast also available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Play, iHeartRadio, among others.)

Unintended Consequences of COVID-19: Operational Exposure

Extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures. Many people have uttered this phrase in light of COVID-19. One of those extraordinary measures has been a pivot to remote work for many of us. In this context, access to critical apps is often discussed. But rarely do we hear the details about how that access has been enabled.

App Servers as Insertion Points

An insertion point is an architecturally distinct location in the code to customer data path at which it makes sense to add functionality that is often outside the purview of development or operationally more efficient. Insertion points include the client, infrastructure, and the app itself. So, what we're looking for are app services that are both operationally and cost efficient at the point of insertion; in this case, we're focused on the app server (platform) itself.

How Secure is your VPN?

Perennially important, virtual private network (VPN) security is now imperative given the current COVID-19 pandemic. Remote working has fast become the new normal and, correspondingly, the demand for VPN capabilities has skyrocketed. Unfortunately—if unsurprisingly—attacks on VPNs have risen sharply alongside.

Living through the Pandemic in Asia: A Perspective on Crisis

F5's Kunaciilan Nallappan reflects on the early days of 2020, sharing his thoughts on the company's initial response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the continuing importance of putting employees, customers, and communities first as we navigate these times together.

Video and Network Optimization for Mobile Service Providers in the Time of COVID-19

For mobile service providers, COVID-19 has been the catalyst recently for dramatic traffic growth as enterprises and consumers follow mandatory stay-at-home guidelines. Fortunately, many OTT providers have throttled their video streams to reduce the strain on the network, but this has also highlighted to service providers the importance of being prepared.

From Solutions to Stacks: The Age of Assembly

This componentization of IT is like the componentization of the applications it is tasked with securing and delivering. It's estimated that 80 to 90% of modern applications are composed of third-party components, most of which are open source. The benefits to doing so include speed, responsiveness to change (agility), and a reduction in the cost to create the software. After all, if someone else already wrote the code for a wheel, why reinvent it?

What Six Years of “State of Application Services” Data Tells Us about Organization Preparedness

As organizations rapidly mobilize a global teams to work from home, they are considering the performance, availability, and security of their corporate applications. In recent conversations with customers and partners around the world, we interestingly see a renewed focus on some of the same application services that topped the list in 2015—load balancing, network firewall, anti-virus, and most importantly, identity and access.

Engaging Global Teams and Communities during Shifting Tides of COVID-19

As COVID-19 continues to make its impact felt on a worldwide scale, F5’s Chief Human Resources Officer Ana White and Chief Marketing & Customer Experience Officer Mika Yamamoto reflect on implementing response and readiness efforts reaching employees and communities worldwide.

F5 Adds Sri Shivananda to its Board of Directors

“For his entire career, Sri has been on the forefront of how technology can be leveraged to make financial services and commerce more convenient, affordable, and secure,” said François Locoh-Donou, president and CEO of F5. “His background will be a major asset to F5 as we further expand the ways we connect with our customers through SaaS, cloud, and digital go-to-market efforts.”

Gaining Visibility into your Applications Requires Breaking Down Operational Silos

F5 EVP Kara Sprague: One of the reasons why application-level visibility remains so elusive is because application data paths are complex. There are generally several operational silos along the data path for a single application, and even more operational silos for each of the application architectures and infrastructure environments used within any multi-cloud architecture. And where there are silos, there is limited visibility.

F5 Technical Services: Continuing Business in the Time of Coronavirus

The COVID-19 pandemic has created a new work reality almost overnight. Globally, companies like F5 are finding new ways to reinforce flexibility and innovative collaboration as key elements of employee culture. In this article, Jay Kelley takes a closer look at the activities of the Technology Services team at F5 during the course of March 2020 to meet the changing needs of the company and its customers.

Optimizing Remote Access to Support WFH during COVID-19

The general dominance of video and SaaS traffic today is, in part, why remote access services are being overwhelmed. In parallel, the rise of telemedicine during this pandemic is increasing and along with it, live video traffic. One way to increase capacity and improve performance for remote users is to update your remote access configuration to reflect the modern makeup of application traffic.

DevOps Rising to the Occasion, Filling the Web App Security Gap with F5’s Essential App Protect Service

Essential App Protect takes the complexity and guesswork out of safeguarding applications in delivering simple, fast, and scalable cloud-based security for web apps—wherever they’re deployed. The service can be activated within minutes, giving apps out-of-the-box protection against common web exploits, malicious IPs, and coordinated attacks.

The Next Journey for Applications: Extracting Value from a Sea of Data

F5 Office of the CTO’s Ken Arora examines how the evolution of applications and application services interacts and harmonizes with the larger megatrend of data value extraction (as well as digital transformation), where that symbiosis is today, and finally, where it's headed in the near future.

Keeping Networks Running and Protected in a Time of Uncertainty

A new reality brings new vulnerabilities. With nearly 100% of staff telecommuting, what becomes the most important link in the connectivity chain? When exponentially more customers rely on the Internet to order products, what part of an organization’s operations suddenly becomes the most critical? Of course, it’s the network.

Cloud, COVID-19, and the Elusive Measure of Agility

COVID-19 and its rapid spread across the globe have, however unfortunately and unintentionally, altered perceptions around what business agility looks like, particularly in the context of the sudden shift of employees requiring access to applications and data from vastly distributed locations.

Maintaining Business Continuity During a Global Crisis

Whether you’re struggling to respond to spikes in usage, communicate effectively with a newly remote workforce, or ensure that all employees have access to the apps and systems that allow them to do their jobs, here are some simple tips to help you adapt to the new reality.

A Letter from CEO François Locoh-Donou regarding F5’s Response to COVID-19

For additional background and visibility around how the company is responding to COVID-19, a copy of the recent email sent to F5, NGINX, and Shape customers worldwide from our CEO is published here as a blog post.

NetDevOps Survey: The Increasingly Automated Life of NetOps

The latest NetDevOps survey is in and the results show promise for the state of the enterprise deployment pipeline. A community effort, the NetDevOps survey digs for details not normally found in surveys focusing on "the network."

DNS is Not the First Thing that Comes to Mind in a Crisis

Spurred by the coronavirus, a mass shift in teleworking has been one of the most notable ways companies like F5 are moving quickly to make sure customers are up and running. But as this shift takes hold industry-wide, complexities emerge in other areas as well.

The 2020 State of App Services: The DevOps Divide

If you think DevOps is just developers who write scripts and manage CI/CD pipelines, you'd be wrong. If you thought they were just operations who focus on the development pipeline, you'd also be wrong.

F5 Keeps Remote Workers Connected and Secure with BIG-IP APM

With COVID-19 prompting widespread protection and prevention efforts, how can now house-bound and remote workers stay productive, access applications located anywhere (from any location, over different devices), and keep corporate apps and data secure? Jay Kelley provides some helpful guidance in the context of F5’s access management solution, BIG-IP Access Policy Manager (APM).

Responding to Coronavirus: Six Ways to Improve App Availability and Performance for Your End-Users

If you’re an IT professional, the impact of COVID-19 presents a host of new business continuity challenges, along with its myriad interpersonal adjustments. You need to respond quickly to unprecedented changes in work schedules, remote access to applications, and spikes in networking and data demands. Any of these can result in sluggish application health and performance due to over-taxed resources—affecting your ability to serve customers as they adapt to new realities.

Expectations and Adaptation: Tackling Today’s Most Pervasive Customer Challenges

F5 EVP Kara Sprague: Today's organizations are trying to reconcile an extreme pace of change with rising demands—serving users who don’t always know what they want, while facing constant pressure to innovate, compete, and respond to market developments. For many of our customers, these rapidly changing dynamics have become a catalyst to embark on large-scale transformations.

Data and Computers Don’t Care about Gender: A Q&A with F5’s Lori MacVittie

Aligned with International Women's Day, Lori MacVittie takes a moment to discuss her career to date, tips for women looking to get into tech, and reasons for additional optimism on the horizon (particularly in the cloud computing space) in this Q&A with EMEA's Neil Jaques.

The State of the Enterprise App Portfolio

When organizations adopt new architectures and develop new apps, they typically don't throw away ones that already exist. While there's always some culling of the portfolio that's taking place over time, it’s generally true that apps put into service years ago using traditional architectures are still in service—providing they continue to offer business value.

State of Application Services 2020: App Attitudes

When we dig into the State of Application Services each year, we don't just focus on app services. There are a plethora of trends and technologies that impact app services in general, such as new app architectures, automation, and cloud have increasingly had an impact on surrounding topics. It's necessitated a shift from delivering app services as software to software coupled to hardware, from virtual machines to the cloud and, more recently, to containers.

Software & High Performance: Why They Don’t Have to Be Mutually Exclusive

The benefits of migrating away from hardware-dominated environments to cloud and software-defined architectures are well known—increased scalability, operational agility and economic flexibility, to name just a few. But there is also the common misconception that in order to realize these gains, organizations are forced to make a sacrifice regarding the performance of their apps.

Lost and Found: When Clouds Cover Your Apps

Lori MacVittie continues a blog series on F5 Beacon and application visibility: Most of us who've worked in an enterprise setting have at least one tale of the inability to locate an app running somewhere on the premises. Whether it's on a long-forgotten server under someone's desk or deep within the data center, long-lived enterprises are bound to have lost an app at one time or another.

F5 Expands LGBTQ+ Support in EMEA

F5 announced the launch of the UK and Ireland (UKI) branch of its F5 Pride Employee Inclusion Group (EIG) this week. It also hosted the company’s first pan-EMEA F5 Pride: LGBTQ+ @ Work Symposium, highlighting best practices for diversity and inclusion, as well as mapping out plans to further bolster company-wide support for LGBTQ+ staff.

F5 Empowers Customers with End-to-End App Security

[Press Release] At RSA, F5 introduced its customer-focused approach to Application Protection, bolstered by new offerings and the company’s recent acquisition of Shape Security. Informed by customer use cases, prominent industry attack practices, and threat intelligence from F5 Labs, F5’s extensive portfolio safeguards all applications without impacting the end-user experience or slowing time-to-market.

2020 State of Application Services: Cloud Insights

Cloud-native, while still a term with many definitions, can be thought of as a methodology and approach, not a specific technology. And the importance of firmly instilling that into your organization can’t be overstated. The priority for teams and individuals involved in digital transformation is to ensure they agree on and understand the business outcome, using it to inform technical designs/solutions.

Celebrating Cloud Security with Microsoft

F5 kicked off the RSA week in brilliance and style at Microsoft Security 20/20. This gala event celebrated and honored their top partners within the Microsoft Security ecosystem. It’s extremely gratifying to be recognized for the customer obsession we have at F5 with the Customer Impact Award, given security is a critical initiative and core competency for both F5 and Microsoft.

Telemetry: A Different Kind of Data

Are we just using telemetry because it sounds sexier than data? Ultimately both data and telemetry are organized bits of information. To use them interchangeably is not a crime. But the reality is that, if you want to be accurate, there is a difference. And that difference will become increasingly important as organizations march into the data economy.

AI and the Role of Application Services

While we largely have Hollywood and science fiction to thank for our popular understanding of the complex topic, put simply, one can define artificial intelligence as “teaching a computer how to mimic aspects of human intelligence.” To understand how AI and application services will work together in the future, it’s first necessary to examine three distinct types of AI: Strong, Weak, and Assistive.

Container-Native App Services

A growing number of app services are becoming integral components of cloud-native architectures, and the emerging app services are almost exclusively container-native app services. (These are generally—though not always—deployed as part of the surrounding operating environment required to deliver a cloud-native application.) Lori MacVittie looks at examples of such services, as well as their increasing value to organizations.

F5 State of Application Services Research Highlights Key Opportunities to Scale and Accelerate Digital Transformation

[Press Release] F5 announced the availability of its 2020 State of Application Services report. This year’s survey showed that many organizations are starting to realize the benefits of increased scale and velocity of application deployment in their businesses. This value, however, can bring significant complexity as organizations maintain legacy infrastructure while increasingly relying on multiple public and private clouds, implement modern application architectures, and face an evolving and sophisticated threat landscape.

F5 Labs Research Shows Global Service Providers are Increasingly Under Fire from DDoS Attacks

Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against service providers are significantly on the rise, according to recent research. An analysis of global customer security incident data from the past three years—both mobile and landline—also found that brute force attacks, though still prevalent, are on the wane. Other prominent observed threats include compromised devices and web injection attacks.

Service Providers on the Edge: Common Automation Frameworks and the End of Speed and Security Compromises

Bart Salaets: In the service provider realm’s not-too-distant past, there was a distinct line in the sand. On the one side, networking and security teams spearheaded the evolution to an NFV architecture, with a strong focus on virtualising network and security functions. On the other side, developers enthusiastically embraced cloud platforms, DevOps methodologies, and automation via CI/CD pipelines. The edge is where they come together.

The 2020 State of App Services: Apps, Automation, and Architectures

[Blog Post] Months of analyzing over 2600 responses to our State of Application Services survey have culminated in a fascinating look at the impact of digital transformation on organizations around the globe. Companies are in progress on a technological transformational journey. Four in five executives told us they are acting on digital transformation initiatives, and that those initiatives are driving adoption of cloud-native architectures and app services—with automation and security also top-of-mind.

F5’s Next Generation NGINX Controller Accelerates Delivery of Modern Applications

F5 introduces NGINX Controller 3.0, a cloud-native application delivery solution to help organizations increase business agility, mitigate risk, and enhance their customers’ digital experiences. Built to unleash productivity and efficiency, the 3.x series offers the first multi-cloud, self-service platform that removes the friction between DevOps, NetOps, SecOps, and app developers.

F5 Friday: Integrating BIG-IP with NSX-T

As organizations march steadily on their journey through digital transformation, the issue of integration becomes critical. In addition to the obvious integration challenges arising from the heterogenous app portfolio of most firms, there are similar challenges arising from the heterogenous app services portfolio organizations also maintain. Lori MacVittie points to this F5/VMware integration to highlight how customers can ensure the security, scale, and performance of applications.

Lost and Found: Are Your Apps Cost Effective?

With applications residing on-premises, you may have an understanding of where they all are or at least how to find them if asked. But with a move to cloud-native apps and migration to cloud deployments, do you know where all your apps are across multi-cloud environments? Jonathan George explores these topics in the context of F5 Beacon, the company's app visibility and analytics SaaS solution.

F5 Networks Announces First Quarter Fiscal Year 2020 Results

F5 announced financial results for its fiscal first quarter ended December 31, 2019. Revenue of $569.3 million for the first quarter of fiscal year 2020 reflects 5% growth from $543.8 million in the first quarter of fiscal year 2019, driven by software solutions revenue growth of 50%.

Dirty Data is a Business Risk

The inability to verify the integrity or correctness of data should be of significant concern to those organizations pursuing digital transformation efforts (which rely heavily on data). That data will be used not only to conduct business but it also forms the basis for pattern and behavior recognition. Accordingly, it will power advanced analytics that automatically make operational and business decisions without human intervention.

Secure Cloud Architecture: Planning for Business Outcomes

F5’s Tim Wagner draws parallels between Secure Cloud Architecture and urban planning in his latest blog, pointing out key considerations, items to account for, and—crucially—questions to ask at the outset that can help bring about desired results.

Accelerating Application Delivery from Code to Customer with NGINX

François Locoh-Donou, CEO of F5: The new NGINX Controller 3.0 brings enhanced enterprise features that go beyond what both traditional and cloud-native solutions can offer. By giving customers (that span DevOps to NetOps) the ability to automate functions across deployment models and locations, we are opening up a new set of self-service capabilities that will increase agility, mitigate risk and enhance the experiences organizations are able to deliver to their customers.

Introducing NGINX Controller 3.0: Accelerate Time-to-Market with App-Centric Delivery

Gus Robertson, SVP and GM of NGINX at F5: An app-centric approach empowers developers through self-service, but from a centralized solution that maintains control and compliance for operations teams. The key to balancing AppDev productivity with Ops compliance is shifting the center of gravity from the instance of infrastructure supporting the app to the application itself. With Controller, teams spanning DevOps, NetOps, SecOps, and AppDev can work across the application lifecycle, managing the tasks relevant to their role.

F5 Completes Acquisition of Shape Security

Together, F5 and Shape represent an end-to-end application security solution, reducing infrastructure complexity while protecting every aspect of the ‘code to customer’ journey against losses from online fraud, reputational damage, and disruptions to critical online services.

Shape Officially Joins F5 to Defend Every App from Fraud and Abuse

Shape co-founder Derek Smith shares his thoughts on a combined company in this new blog.

Tackling the Next Generation of Threats with Shape and F5

What sets Shape and F5 apart is F5’s ability to capture high fidelity data from our position in front of millions of mission-critical customer applications combined with the sophisticated AI-assisted analytics platform from Shape. By integrating Shape and F5, we are executing on our vision to create an advanced set of security capabilities that can handle today’s most sophisticated attacks.

In the Future, the A in API will Stand for Automation

API stands for Application Programming Interface. Over the years, it has evolved from a tightly coupled imperative specification to a loosely coupled declarative model. Regardless of implementation and the mode of invocation, APIs tend to be associated with app development. But another API economy has been steadily expanding. It lies within operations. And in that domain, the "A" in API stands for automation.

DevOps Life Skills: Understanding and Managing the Procurement Process

It’s not unusual for DevOps engineers to use cloud-native tools, open source solutions, or other inexpensive (or free) resources that don’t require significant investment or interaction with the procurement team. But what if you need to advocate for a richer IT investment to drive needed efficiencies as well as to ensure better app security and performance?

Lost and Found: A Simple Solution to a Difficult Problem

Pause for a minute and ask yourself the following questions: Do you know how many apps you have? Do you know how those apps are performing? Do you know what those apps are doing? These questions may seem very basic, but many enterprises are struggling to find answers to them. F5’s Adil Laari explores app visibility in the context of the company’s new SaaS offering, F5 Beacon.

F5 Essential App Protect Service Now in Preview

Agility is the way of IT these days. We all strive for developers and operations to go faster, to unleash creativity, unhindered by the burdens of provisioning app infrastructure and resources. The trick is balancing our need for app delivery speed with the need to stay secure and compliant (while also incorporating microservices, distributed API-driven architectures, containers, and multi-cloud deployments).

OK 2020 Rat, Now What?

According to the Chinese zodiac cycle, the year of the (Metal) Rat is upon us. As the first animal in the zodiac, the strong, prosperous Rat brings a year of new beginnings and opportunities. Peter Silva gives his thoughts on the months to come and what they might hold for the industry.

Lost and Found: App Proliferation Leads to Lack of Insight

Today, there are many enterprise applications that organizations use to conduct business where IT has no visibility. While this type of proliferation invites risk, it is often seen as relatively harmless. That may be because executives and stakeholders aren't aware of real impacts from an inability to steward a growing portfolio of "lost and found" applications.

Inserting App Services into Shifting App Architectures

Application architectures have evolved several times since the early days of computing, and it is no longer optimal to rely solely on a single, known data path to insert application services. Furthermore, because many of the emerging data paths are not as suitable for a proxy-based platform, we must look to the other potential points of insertion possible to scale and secure modern applications.

Now That You Understand How Important API Security Is…

The use of APIs have the potential to be transformative by enabling new business models and revenue streams. Implemented without adequate guardrails, however, APIs also have the potential to disrupt and put businesses at risk. Concluding his two-part blog series, Mark Campbell outlines steps that organizations can take to help address the industry’s present API security gaps.

F5 to Acquire Shape Security, Transforming Application Security

Shape, a leader in fraud and abuse prevention, adds protection from automated attacks, botnets, and targeted fraud to F5’s world-class portfolio of application services, protecting customers’ digital experiences. The strategic acquisition accelerates F5’s growth momentum and more than doubles F5’s addressable market in security.

A Letter to F5 Employees from CEO François Locoh-Donou Announcing Shape Security Acquisition

François Locoh-Donou shares a copy of the email sent to global staff announcing F5’s agreement to acquire Shape Security. 

How Cybersecurity is Becoming (Even) More Relevant

Digital transformation has significantly increased the footprint of applications. Modern app architectures are diverse in nature and extend across hybrid and multi-cloud environments, with each app service carrying a potential for compromise and increased exposure. The need to protect each app service has only become more relevant since app layer threats remain the #1 type of attack.

API Gateways are the New Strategic Control Points (But Still Lack Security)

The transformation from monolithic applications to ecosystems of microservices has made APIs a strategic and critical element of business success. APIs are typically designed to be externally exposed and accessed by business partners, customers, and microservices. Just like web applications, though, APIs can be a doorway for unauthorized access to sensitive data. And as with many technology advances, security considerations often trail behind.

Survey Says: Container Security (Still) Cause for Concern

Consider this: 54% of containers live fewer than five minutes. Predictably, this leads to security topics. If you’re trying to secure access (and you should be) and trying to protect the app or API running in that container, you've got to make sure your security services are constantly adjusting policies to match the current state of the cluster. That's a lot of change going on, which means a lot of operational overhead.

DevOps Life Skills: Working with the Infrastructure Team

For app developers, working alongside a large infrastructure-platform team can be a blessing or a curse. When that team provides infrastructure, networking, and security services in a managed, self-service model—thereby relieving developers of the toil of managing infrastructure—it's truly a blessing. But if the infrastructure team’s primary delivery is a week(s)-long backlog with a revolving door of handoffs, developers can feel cursed.

The Top 10, Top 10 Predictions for 2020

F5's Peter Silva: As each year comes to a close, tech pundits blow the dust off their crystal balls and share their predictions for the coming year. As someone who has (let's generously say) repurposed others' since 2012 rather than thinking up my own, here's what some of the smart folks I read expect to happen...including some light commentary, perspective, observations, and advice along the way.

Why Application Delivery Should Look More Like a Factory (and Less Like an Artisan’s Shop)

A good way to think about how digital transformation and DevOps practices are influencing app deployment is to picture an application factory. Instead of handcrafted policies and manual review processes, network and security experts need to define reusable policies for developers to deploy with their applications as part of an automated deployment pipeline.

Digital Transformation: 2020 and Beyond

Digital transformation is about moving technology from business interactions to processes to new models. At first, it's about apps. But as app portfolios expand, it turns to focus on automation and orchestration. With the increase in data generation, transformation becomes the pivot point for new business opportunities.

Addressing the Peter Parker Principle in TLS Inspection

“With great power comes great responsibility.” Acknowledging Voltaire and Churchill, the quote is best known from the Spider-Man comics, attributed to Uncle Ben. Of course, part of the line’s cultural prevalence is that it can be applied to any number of situations and topics, including TLS inspection.

People of DevOps: If you know one thing about F5, let it be this

For many enterprises, new working patterns need to coexist alongside applications, teams, and technologies that have taken root over time and are now firmly embedded into the fabric of IT delivery. Zach Westall takes a closer look at how F5 and BIG-IP help DevOps teams (and the groups they work with) deploy services throughout the application delivery stack in support of CI/CD practices.

The Proxy is a Key Component to the Future of Security

The future of security rests on telemetry that is more than technical data points picked out of packets. It requires a holistic view of interactions from client to application to behavior. Machine learning requires enormous amounts of data to establish and recognize patterns. This is why programmable proxies are such a critical part of an advanced security approach.

F5 Beacon Brings Insights through Visibility into Multi-Cloud App Portfolios

F5 Beacon was expressly designed with the purpose of providing visibility into every app, anywhere. Atop that foundational principle, we’ve built a robust open API, intuitive UI, and enabled analytics that provide answers to some of the most common questions asked by IT and business leaders everywhere.

Secure Cloud Architecture: Avoiding Technical Debt

Principal Cloud Evangelist Tim Wagner describes a typical progression of cloud migration efforts (referencing holiday shopping and the AWS re:Invent conference along the way), as well as some of the all too common pitfalls that can trip up even the most well-meaning of IT and development teams.

Customer Experience Depends on Visibility

Visibility remains key for organizations to secure, scale, and speed up applications. And as apps are increasingly distributed—across containers, clouds, etc.—the more widely we need to distribute the application services that provide heightened visibility to enhance performance.

Build, Migrate, and Secure your Apps – Join us at AWS re:Invent!

Tom Atkins emphasizes some of the benefits that F5 and AWS customers realize when building, migrating, and securing their applications. Drawing on multiple examples, this blog also underscores the value that F5/AWS partnership efforts have for organizations deploying all manners of cloud environments.

F5, NGINX, and our Commitment to the Kubernetes Community

Hitesh Patel & Owen Garrett publish a blog timed with this week's KubeCon, noting that: F5 believes there doesn’t need to be a conflict between community and commercial solutions. A balance can be achieved, but it requires a commitment to work together and constantly refine that balance as new challenges and innovations arrive.

How to Deploy NGINX Plus on the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform in 10 Minutes

One of the reasons you see NGINX and, by extension, NGINX Plus deployed so broadly is that it has many roles within modern and traditional architectures. In this blog, Lori MacVittie highlights the advantages of NGINX Plus in operating containerized workloads with the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform.

Top 3 Takeaways from the Site Reliability Engineering Panel with LinkedIn, Dell, and Gremlin at NGINX Conf 2019

Many organizations are still learning how to define the concept and role of Site Reliability Engineering, as well as incorporate elements of Chaos Engineering. F5’s Keiichiro Nozaki explores these topics in summarizing commentary from a recent panel discussion at NGINX Conf. 

Shifting Security in DevOps Means Shifting Mindsets

Robert Haynes highlights the "2019 State of DevOps Report" from Puppet, drawing on its contents and his professional experience to note: The advantages of shifting security left into the software lifecycle rely on shifting those DevOps behavior principles into the security teams as much as, if not more than, moving security tools into the pipelines.

When the Digital Mice Get Smarter So Must the Digital Mousetrap

F5's Office of the CTO's Renuka Nadkarni: Some attacks are merely a nuisance, degrading network performance or disrupting availability. Some others may be relatively rare but have far more serious impacts in the form of data breaches. Like the plagues spread by mice that wiped out cities in a bygone era, today’s attacks wipe out brand reputations and business value. 

The Future of Load Balancing Rests on Data

Admittedly, load balancing topics may not be at the top of your priority list today, but Lori MacVittie points to some interesting considerations on where the technology is going (and how it will further benefit customers) in this blog.

Delivering End-to-End Application Visibility

EVP Kara Sprague: The pressure to transform digitally has become universal. Whatever your strategy is, the trick is to deploy and manage applications in a consistent way across all your different infrastructure silos. The best way to do this—and to get visibility into your code-to-customer pathways for all your applications—is to leverage a consistent set of multi-cloud application services.

Edge Computing: A Game Changer for Service Providers?

With its distributed nature, edge computing empowers service providers to offer new solutions and services that simultaneously increase revenue streams and reduce network transport costs. In other words, it’s a big deal, and it puts service providers in a unique position to shake up entire industries (including their own).

Protecting Business Means Protecting APIs

Modern application architectures like microservices increasingly rely on APIs, making them a particularly attractive target for attackers who understand the value of gaining control over these endpoints. Lori MacVittie breaks down some of the preliminary options in securing APIs.

The Three Phases of Digital Transformation

F5 CTO Geng Lin: Organizations are taking advantage of the proliferation of digital technologies to define new business models or to improve business productivity with existing models. While the pace of digital transformation varies based on the business and the sector it is in, overall, the journey of digital transformation has three stages.

F5 Partners with Rakuten Mobile to Support New Cloud-Native Mobile Network, 5G-Ready Service Rollout

[Press Release] F5 technologies support Rakuten’s October launch of the world’s first fully virtualized, cloud-native mobile network and its future deployment of 5G. The carrier will leverage F5’s network functions virtualization (NFV) capabilities to optimize its new mobile network and accelerate its path to 5G services in 2020.

Speeding Customer Innovation in the Cloud with F5 and AWS

Barry Russell, VP of F5’s Global Cloud Business, delivers a Q&A interview that adds color to the Oct. 23 announcement of a Strategic Collaboration Agreement between F5 and AWS, as well as what it means for customers.

DevOps Doesn't End with Delivery

It doesn’t matter how fast you can deliver if deployment delays release. While NetOps are warming up to automation and orchestration, there are significant challenges facing their efforts to speed up deployment. DevOps is in the best position to help them do that.

Azure Strategy Still Coming Together? Here’s Four Ways F5 Can Help

All cloud journeys are unique and can be complicated, with very different objectives, strategies, and hurdles. Some organizations are just getting their feet wet and others are charging full steam ahead—expanding into multi-cloud architectures and modernizing applications to embrace automation and native services.

F5 Networks Announces Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2019 Results; Delivers Second Consecutive Quarter of 91% Software Revenue Growth

The company announces its quarterly results, along with earnings for fiscal year 2019, with software revenue continuing to grow.

Phishing Season is Upon Us

Peter Silva: Phishing has become the number one attack vector for good reason. And what is the most active time of year for fraudulent online schemes like phishing and fraud? Essentially, right now through the holiday shopping season. (I thought it best to get your attention near the opening bell.)

F5 Announces Strategic Collaboration Agreement with Amazon Web Services to Allow Customers to Innovate Faster in the Cloud

[Press Release] F5 and AWS move ahead with a multi-year global Strategic Collaboration Agreement (SCA) to better allow customers to use F5 for new cloud-native application workloads and extend their existing F5 investments on AWS.

You Can't Protect What You Can't Find

Visibility is an often-cited challenge typically referring to the ability to inspect traffic, transactions, and errors that occur during an application's execution. But there's another, perhaps more critical, meaning to visibility at the business layer: a complete inventory of the corporate application portfolio.

Industry Trends with Forrester’s Channel Expert Jay McBain

[Blog and Video] F5’s Maggie Miller chats with an industry analyst on the trends driving optimism in the channel, how today’s buyers are different, and advice for F5 partners in this ever-changing market.

F5 Silverline Managed Services Opens First Regional Point of Presence in Sydney, Australia

F5 expands global footprint by deploying points of presence in additional geographic locations, making its Silverline offerings available to customers across Asia Pacific. This enhances customers' options to protect applications and web properties without upfront investments in IT infrastructure and support.

Kubernetes is Winning the Multi-Cloud War

When you ask customers why they're adopting a multi-cloud approach, one of the top answers is "avoid vendor lock-in." That's been a reason for multi-vendor everything in the enterprise for twenty and more years. It should surprise no one that holds true for public cloud, as well. After all, cloud is a product as surely as a network switch or data center server.

A Look Back at the 2019 F5 Girls Who Code Summer Immersion Program

For seven weeks in July and August, F5 partnered with Girls Who Code to host 20 high school junior and senior girls in our new downtown Seattle headquarters with two goals: teach them coding skills and prepare them for a potential career in technology. In saluting their accomplishments on the International Day of the Girl, Kara Sprague provides a retrospective blog detailing this effort tied to F5's Global Good Program.

F5 and Intel: Accelerating Applications Anywhere

We tend to hear 'ecosystem' and think of applications, not those that focus on the transformation of the network. Integration into both these ecosystems is important because application services continue to provide critical functions like acceleration, security, and scale. Underscoring this approach, Intel has named F5 as a 2019 Leaders Board partner in the Intel Network Builders program.

Machine Identity Protection Is a Critical Part of Modern App Development

Today, "machine" also includes code running independently on devices, APIs, containers, serverless architectures, and of course VMs. Because they are software-defined, these machine types are easily created, changed, and destroyed throughout the day, every day, making software-defined machines an important part of the app development workflow. Frank Strobel explores these topics in the context of F5 and technology partner Venafi.

Knowing About Vulnerabilities is only Half the Battle

In the journey toward continuous IT, there's a lot of focus on security. And well there should be. Breaches abound. Vulnerabilities are discovered on a daily basis, and the patch gap doesn't seem to be getting any smaller. While one of the often-suggested solutions for more secure code is, predictably, that of scanning source code, scanning only gets you so far.

Welcome to National Cybersecurity Awareness Month

Peter Silva: While cybersecurity awareness should be a daily adventure, it is still nice to have a full month dedicated to raise awareness about the importance of cybersecurity and to ensure that all people have the information they need to be safer and more secure online.

Load Balancing On-Prem or SaaS?

F5 has a cloud-based solution called the F5 DNS Load Balancer Cloud Service that leverages the AWS SaaS Enablement Framework and is now available in AWS Marketplace. While load balancing has traditionally been handled on-prem quite successfully, Roger Barlow outlines the many advantages of a SaaS-based approach.

Microsoft and F5: A Single Identity and Security Strategy for All Apps

With thousands of apps in use daily, hosted in all or any combination of locations, how can organizations ensure secure, appropriate user access without requiring users to login in multiple times? Moreover, how can organizations terminate user access to each application without having to access each app individually? VP John Morgan digs into the details.

Choosing Ansible or Terraform for F5 Application Services

The open source movement has always focused on freedom. The freedom to choose the solution that works best for you given skills, budgets, architecture, and goals. That principle continues to be a significant factor today when it comes to building repeatable infrastructure for the deployment pipeline.

The 2020 State of Application Services Survey is Now Open

It's that time of year again when the scent of pumpkin spice is everywhere, and we reach out to solicit your input on the State of Application Services and the trends/technologies that shape them. So take a few minutes to share your perspectives, opinions, and plans—we appreciate it!

More Apps. More Accounts. More Risk.

Despite education and a constant litany of reminders that security is everyone's responsibility, not only is the corporate-consumer barrier being breached on a regular basis but the most basic of security practices is being completely ignored when it comes to apps and passwords, pointing toward the still-compelling benefits of multi-factor authentication (MFA) and password complexity requirements.

Zero Touch Application Delivery with F5, Terraform, and Consul

[Guest blog post] To promote app delivery automation, HashiCorp Terraform enables network operations teams to treat the F5 BIG-IP platform ‘as code,’ so the network infrastructure can be provisioned automatically when new services are deployed. Consul’s central service registry and service discovery capabilities track the real-time network location and health status of all backend services.

A Sociotechnical Metrics Framework for Network and Security Operations Centers

Researchers from the University of Kansas and the Stevens Institute of Technology are focused on developing a new metrics framework for security operation centers (SOCs) that measures and validates SOC performance against enterprise network security. Peter Silva provides more detail on this project and its connection to F5.

F5 Launches Unity+ Channel Partner Program

F5 announces Unity+, an innovative channel program designed to create long-term profitable partner growth. Unity+ enhances partner opportunities and incentives, captures new revenue streams, and drives tighter collaboration to help customers through technology transformations.

Unity+: Here’s what you need to know about F5’s innovative channel program

Through Unity+, F5 is collaborating with our partners to better meet their business needs and serve our mutual customers with flexible licensing models, greater deal registration differentiation, and easy-to-consume sales and pre-sales technical learning paths. VP Colleen McMillan provides additional details in this blog.

Open Source is for Operations, Too

Open source isn't just about code. Operations are—and should be—embracing open source solutions. To fully realize the benefits, however, operations should also actively participate in and contribute to the communities creating the configurations, templates, and best practices around its implementation.

F5 Labs Launches Application Protection Research Series, Adds Education Content

Following the popular 2018 Application Protection Report, F5 Labs (the company's security threat intelligence research team) is introducing a portal for its Application Protection Research Series to cover longer timeframes and the big-picture threat landscape. The team is also rolling out an Education series centered on foundational concepts in information security, designed for people new to the industry or interested in exploring a particular niche.

NGINX Conf 2019, Day 1: Bringing Your Apps to Life, from Code to Customer

Gus Robertson summarizes Day 1 of NGINX Conf 2019 with his top three takeaways, explaining how F5 and NGINX together are supporting the move to a world of living apps, helping entrerprises increase the velocity from code to customer, and buidling new capabilities across the entire ecosystem.

NGINX Conf 2019 Day 2: Empowering the Full Range of Today’s Architectures

This blog summarizes Day 2 of NGINX Conf 2019 with three top takeaways: F5's commitment to the NGINX open source community, a year's worth of NGINX updates and a preview of what's to come, and customer stories about their successes with NGINX.

Service Mesh Mania: Choosing Aspen Mesh or NGINX

The combined F5 and NGINX portfolio now has two service mesh offerings to scale, secure, and provide visibility into container environments. Both enable management and visualization of Kubernetes clusters. Both offer their solution as an on-premises option, and both provide tracing and metrics that are critical to addressing the issue of visibility. So which one is right for you?

F5 Debuts Solutions at its NGINX Conf to Reduce Sprawl and Complexity of Modern Application Delivery

At NGINX Conf, F5 Networks (NASDAQ: FFIV) announced several new solutions designed to help DevOps, NetOps, and SecOps teams better collaborate in delivering today's applications. Accelerated NGINX development and new solutions level up customers’ app and API infrastructures.

Bridging the Divide with F5 and NGINX

Kara Sprague: F5 and NGINX are not just integrating to go to market in the same old way together. The fundamental inspiration behind the acquisition was the fact that there’s a ton of value we can deliver together as a combined portfolio. Jointly, we deliver solutions that span the entire application lifecycle for monolithic, three-tier, and microservices-based apps alike.

Data Center Speaks Out: I'm Not Dead Yet!

Lori MacVittie takes a humorous look at how predictions or claims that the data center is dead (or at the very least, on its death bed) have persisted since the ascendancy of cloud to the majority industry mindshare. Further, they continue to be incorrect, with one of the reasons for these inaccurate predictions being the purposeful conflation of SaaS with IaaS.

Sensors for our Five Senses

Peter Silva notes a few of the modern ways that the capabilities of our five primary senses are being recreated using sensors. Today, gadgets (and IoT technologies) are being built that work in conjunction with, enhance, or in some cases replace the traditional functions of the eyes, ears, nose, tongue, and hands.

The Definition of Faster in the Age of App Capital

One of the impacts of digital transformation is the desire to move at speed. Organizations want to develop and deliver apps faster. They want to adapt to unpredictable changes in business conditions faster. They want to respond to attacks faster. So, how are they going to get there?

Where does a WAF fit in the data path?

This summer, the F5 Newsroom revisits some of our most popular Web Application Firewall content | Proxy-based WAFs are integral to application protection. They’re also a go-to solution for addressing zero-day vulnerabilities through signature updates or the use of programmatic functions to virtually patch applications. But there’s still the question of location.

Polling VMworld Attendees’ Biggest Challenges

At VMworld 2019 in San Francisco, F5 polled attendees at its booth to find out what their most formidable challenges were in their jobs. Focused around the functions of NetOps, DevOps, SecOps, and AppDev, this in-the-moment research reveals how various IT teams are thinking about automation, security, digital transformation, and collaboration between the separate groups.

Cloud-Native Apps Don’t Require a Cloud

Cloud computing has changed the way in which we go about developing, building, and deploying applications. Apps that were born in the public cloud naturally assumed many of the same dependencies and characteristics. Thus, the term “cloud-native” accurately represents the etymology of the architectural style as opposed to a specific cloud requirement.

Bolster your API security on AWS with Managed Rules for AWS WAF

This summer, the F5 Newsroom revisits some of our most popular Web Application Firewall content | Building on the previously delivered trio of managed rules for AWS’ native WAF, this ruleset focuses solely on protecting your APIs against existing and emerging threats, including XML external entity attacks and server-side request forgery.

Automate DevOps/SecOps with CI/CD using F5 BIG-IP, SovLabs, and VMware vRA

Deploying applications at the speed of users can paradoxically be something of a slog. IT, DevOps, and SecOps organizations may spend hours/days/months trying to figure out ways to simplify the delivery of applications while providing the safety and security required by today's users. This blog gets into one way that F5 and technology partners are addressing the associated challenges.

5 Reasons You Should Join Me at NGINX Conf

As Lori MacVittie puts it, the term community is tossed about a lot these days, but NGINX Conf really is about bringing together two different communities—open source and enterprise users of NGINX. Taking place this September in Seattle, Conf is a great opportunity to share ideas and collaborate on the technical, architectural, and operational approaches customers and the surrounding industry are taking toward application delivery.

How Does a WAF Mitigate Vulnerabilities?

This summer, the F5 Newsroom revisits some of our most popular Web Application Firewall content | Apps today are the gateway to customer and corporate data, and traditional methods of controlling access at the network layer aren’t enough—with bad actors increasingly targeting identities and applications. So how, exactly, does a WAF mitigate all those vulnerabilities that keep cropping up like weeds in the garden?

Securing Apps starts with Securing the Software Development Lifecycle Pipeline

Sensitive data should include code, and it should be protected. Code is the heart of a digital business and the delivery pipeline is increasingly considered an attack vector. By putting into place a privileged user access model, you can be more confident that both the credentials—and the user behind them—are legitimate.

Announcing BIG-IQ 7.0: A Big Step Forward for Management and Visibility of Your Most Valuable Asset

With many organizations deploying dozens to hundreds of applications, their value is constantly growing, but visibility and manageability of all of these apps is no small feat. The latest release of BIG-IQ is a significant leap forward that can help NetOps, SecOps, DevOps, and application owners build, deploy, and manage apps, devices, and services more intelligently.

Intentionally Insecure: Poor Security Practices in the Cloud

This summer, we revisit some of F5’s most popular WAF-related content | Moving to the cloud enables developers to circumvent traditional enterprise IT roles that are obviously needed, considering the growing number of cloud breaches. It can also enable companies to deploy systems with poorly-configured security features, not because they want to, but because individuals might not understand the consequences (or might assume a breach is unlikely).

What Your Pipelines Say about Your Organizational Structure

When a pipeline (system) is designed by a team, they are able to take into consideration the pipeline as a whole rather than as its composite pieces. That is, the individual communication channels between IT domains point toward a peer process that better facilitates the design of a system that spans multiple concerns.

Customer Story and Video: Talentsoft Simplifies and Optimizes Operations in the Cloud with F5

Europe’s leading cloud-based talent management and learning software provider needed to scale its IT operations to meet ambitious global expansion goals. With an F5 solution implemented across private cloud, data center, and Microsoft Azure environments, it was able to provide 9 million users across 130 countries software access on any device, from any location.

Balancing Security and Performance with Web Application Firewalls

This summer, the F5 Newsroom revisits some of our most popular WAF content – In this blog, Lori MacVittie navigates the give-and-take between security and performance, the pitfalls of giving up one for the other, and how WAFs can help organizations deploy security strategically to prevent exploitation, detect breaches, and safeguard applications.

Container Security Basics: Conclusion

F5’s blog series wraps up with a quick summary of covered topics, key lessons, and overarching themes, noting the relevance of techniques you've likely used elsewhere to secure traditional apps and infrastructure. The series closes with a salient parting reminder: Customers expect security. Don’t disappoint them.

Customer Story: Shinsegae Internet Duty Free Protects its Online Store from Bot Attacks with F5

With F5, Shinsegae Internet Duty Free enhanced its online retail experience, application performance, and customer data security. Advanced WAF helped shift the focus toward automated threat protection and more proactive security measures, realizing significant benefits over traditional WAF approaches.

[DevCentral Lightboard Lesson] The Need For Secure Coding: Tcl Double Substitution

The F5 BIG-IP system has a powerful programmability feature called iRules, based on an extended and customized Tool Command Language (Tcl). As is the case with any programming language, developers need to understand the commands and functionality of the language in order to avoid possible vulnerabilities and other problems. This video highlights one such command and discusses the need for secure coding practices.

Securing Single Page Applications (SPAs) is a Team Sport

It's important that security teams get outside the boxes on typical architectural diagrams to really understand applications. A significant percentage of (successful) attacks are executed at the application layer. The longer we fail to recognize the unique characteristics of various types of applications, the longer those applications remain vulnerable.

The Three AWS Web Application Firewall Managed Rules You Need to Deploy Now

This summer, the F5 Newsroom revisits some of our most popular WAF content – In this blog, Lori MacVittie calls out three web app security rules that extend AWS WAF functionality to provide protection for any app. They’re managed, which means security experts are maintaining and updating them so you can have confidence that they’re always up to date and defending against the latest threats.

Three Scenarios where Policy Consistency is Beneficial

The key to simplifying multi-cloud architectures is to standardize elements wherever possible. By employing tools that can be used across environments, much of this complexity is abstracted away as you move from a cloud-specific to a cloud-agnostic service portfolio.

Interview: Forbes Leadership Talk with F5's Chief Marketing and Customer Experience Officer Mika Yamamoto

"Link arms with your functional counterparts and strive to achieve a common set of goals. That's when you elevate the standing of marketing, the customer experience, and the company's results—which is really what it’s about."

What Makes a WAF Advanced?

This summer, the F5 Newsroom revisits some of our most popular Web Application Firewall content – In this blog, Brian McHenry covers how modern attacks can bypass virtually all traditional WAF detection mechanisms and explores the capabilities necessary to combat the evolving threats seen in the application security landscape.

The Commodification of Operations

We're moving from an expert operations economy to a commodified operations economy. Today, the operational aspects of deploying network and application service infrastructure are expected to be accessible to a broader set of roles within the organization. To get there, simplification is necessary.

Container Security Basics: Workload

Part four of F5’s blog series explains that while ‘workload’ is a fairly recent term that’s often used to describe applications, it can also refer to infrastructure services. That’s important, because there can be a variety of ‘workloads’ running in your container clusters that aren’t necessarily coming from your developers.

Container Security Basics: Orchestration

The third entry in F5’s container security basics blog series digs into how the orchestration layer of container security focuses on the environment responsible for the day to day operation of containers. (And by the data available today, if you’re using containers, you’re almost certainly taking advantage of Kubernetes as the orchestrator.)

F5 Networks Announces Third Quarter Fiscal Year 2019 Results

Revenue of $563.4 million for the third quarter of fiscal year 2019 reflects 4% growth from $542.2 million in the third quarter of FY 2018, driven by total software solutions revenue growth of 91%, including a partial quarter contribution from NGINX.

It’s 10 p.m.: Do you know where your applications are?

F5 EVP Kara Sprague: If we’re going to gain a toehold toward minimizing threats so we can maximize the value of the application ecosystem, organizations need to start investing the same energy and resources into their application capital as they do with physical assets and talent.

Infrastructure Architecture: Containers Creating Fourth Plane

Traditionally, there are three architectural planes associated with network infrastructure: data, control, and management. But a fourth layer—the orchestration layer—integrates with container environments and makes use of related capabilities to automate the discovery of services and instances.

Container Security Basics: Pipeline Security

F5’s blog series on container security basics continues. The CI/CD pipeline is a critical component upon which rests the speed and security of the applications it builds and delivers. Accordingly, there are two main elements of pipeline security: first, security of the pipeline itself. Second, security in the pipeline.

Announcing New F5 ELA Enhancements

F5 is expanding its existing Enterprise Licensing Agreements (ELA) program to increase the value of customers’ physical and virtual infrastructures. Specifically, we’re adding ELA support for both NGINX software—building on the recent acquisition—and BIG-IP software running on F5 appliances.

Three Attacks You Can’t Stop with Secure Coding

When it comes to breaches involving apps and data exposure, fingers are almost always pointed at developers. But Lori MacVittie discusses why we can't blame all breachers on developers.

Is 2019 Half Empty or Half Full?

With 2019 crossing the halfway point, Peter Silva looks at some of the year’s notable technology trends for optimists and pessimists alike, particularly where security is concerned.

Container Security Basics: Introduction

Container adoption continues to accelerate across (almost) all areas of IT. But what does container security really mean? F5's Jordan Zebor and Lori MacVittie offer their take in the first of a blog series focused on the topic.

The Divide between Configurability and Operability

Lori MacVittie continues our blog series surrounding F5’s acquisition of NGINX, discussing the concept of operational simplicity.

The Magecart Mess

What is Magecart? Magecart is really a term given to a group of cybercrime units. At least a dozen groups are responsible, and each have their own specialty. F5’s Peter Silva examines how it was also last year’s #1 root cause of retail, tech, and manufacturing breaches.

No Room for Silos when it Comes to Security

The focus of IT as its moving through its digital transformation should be to modernize ops - from the technology to the teams that use it to innovate and deliver value to the business. Lori MacVittie's blog touches on how silos within an organization can impede successful transformations.

Multi-Cloud Consistency is Multi-Layered

When it comes to multi-cloud consistency, Lori MacVittie discusses why a failure to recognize the two different types of consistency - functional and operational - and their importance is at the root of the problem with implementation.

Improving Time to Value: Process and Parallelization

What's this got to time to value and applications? Everything. Because as it turns out, traditional IT is really driving to production in a serial circuit, while modern app developments is burning at all hours on a parallel one. 

Peering Into and Protecting Against What You Can't See

It seems like the whole world is encrypted. That can be a very good thing, as encryption keeps our personal info safe. But, encryption also creates security challenges, such as blind spots where hidden threats like malware and malicious payloads can lurk. Fortunately, F5 and Cisco have a solution.

F5 DNS Load Balancer Cloud Service Now in Preview

Now in preview, the F5 DNS Load Balancer Cloud Service features DNS-targeted DDoS protection and highly available and responsive global server load balancing (GSLB).

Improving Operational Security in the Cloud

If you want to keep the costs of operating in the cloud down, take a look at your security practices on the management side of operations.

Sicherheit lässt keinen Raum für Silos

Im Zuge der digitalen Transformation sollte die IT den Schwerpunkt auf die Modernisierung von Abläufen legen, angefangen bei der Technologie bis hin zu den Teams, die diese Technologien einsetzen, um Innovationen herbeizuführen und dem Unternehmen zu einem Mehrwert zu verhelfen. Der Blog von Lori MacVittie zeigt auf, wie Silos innerhalb einer Organisation einer erfolgreichen Transformation im Wege stehen können.

Multi-Cloud-Konsistenz ist vielschichtig

Zum Thema Multi-Cloud-Konsistenz erläutert Lori MacVittie, warum ein Unvermögen, die beiden Arten von Konsistenz – die funktionale und die operative – und deren Bedeutsamkeit anzuerkennen, die Grundursache für Implementierungsprobleme ist.

Beschleunigte Wertschöpfung: Prozess und Parallelisierung

Was beide mit Wertschöpfung und Anwendungen zu tun haben? Alles. Wie sich herausstellt, nähert die traditionelle IT sich der Produktion in einer Reihenschaltung an, während moderne Anwendungsentwicklungen rund um die Uhr auf einer Parallelschaltung stattfindet.

Schutz gegen das Unsichtbare

Die gesamte Welt scheint verschlüsselt. Das kann etwas Positives sein, da die Verschlüsselung die Sicherheit unserer persönlichen Daten wahrt. Jedoch bringt die Verschlüsselung auch verschiedene sicherheitsbezogene Herausforderungen mit sich, beispielsweise tote Winkel, in denen sich unsichtbare Bedrohungen wie Malware und bösartige Nutzdaten verbergen können. Glücklicherweise haben F5 und Cisco eine Lösung in der Hinterhand.

F5 DNS Load Balancer Cloud Service jetzt in der Vorschau verfügbar

Der nun in der Vorschau befindliche F5 DNS Load Balancer Cloud Service bietet eine gezielte DDoS-Abwehr für DNS sowie einen höchst verfügbaren und ansprechbaren globalen Serverlastenausgleich (GSLB).

Verbesserung der operativen Sicherheit in der Cloud

Wenn Sie die Kosten für den Betrieb in der Cloud niedrig halten möchten, sollten Sie zunächst Ihre Sicherheitsverfahren auf Verwaltungsseite des Betriebs unter die Lupe nehmen.

ACI-Anwendung von F5 stützt gemeinsame Cisco-Bereitstellungen mit optimalen Anwendungsdiensten

Mit der Kombilösung werden die branchenführenden Verfügbarkeits- und Sicherheitsdienste von F5 auf der SDN-Plattform von Cisco bereitgestellt, um auf diese Weise eine überlegene Leistung auf Schicht 2 bis 7 zu erzielen.

Annäherung zwischen ACI und BIG-IP – ein Schritt nach dem anderen

Calvin Rowland, leitender Vizepräsident von F5, erläutert, wie F5 und Cisco ACI und BIG-IP näher zusammenbringen.

Monolithen versetzen mit Mikrodiensten

Machen wir uns nichts vor: Solange Sie kein wahres Greenfield-Start-up sind, betreiben Sie genau in diesem Moment sowohl traditionelle als auch moderne Anwendungen. Das bedeutet wiederum, dass Sie gleichzeitig sowohl ältere als auch moderne Architekturen unterstützen müssen. Wir erklären, wie Ihnen dies mithilfe von Containern gelingt.

Umstellung auf TLS 1.3 im Unternehmen

Peter Silva fasst einen aktuellen Bericht darüber zusammen, wie Unternehmen schnell auf den neuen Protokollstandard Transport Layer Security (TLS) 1.3 umstellen und zeitgleich die mit der Umstellung verbundenen operativen und sicherheitsbezogenen Bedenken ausräumen.

Sichere Containerisierung betreiben

In den vergangenen 12 Monaten meldeten unglaubliche 60 % aller Nutzer einen Vorfall in Bezug auf die Containersicherheit. Sollten Sie noch keine sichere Containerisierung betreiben, so legt Lori MacVittie Ihnen fünf Schritte ans Herz, deren Umsetzung Sie ernsthaft in Erwägung ziehen sollten.

Das IoT wirkt sich immens auf Unternehmen aus – und das ist nur die Spitze des Eisbergs

Frank Strobel erläutert, wie neue Technologien und Lösungen sich seiner Ansicht nach auf die reale Welt auswirken, nachdem er der Bosch ConnectedWorld 2019 – der führenden Konferenz zum Thema IoT und digitale Transformation – in Berlin, Deutschland, beigewohnt hat.

F5 baut seine Präsenz in Indien mit einem neuen Kompetenzzentrum aus

Das neue Kompetenzzentrum in Hyderabad zielt darauf ab, das Software- und Cloud-Portfolio von F5 zu erweitern und zu skalieren, um auf diese Weise den Anforderungen von Kunden auf der ganzen Welt zu entsprechen. Erfahren Sie mehr darüber, wie mit dieser neuen Niederlassung künftig mehr Zeitzonen abgedeckt werden können, und erhalten Sie Einblicke in die Kapazitäten von Kundendienst und Notfallwiederherstellung zur Unterstützung des globalen Wirkens von F5.

Lagebericht zu Anwendungsdiensten: Etwas mehr von allem

Seit dem ersten Quartal von 2019 beobachten wir die Entwicklungen und Veränderungen bezüglich der Nutzung von Anwendungsdiensten – ob für Sicherheit, Leistung oder Identität/Zugriff.

F5 wird mit dem Red Hat Community Partner Award ausgezeichnet

Calvin Rowland, leitender Vizepräsident von F5, fasst kurz den Red Hat Summit zusammen, der vergangene Woche in Boston abgehalten wurde, und unterstreicht die fortgesetzte Partnerschaft zwischen den beiden Unternehmen, die dazu führte, dass F5 von Red Hat mit einem Partner Technology Innovation Award ausgezeichnet wurde.

Die andere Seite der DX-Gleichung optimieren

Die Mehrheit der Unternehmen weltweit und in jeder Branche durchläuft derzeit den Prozess der digitalen Transformation. Lori MacVittie betrachtet die neuesten Entwicklungen rund um die digitale Wirtschaft und Lieferkette, um besser nachvollziehen zu können, inwiefern Unternehmen Änderungen herbeiführen, die sich darauf beziehen, wie sie Anwendungen entwickeln, wann sie Anwendungen bereitstellen und mit welchen Architekturen gearbeitet wird.

NGINX ist jetzt offiziell Teil von F5

Führen Sie sich den Blog von Gus Robertson zu Gemüte, in dem er – nun, da die Übernahme von NGINX eine sichere Sache ist – die gemeinsame Vision für Kultur, Technologie und Zukunft beschreibt.

F5 schließt Übernahme von NGINX ab

F5 hat die Übernahme von NGINX, einem Open-Source-Marktführer auf dem Gebiet der Anwendungsbereitstellung, erfolgreich abgeschlossen. Weitere Hintergrundinformationen entnehmen Sie bitte der Pressemitteilung und zusätzlichen Ansichten seitens Führungsriege von F5 und NGINX.

Sind die Menschen das Problem der Informationssicherheit?

Bei Mitarbeitern macht sich häufig Frustration bezüglich der Sicherheitsrichtlinien des Unternehmens breit. In der Regel haben die Hauptaufgabenbereiche der meisten Personen nicht einmal etwas mit Sicherheit zu tun. Peter Silva, leitender Manager für die Vermarktung von Sicherheitslösungen bei F5, erläutert, warum es so wichtig ist, Sicherheitsrichtlinien zu entwickeln, die für und nicht gegen die Mitarbeiter arbeiten.

F5 heißt neue Marketing- und Technologievorstände willkommen

Mika Yamamoto tritt dem Unternehmen in der neuen Position des Marketingvorstands und Vorstands für Kundenzufriedenheit bei und Geng Lin wird die Rolle des Technologievorstands übernehmen.

Repositories und Standardisierung helfen, Herausforderungen bei der Integration von Netzwerkautomatisierung zu meistern

Abläufe müssen integriert werden. Ohne eine Integration können Prozesse nicht automatisiert werden (und hierbei geht es bei der Orchestrierung), da Prozesse notwendigerweise mehrere Systeme, Dienste und Geräte überspannen – wovon wiederum jedes oder jeder über seine ganz eigene operative Domäne und ein eigenes Toolset verfügt.

Die Kluft überwinden: Flexibilität und Sicherheit

Unsere Reihe zum Thema „Die Kluft überwinden“ setzt sich mit Robert Haynes fort, der sich mit dem langjährigen Mythos auseinandersetzt, der innerhalb der Netzwerk- und Sicherheitscommunitys kursiert: Dass sichere Softwarearchitekturen starr seien und dass eine agil bereitgestellte Software weniger sicher sei.

Schluss mit der Nabelschau bei Verschlüsselung

Heutzutage stehen wir Datendiebstählen fast emotionslos gegenüber, da sie mit solch einer alarmierenden Häufigkeit geschehen. Gleichzeitig sind wir jedoch so immens von unserer eigenen Genialität im Bereich der Kryptografie betört, dass wir völlig vergessen, dass die meisten ruhenden Daten, versteckt in irgendwelchen Datenbanken, unverschlüsselt sind.

Die Kluft überwinden: Skalierung und Zuverlässigkeit

Als Team wird es uns von F5 und NGINX gelingen, den Anforderungen an „Zuverlässigkeit“ ungeachtet der Definition zu entsprechen. Ganz gleich, ob es sich um die Zuverlässigkeit von kleinen entwicklergesteuerten Bereitstellungen zur Skalierung moderner Anwendungen oder um die Zuverlässigkeit großer Bereitstellungen zur Skalierung von Anwendungsdiensten und traditionellen Anwendungen handelt – mit einem kombinierten Portfolio wird es Kunden möglich, das richtige Tool für die richtige Anwendung zu nutzen.

F5 Networks gibt die Ergebnisse für das zweite Quartal des Geschäftsjahres 2019 bekannt

Der Umsatz in Höhe von 544,9 Mio. USD im zweiten Quartal des Geschäftsjahres 2019 entspricht einem Wachstum von 2 % gegenüber dem Umsatz in Höhe von 533,3 Mio. USD im zweiten Quartal des Geschäftsjahres 2018, das auf ein Umsatzwachstum von 30 % im Bereich der Softwarelösungen zurückgeht. Das Zusammenspiel aus starker Nachfrage nach Anwendungssicherheit und neuen Softwareverbrauchsmodellen von F5, einschließlich Enterprise-Lizenzvereinbarungen, trug in diesem Quartal zu einem Softwareumsatzwachstum in Höhe von 30 % bei.

Das Misserfolgsrezept: „Erst die API, dann die Sicherheit“-Strategien

Die Nachfrage nach APIs steigt. Angesichts ihrer facettenreichen Funktionen läuft man ihnen praktisch überall über den Weg, sei es zur Ankurbelung der digitalen Wirtschaft durch Freigabe mobiler Anwendungen oder zur internen Steigerung der Produktivität durch Automatisierungs- und Orchestrierungsinitiativen.

F5 Friday: Die Container Ingress Services werden K8s-nativ

Mit dem fortschreitenden Reifungsprozess der Containertechnologie macht auch die Integration der für ihre Unterstützung notwendigen Enterprise-Class-Technologien Fortschritte, wodurch traditionelle Angebote allmählich in Richtung von Umgebungen zur Container-Orchestrierung wie Kubernetes tendieren.

Die Kluft überwinden: Traditionelle und moderne Architekturen

Heutzutage sind sowohl traditionelle als auch moderne Architekturen vertretbar und notwendig, damit Unternehmen digitale Ressourcen schneller, häufiger und allem voran möglichst effizient bereitstellen können, um ihr wertvollstes Gut zu unterstützen – ein Mehrgenerationenportfolio von Anwendungen.

Digitale Transformation und die Explosion des Anwendungsportfolios

Ganz gleich, ob es sich um eine umfangreiche Bibliothek aus auf Knopfdruck abrufbaren Filmen und Fernsehserien oder um die Möglichkeit handelt, einen Fahrdienst zu rufen, einen Tisch zu reservieren oder die nächstgelegene Tankstelle zu finden – jede Art von Unternehmen steht unter dem Druck, die Bedürfnisse seiner Kunden zu erfüllen und einen digitalen Mehrwert zu schaffen.

Automatisierung mit F5 AS3 und Red Hat Ansible

Wenn Sie bereits mit der Automatisierung Ihrer Anwendungsdienste von F5 begonnen haben, sind Sie gewiss mit dem Gebrauch von Automatisierungstools wie Ansible vertraut. Um gleich mehrere Anwendungsfälle zu unterstützen und die Bereitstellung von Anwendungsdiensten noch einfacher zu machen, bringt F5 Application Services 3 (AS3) als Bestandteil von F5 Automation Toolchain heraus.

Das stärkste Glied: Die Verkettung von aufmerksamem Zuhören und Benutzerfreundlichkeit

Nicht jeder Kunde steht auf dem Weg zur Automatisierung auf derselben Stufe. Aus diesem Grund haben wir F5 Automation Toolchain entwickelt, ein Instrumentarium aus Komponenten, die einzeln aufgeschlüsselt und unabhängig voneinander genutzt werden können. Sobald die Zeit reif ist, werden sie schließlich wieder zu einer Einheit zusammengefügt.

Keine konsistente Sicherheit in der Cloud ohne Konsistenz

Es ist schon etwas ironisch, dass die Befragten des führenden Anwendungsdienstes angaben, eine Anwendung niemals ohne Sicherheit bereitzustellen, ein Blick in die Bereitstellungsinformationen jedoch einen anderen Schluss nahelegt. Zumindest in der Cloud scheint die Sicherheit häufiger unter den Teppich gekehrt zu werden, als sie sollte.

Alibaba Cloud Support – Ausbau des Multi-Cloud-Netzwerks von F5

Mithilfe von einheitlichen Diensten und Richtlinien in der Alibaba Cloud und in anderen unterstützten Cloudumgebungen wird es Betriebsteams möglich, jede einzelne Anwendung bequem zu sichern und zu optimieren, während Entwickler von der architektonischen Freiheit profitieren, die von ihnen gewünschte Cloud zu wählen.

Die Kluft zwischen DevOps und NetOps überwinden

Wir haben zu viele Artikel gesehen, in denen DevOps-Teams und NetOps-Teams zu Konkurrenten gemacht werden – fast schon auf persönlicher Ebene. Das ist natürlich alles andere als hilfreich. Dieser Artikel geht die Sache auf andere Weise an.

Es ist keine Veröffentlichung, es ist ein Lebenszyklus

Hitesh Patel von F5: In dieser Umgebung liegt die Messlatte für den Erfolg nicht mehr länger bei der Veröffentlichung eines neuen Produkts. Vielmehr geht es darum, sämtliche Produktkomponenten – Kunden, Partner, F5-Ingenieure, Kundendienstpersonal – in einem ständigen Zyklus aus Innovation und Optimierung zu verpflichten und auf ihre Bedürfnisse zu hören.

Anthos von Google Cloud nun mit Container Ingress Services von F5 verfügbar

Mit der allgemeinen Verfügbarkeit von GKE On-Prem (einer Kernkomponente von Anthos von Google Cloud) gibt F5 seine Integrationsfähigkeit mit dieser neuen Lösung bekannt, wodurch Nutzer der Schaffung einer wirklich hybriden Cloudarchitektur einen Schritt näher kommen.

Öl oder Daten – was ist wertvoller?

In den letzten Jahren wurde häufig darüber spekuliert, ob Daten Öl als die wertvollste Ressource der Welt ablösen werden. Wie Sie sich vielleicht vorstellen können, liegt ein eindeutiger Konsens zu diesem Thema noch in weiter Ferne.

Auswirkungen der Komponentisierung von Anwendungen auf Leistung und Sicherheit

Einst konnten Unternehmen sich zur Optimierung der Leistung ihrer Anwendungen noch auf den Einsatz strategisch bereitgestellter Proxys verlassen. Das ist damit zu erklären, dass traditionelle Anwendungen – Monolithen und Drei-Schicht-Architekturen – in der Regel lediglich einen einzelnen Datenpfad zwischen Client und Server nutzten.

Die Kluft überwinden mit Open Source

Aus Zukunftsperspektive können F5 und NGINX Unternehmen dazu befähigen, einem der dringendsten IT-Bedürfnisse nachzukommen – schnellen und häufigen Bereitstellungen in vielfältigen Anwendungsarchitekturen, die in Multi-Cloud-Umgebungen angesiedelt sind. Wir sind der Meinung, dass der Erfolg einer solchen Unternehmung davon abhängig ist, ob NGINX auch weiterhin Open Source bleibt und zu großen Teilen von der Community gefördert wird, die es aufgebaut hat.

F5 und NGINX: Die Kluft überwinden

François Locoh-Donou, Geschäftsführer von F5, startet eine neue Blog-Reihe, um die Kluft zu ergründen, die seit jeher zwischen modernen Open-Source-Anwendungen, die in der (und für die) Cloud entwickelt werden, und den traditionellen, geschäftskritischen Anwendungen besteht, die häufig als letzte das Rechenzentrum des Unternehmens verlassen.

DNS als Schlüssel zum vernetzten Kunden

DNS ist nach wie vor einer der am wenigsten geschätzten Anwendungsdienste. Dennoch spielt er eine derart wichtige Rolle, dass ein Ausfall als katastrophal gilt. Wenn jedes DNS-System damit aufhören würde, Anfragen zu beantworten, würde die digitale Wirtschaft binnen Minuten in die Knie gezwungen werden.

Cloud-Portfolio von F5 wächst mit Cloud-Diensten, die eine gesteigerte Anwendungsleistung und Sicherheit bieten

Neue über AWS bereitgestellte SaaS-Lösungen bieten optimierte und verbrauchsfreundliche Dienste für Anwendungsentwickler und DevOps-Teams.

SaaS-Lösungen von F5 Cloud Services nun bei AWS Marketplace verfügbar

Venu Aravamudan, leitender Vizepräsident und Geschäftsführer von F5 Cloud Services: F5 Cloud Services beschleunigt die Anwendungsbereitstellung über eine reibungslose, intuitive Multi-Cloud-Plattform. Diese SaaS-Lösungen sind für cloudnative Anwendungen und Mikrodienste optimiert.

Cloudbasiertes DNS – Zeit zum Handeln

Mit der Einführung von F5 Cloud Services führt Sie der leitende Produktmanager Roger Barlow durch die spezifischen Vorteile von DNS Cloud Service, der sekundäre autoritative DNS-Dienste bietet.

Steigerung der API-Sicherheit auf AWS mit neuen verwalteten Regeln für AWS WAF

An das im Herbst 2018 veröffentlichte Trio aus verwalteten Regeln für die native WAF von AWS anknüpfend folgt nun ein weiterer Regelsatz, der sich ausschließlich auf den Schutz Ihrer APIs vor bestehenden und neu auftretenden Bedrohungen konzentriert, einschließlich Angriffen auf externe XML-basierte Entities und serverseitigen Anfragebetrugs.

Wenn Ökosysteme aufeinandertreffen (und es gut ausgeht)

Calvin Rowland, leitender Vizepräsident für Geschäftsentwicklung, teilt seine Freude über die Übernahme von NGINX durch F5 und blickt dem gegebenen Versprechen, Technologiepartnernetzwerke mit Open-Source-Aspekten zu kombinieren, um Kunden einen Vorteil zu verschaffen und lückenlose Anwendungsdienste bereitzustellen, positiv entgegen.

NGINX und F5: Unser anhaltendes Engagement für Open Source

Im Anschluss an die jüngsten Neuigkeiten zur Übernahme spricht Gus Robertson, Geschäftsführer von NGINX, über das Engagement von F5 für die Open-Source-Technologie, Entwickler und Community von NGINX.

Eigeninteresse: Warum wir einen kühnen neuen Dienst exklusiv für Service-Provider entwickelt haben

Vizepräsident Trevor Rodriguez spricht über seine bisherigen Erfahrungen bei einem Tier-1-Telekommunikationsunternehmen und erläutert, wie sie dazu beitragen, den Mehrwert zu verdeutlichen, den Betriebsteams von Service-Providern mit F5 Service Provider Essentials genießen.

Die Branche entwickelt sich schneller als das mooresche Gesetz

Das mooresche Gesetz wird häufig im Sinne der Rechenleistung ausgedrückt, die sich alle zwei Jahre verdoppelt. Durch Nutzung der Leistungsfähigkeit von Containern und Cloud sowie der Zuverlässigkeit und Geschwindigkeit moderner Netzwerke müssen wir jedoch nicht zwei Jahre lang warten, um Daten noch schneller verarbeiten und Entscheidungen noch schneller treffen zu können.

Wesentliche Veränderungen und Herausforderungen mit HTTP/3

Angesichts der langsamen, doch stetigen Umstellung auf HTTP/2 und der von HTTP/3 verursachten sicherheitspolitischen Herausforderungen liegt vor Letzterem bis zur Umstellung noch ein langer und steiniger Weg.

Der Kampf von DevSecOps: Eindrücke von der DevSecCon Singapore 2019

Keiichiro Nozaki lässt die DevSecCon Singapore 2019 Revue passieren und spricht über die sich weiterentwickelnden Rollen der DevOps- und Sicherheitsteams ebenso wie über die Vorteile einer Zusammenarbeit für beide.

F5 übernimmt NGINX, um die Kluft zwischen NetOps und DevOps zu überbrücken und umgebungsübergreifend einheitliche Anwendungsdienste bereitzustellen

„Die Übernahme von NGINX durch F5 stärkt unseren Wachstumskurs durch Beschleunigung unserer Software- und Multi-Cloud-Transformation“, sagte François Locoh-Donou, Präsident und Geschäftsführer von F5.

Ein Brief von Geschäftsführer François Locoh-Donou an die Mitarbeiter von F5, in dem die Übernahme von NGINX bekannt gegeben wird

Zusätzlich zur Ankündigung vom 11. März spricht der Geschäftsführer von F5 über seine Ansichten im Zusammenhang mit der Zustimmung des Unternehmens, NGINX zu übernehmen.

MTTR ist nicht „Mean Time to Reboot“

Fail-Fast ist heutzutage das Mantra der Geschwindigkeit. Während dieses Konzept in der Theorie recht vielversprechend ist (für das Unternehmen und für DevOps), kommt es in der Praxis häufig zu noch mehr Ausfällen.

F5 fördert anwendungs- und sicherheitsorientierte Innovationen mit Hewlett Packard Enterprise für Microsoft Azure Stack

Die Partnerschaft zwischen F5, HPE und Microsoft erweitert die im September angekündigte Integration, um die Anwendungsumgebungen von Kunden, die Azure Stack verwenden, noch agiler zu machen.

Pläne zur Bereitstellung von Anwendungsdiensten werden von der Teamstruktur beeinflusst

Die Teamstruktur ist wichtig, da sie dazu beiträgt, Ihre Zwecke und Prioritäten zu definieren. Diese diktieren wiederum die Kennzahlen, an denen der Erfolg gemessen wird. Dies ist nicht nur zum Zwecke der Förderung einer kollaborativeren Kultur von Bedeutung, sondern auch wegen der Art und Weise, wie Entscheidungen und Technologieauswahl beeinflusst werden.

Funktion als (sichererer) Service

Mikrodienste und Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) vereinfachen häufig die Agile-Entwicklung, da ein Dienst von einem verhältnismäßig kleinen Team deutlich schneller konzipiert, entwickelt und verfeinert werden kann als eine große monolithische Anwendung. Mikrodienste und FaaS bringen jedoch noch einen weiteren interessanten Vorteil mit sich, der häufig in Vergessenheit gerät: Sicherheit.

Versetzen Sie Ihrer Umstellung auf 5G-Dienste einen Schub, ohne 4G-Investitionen aufzugeben

James Feger, Vizepräsident und Geschäftsleiter für Service-Provider, spricht über seine Ansichten zu 5G, Automatisierung, IoT und anderen Branchenthemen, die im Rahmen des diesjährigen Mobile World Congress im Mittelpunkt stehen werden.

Bericht zum Stand der Anwendungsdienste 2019: Mehrheit stellt nicht ohne Sicherheit bereit

Seit fünf Jahren stellen wir Tausenden von Vertretern aller IT-Rollen weltweit eine einfache Frage: Nennen Sie die eine Sache, ohne die Sie niemals eine Anwendung bereitstellen würden. Anders ausgedrückt: Was ist das Wichtigste, das Sie für Ihre Anwendungen bereitstellen können?

F5 Friday: API-Sicherheit mit F5 und 3scale

Durch Einbettung einer Advanced WAF von F5 vor einem 3scale API-Gateway profitieren Kunden von zusätzlichen Sicherheitsvorkehrungen, die unter anderem den Einsatz von IP-Wissen vorsehen, um Bedrohungen schneller und präziser erfassen zu können. Gleichsam ermöglichen sie es, intern oder aber extern eine sichere API-Fassade einzurichten, und bieten außerdem Schutz vor einer Vielzahl an Angriffen auf Anwendungsschicht.

F5 stellt mit neuen Lösungen für Service-Provider die Weichen für 5G-Dienste

Neue Tools und Dienste ermöglichen Telekommunikationsgesellschaften die Umstellung auf 5G, um auf diese Weise Netzwerke zu optimieren, bereits heute neue Dienste zu monetarisieren und ihre Netzwerke auf jeder Schicht zu sichern. F5 führt darüber hinaus einen Service- und Supportplan ein, der sich gezielt der komplexen und sich weiterentwickelnden Anforderungen von Service-Providern annimmt.

Bericht zum Stand der Anwendungsdienste, Telekommunikationsausgabe: Entwicklung zum Marktführer

Das Telekommunikationsnetz vollzieht einen Wandel, um 5G ebenso wie eine Vielzahl von Anwendungsfällen in den unterschiedlichsten Branchen unterstützen zu können. Ein Blick auf die Umfrage zum Stand der Anwendungsdienste 2019 belegt derweil, dass die Befragten aus der Telekommunikationsbranche tatsächlich ihr technologisches Image aufmöbeln, um sich als Marktführer profilieren zu können.

Lagebericht zu Anwendungsdiensten: Programmierbarkeit auf dem Vormarsch

Während der Schwerpunkt der Programmierbarkeit heutzutage vornehmlich auf Abläufen und Vorgängen liegt, verbleibt ein beträchtliches Maß an Datenpfad-Programmierbarkeit, ohne die der Nutzer nicht mit Anwendungen interagieren könnte.

Cloud-Cron: Einsatz von Function-as-a-Service zur Kostenkontrolle

Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) wird vermehrt in zahlreichen operativen und entwicklungsbezogenen Kontexten eingesetzt. Obwohl der Hoffnungsträger des Cloud-Computings häufig im Zusammenhang mit APIs, IoT und mobilen Anwendungen zur Sprache kommt, bietet er auch außerhalb der Entwicklung einen erheblichen Nutzen.

Drei wichtige Erkenntnisse für den Asien-Pazifik-Raum aus dem Bericht zum Stand der Anwendungsdienste

Keiichiro Nozaki erläutert seine Sicht zum Bericht zum Stand der Anwendungsdienste 2019 und stellt dabei regionale Entwicklungen und Themen heraus, um einen tieferen Einblick in die Prioritäten der heutigen Unternehmen sowie in die von ihnen verfolgten technologischen Initiativen zu vermitteln.

F5 schließt sich mit Equinix zusammen, um die Sicherheit für Multi-Cloud-Umgebungen zu steigern

F5 gibt die Verfügbarkeit einer in Zusammenarbeit mit Equinix entwickelten Lösung bekannt, die automatisierte HSM-Funktionen (Hardware-Sicherheitsmodul) als Service bereitstellt. Hierbei verschmilzt die BIG-IP-Plattform von F5 mit der SmartKey-Technologie von Equinix, um das Lebenszyklusmanagement für Verschlüsselungsschlüssel zu vereinfachen und Unternehmen, die ihr unaufhaltsam anwachsendes Schlüsselsortiment nur ungern in der öffentlichen Cloud hinterlegen, eine überlegene Sicherheit zu bieten.

Schon wieder die Schlüssel verlegt? F5 kann helfen!

Calvin Rowland, leitender Vizepräsident, befasst sich mit einer in Zusammenarbeit mit Equinix entwickelten Lösung, die einen blitzschnellen Abruf von Schlüsseln gestattet. BIG-IP wird es damit wiederum möglich, den SSL-Datenverkehr ungeachtet der Umgebung – ob lokal, in einer privaten oder einer öffentlichen Cloud – für jede Anwendung zu entschlüsseln und zu orchestrieren, wodurch die Multi-Cloud-Schlüsselverwaltung immens vereinfacht wird und Sie eine Sorge weniger haben.

Nochmal Schwein gehabt 2019

Das Jahr des Schweins liegt vor uns. Peter Silva gibt einen persönlichen Ausblick auf das kommende Jahr und philosophiert darüber, was 2019 für Unternehmen, die Sicherheit und die Branche im Allgemeinen bedeuten könnte.

Wie viel Schaden richten automatische Waffen bei Ihnen an?

Uns ist bekannt, dass etwa die Hälfte des Datenverkehrs im Internet heutzutage von Bots generiert wird. Einige davon sind gutartig – jedoch verfolgt der Großteil bösartige Absichten. Auch die mit der Automatisierung und dem maschinellen Lernen erzielten Betriebseffizienzen, die üblicherweise in einem positiveren Kontext erwähnt werden, werden als Waffe zur Ausspähung und für Angriffe genutzt.

François Locoh-Donou wird Mitglied des Vorstands von Capital One

Capital One Financial Corporation (NYSE: COF) gab bekannt, dass François Locoh-Donou, Geschäftsführer von F5, mit Wirkung zum 1. März 2019 in den Vorstand des Unternehmens gewählt wurde. François Locoh-Donou wird sich im Mai 2019 der Wahl durch die Aktionäre von Capital One stellen. >

Daten schlafen nicht, die Apps halten sie wach

Die strategische Bedeutsamkeit von Daten lässt sich nur durch eine Anwendung realisieren. Eine Anwendung kann ihren Zweck wiederum nur durch eine Interaktion mit Daten erfüllen. Diese strategische wechselseitige Abhängigkeit zeigt sich besonders deutlich im diesjährigen Bericht zum Stand der Anwendungsdienste. >

F5 im Fortune-Ranking zu einem der meist geschätzten Unternehmen ernannt

Alljährlich werden Spitzenkräfte, Vorstandsmitglieder und Finanzanalysten zu Unternehmen mit dem ihrer Ansicht nach besten brancheninternen wie auch branchenübergreifenden Ruf befragt. F5 schaffte es zum zweiten Mal in Folge in die Liste. >

Container als Schlüssel zur Multi-Cloud

Seit Jahren wird nun konsequent in die Umstellung auf Containerumgebungen investiert. Überraschend hierbei mögen die Gründe für diese Umstellung sein. Nur so viel: Es geht nicht wirklich um Mikrodienste. >

F5 Friday: Deklaratives Onboarding für BIG-IP

Während DevOps seinen Standpunkt in der IT auch weiterhin unermüdlich vertreten hat, konnten wir die Übernahme von Automatisierungs- und „As-Code“-Methoden beobachten. So werden in der Produktionspipeline beispielsweise vermehrt CI/CD-Tools wie GitHub Enterprise und Jenkins eingesetzt. Dieser Beitrag von Lori MacVittie und dem Amt des Technologievorstands befasst sich eingehender mit Infrastructure-as-Code und beschreibt, was F5 unternimmt, um ein solches Konzept zu ermöglichen und zu unterstützen. >

F5 Networks gibt die Ergebnisse für das erste Quartal des Geschäftsjahres 2019 bekannt

Der Umsatz in Höhe von 543,8 Mio. USD im ersten Quartal des Geschäftsjahres 2019 entspricht einem Wachstum von 4 % gegenüber dem Umsatz in Höhe von 523,2 Mio. USD im ersten Quartal des Geschäftsjahres 2018. Das gegenüber dem ersten Quartal des Geschäftsjahres 2018 erzielte Wachstum geht auf eine anhaltende Dynamik der Softwarelösungen zurück, die das Produktumsatzwachstum im Vergleich zum Vorjahr zum dritten Mal in Folge ankurbelten. >

APIs als Benutzererlebnis und was daran so wichtig ist

APIs sind die neuen Kommandozeilen. Infrastruktur und Anwendungsdienste werden zunehmend über eine API bereitgestellt, konfiguriert und betrieben. Zwischen Automatisierung und Integration in Bereitstellungspipelines stellt die API einen unerlässlichen Baustein dar, den jedes Element – ob Hardware, Software, lokal oder Cloud – zwingend aufweisen muss. >

Der Stand der Anwendungsdienste 2019: Anwendungen als treibende Kraft für die Entscheidungsfindung in der digitalen Wirtschaft

Anwendungsdienste alleine strahlen bereits (fast) immer eine immense Faszination aus. Befassen wir uns aber einmal genauer mit den Anwendungen, Umgebungen, Entwicklungen und Technologien, die Unternehmen dazu verleiten, durchschnittlich 16 verschiedene Anwendungsdienste zu nutzen, erhalten wir einen wertvollen Ausblick auf den Wandel, den IT und Business im nächsten Jahr vollziehen werden. >

Umfrage von F5 zeigt Bedeutsamkeit von Anwendungsdiensten in einer DevOps-getriebenen Multi-Cloud-Landschaft auf

Die soeben angekündigte Studie zum Stand der Anwendungsdienste 2019 befasst sich damit, wie die digitale Transformation die strategische Entscheidungsfindung in Bezug auf die Bereitstellung und Verwaltung von Anwendungen beeinflusst. Der jährliche Bericht gibt die Ansichten von knapp 2000 Befragten wieder, die weltweit in Unternehmen aller Größen in den unterschiedlichsten Branchen und Funktionen tätig sind. >

Zero-Trust – zu stellende Fragen

Mit einer „Zero-Trust-Strategie“ verhält es sich ähnlich wie mit einer „Cloud-Strategie“ – ohne Berücksichtigung der gesteckten Ziele und derzeitigen Lage ist sie recht bedeutungslos. Graham Alderson, globaler Lösungsarchitekt, stellt zentrale Aspekte heraus, die von Unternehmen berücksichtigt werden sollten, die solch einen Sicherheitsansatz verfolgen.

Aufkommende Trends im Bereich der Anwendungsdienste: Ein 5-Jahres-Bericht

Vor fünf Jahren stellte die Branche die Rolle der traditionellen IT infrage – heute nutzen IT-Organisationen die Cloud und investieren in die Kompetenzen und Tools, die für die Automatisierung benötigt werden. Cindy Borovick blickt im Zusammenhang mit dem erst kürzlich veröffentlichten Bericht zum Stand der Anwendungsdienste 2019 auf die Entwicklung der Branche zurück. >

F5 nimmt Nick Mehta und Marie E. Myers in den Vorstand auf

F5 heißt Nick Mehta, Geschäftsführer von Gainsight, Inc., und Marie E. Myers, Finanzvorstand bei UiPath, Inc., im Vorstand willkommen. Mehta und Myers bereichern den Vorstand von F5 mit bemerkenswerten Führungskompetenzen und wertvollem technologischen Sachverstand. >

Die Legende von der Single Pane of Glass

Lori MacVittie: So lange ich denken kann, hat der Lockruf einer Single Pane of Glass, also einer zentralen Konsole, über die die komplette Infrastruktur eingesehen und betrieben werden kann, die IT in ihren Bann gezogen. Ähnlich wie der Heilige Gral wurde sie jedoch niemals gefunden, und zahlreiche IT-Experten sind bezüglich ihrer Existenz zu Zynikern geworden. >

Bericht zum Stand der Anwendungsdienste 2019: Muss die Cloud die Krone abgeben?

Lori MacVittie äußert sich im Zusammenhang mit dem kommenden Bericht zum Stand der Anwendungsdienste von F5 zur Rolle von Cloud und Anwendungsdiensten. Der Cloud ist es in allen ihren Formen – ob öffentlich, lokal, privat oder SaaS – gelungen, ihren Status der strategischen Bedeutsamkeit zu verteidigen. Auch heute noch beeinflusst sie die bereitgestellten Anwendungsdienste, die zur Automatisierung und Orchestrierung der IT verwendeten Tools und Technologien und selbst die Weiterentwicklung von Teamstrukturen innerhalb von Unternehmen. Wird sich dieser Trend auch in diesem Jahr fortsetzen? >

Drei gängige Ansichten zu Serverless, die Sie gut und gerne ignorieren können

Serverless ist der Hoffnungsträger der Cloud-Gemeinde. Jedoch wird das Konzept häufig missverstanden und mit fast schon übernatürlichen Kräften ausgeschmückt, die geschmälerte Kosten, eine schnellere Wertschöpfung und nach Möglichkeit auch noch ein Frühstück im Bett versprechen. Hinzu kommt, dass es immer wieder mit Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) in Verbindung gesetzt wird. >

BIG-IP Cloud Edition nun über den Microsoft Azure Marketplace verfügbar

Nach AWS und VMware unterstützt BIG-IP Cloud Edition nun auch Azure und bietet Kunden somit eine weitere erwerbsfreundliche und gebrauchsfertige Lösung, mit der die Verfügbarkeit, die Leistung, die Transparenz und die Sicherheit von Anwendungen sichergestellt werden können. >

Unterstützung der DevOps-Pipelines mit Container-Ingress-Anwendungsdiensten

Die Entwicklung von containerisierten Anwendungen, der im Rahmen von DevOps-Pipelines nachgegangen wird, hat sich praktisch bereits überall durchgesetzt. Einige Herausforderungen bestehen jedoch auch weiterhin. Die deklarativen Lösungen zur Automatisierung und Orchestrierung von F5 sind im Zusammenspiel mit Ökosystemintegrationen dazu in der Lage, Anwendungsdienste wirklich überall bereitzustellen, einschließlich als Ingress in Containerumgebungen. >

F5 Friday: Ingress versus Ingress

Mit DevOps und NetOps treffen zunehmend zwei Welten aufeinander und auch Containerumgebungen beanspruchen vermehrt Definitionen für sich, die ursprünglich im Netzwerkkontext verwendet wurden. Betrachten wir also einmal den Gebrauch des häufig irreführenden Begriffs „Ingress“ im Sinne des Datenpfads und im Sinne von Containerumgebungen. >

Wie Hardware die Anwendungssicherheit verbessern kann

Ankita Bhalla unterstreicht erneut, wie wichtig es ist, nachzuvollziehen, wie und warum Fremdhardware von der Branche eingesetzt wird. Als Beispiele dafür, wie F5 Sie dabei unterstützt, für die fortgesetzte Sicherheit Ihrer Anwendungen zu sorgen, geht Ankita Bhalla spezifisch auf iHealth von F5 und die neue Integritätsüberprüfungsfunktion für die TPM-Kontrollkette ein.

Ehrung der wichtigsten Partner von F5 in Nordamerika

Lisa Citron, regionale Vizepräsidentin für Vertriebspartner, gratuliert den Gewinnern bei den North America Partners of the Year Awards 2018. Im Rahmen der Veranstaltung wurden strategische Reseller, Service-Provider und Vertriebshändler für ihre herausragenden Leistungen in Bezug auf die Bereitstellung von Schulungen, Lösungen und Support ausgezeichnet, dank denen der Mehrwert der Technologien von F5 für Kunden noch vergrößert werden kann. >

Die Cloud zieht weiter über den Datenzentren auf

Die Cloud zeigte uns eine bessere Möglichkeit zur Integration, Bereitstellung und Betreibung der Netzwerk- und Anwendungsinfrastruktur auf – Aspekte, die sich allmählich ihren Weg in die Rechenzentren von Unternehmen weltweit gebahnt haben. Die mit der Cloud eingeleitete digitale Transformation schleicht sich nun jedoch auch in lokale Systeme ein und führt etwas noch viel Interessanteres herbei – die Auflösung des Netzwerks. >

F5 SSL Orchestrator und Cisco Firepower NGFW: Gemeinsam stärker

In Verbindung mit den Bedrohungsabwehr- und Leistungsfähigkeiten der Firepower-Reihe von Cisco bewerkstelligt SSL Orchestrator die rechenintensive Entschlüsselung des Datenverkehrs, bevor dieser an andere Geräte in einem Security-Stack weitergeleitet wird. Auf diese Weise können eben diese Sicherheitsgeräte nun kostengünstig skaliert werden. >

Kundenerfahrungsbericht: MAXIMUS optimiert den Betrieb mit F5 in AWS

MAXIMUS stellt einer Vielzahl von Gemeinden unerlässliche Gesundheits- und Humandienstleistungsprogramme zur Verfügung. Zuvor waren die IT-Infrastruktur und die Abläufe des Unternehmens nicht adäquat auf seine Anforderungen abgestimmt, weshalb die Anwendungsbereitstellung ein verworrenes und zeitaufwendiges Unterfangen darstellte. Das Team wandte sich für die Migration in AWS und die Automatisierung seiner Prozesse an F5, um auf diese Weise Ressourcen für andere Projekte freigeben zu können. >

Anwendungsdienste für Kubernetes-Anwendungen: Immergleiche Neuerungen

Botschaft zur KubeCon von Robert Haynes von F5: Eine der Basistechnologien, die den Weg für die Einführung von Plattformen und Arbeitsverfahren bereitete, waren die Systeme, die Absicht und Handlung auf automatisierte und integrierte Weise miteinander verbinden. Anwendungsdienste müssen ein Glied dieser Kette sein. Dies stellt einen deutlich fundamentaleren Wandel dar als eine einfache Änderung der Laufzeiten. >

NetOps benötigt Befürworter und keine Gegner

Es ist an der Zeit, zu verstehen, dass es nicht immer die NetOps-Teams sind, die der Bereitstellung der neuesten Anwendungen oder Dienste im Wege stehen. Vielmehr gehen Hemmnisse häufig darauf zurück, dass Unternehmen es beim Versuch einer Transformation ihres IT-Betriebs versäumen, alle Prämissen der DevOps-Teams zu übernehmen.

Wie groß ist der Heißhunger auf eine Modernisierung der Anwendungsentwicklung wirklich?

Keiichiro Nozaki, regionaler Marketingarchitekt/Evangelist, wohnte kürzlich dem Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2018 für Asien-Pazifik an der Gold Coast bei und stellt infolge diese Frage: Wie viele Unternehmen sind für die digitale Transformation bereit? >

Die Top 10 der Prognosen für 2019

Es ist einmal mehr die Zeit des Jahres gekommen, in der Kristallkugeln befragt werden und zahlreiche Experten mit ihren jährlichen Prognosen für das kommende Jahr hausieren gehen. Peter Silva stellt die seiner Ansicht nach nennenswertesten Prognoselisten, die zum Ende des Jahres 2018 die Runde machen, mitsamt einem kurzen Kommentar vor. >

Das Zusammenführen von Verwaltung und Automatisierung

In dieser Woche erscheint BIG-IQ 6.1, die neueste Version der Verwaltungsplattform von F5. Dan Schrader geht auf die Vorteile dieser neuen Version ein und konzentriert sich in diesem Zusammenhang insbesondere auf die deklarativen Technologien zur Automatisierung der Bereitstellung von Netzwerkdiensten sowie auf die aktualisierten Meldefunktionen und Dashboards für die Sicherheit. >

Einsatz von Entwicklern zur Steigerung Ihres Anwendungskapitals durch Containerisierung

Kara Sprague, leitende Vizepräsidentin, spricht über die angesichts der Entwicklerknappheit zunehmend größere Bedeutung von Containern im Zeitalter des Anwendungskapitals. Hierbei geht sie auch auf die erst kürzlich gestartete Open-Beta für Aspen Mesh von F5 ein – ein vollständig unterstütztes Service-Mesh, das auf Istio fußt. >

Schutz der Maschinenidentität mit Venafi und F5

Mit „Maschinenidentität“ ist lediglich gemeint, wie sichergestellt werden kann, dass ein automatisierter Prozess sich selbst identifizieren kann, und wie andere automatisierte Systeme und Prozesse den notwendigen Zugriff auf relevante Ressourcen gewähren. Dies ist kein neues Konzept. Relativ neu ist jedoch der Umfang, in dem es umgesetzt werden muss. >

Aspen-Mesh-Beta nun für Mikrodienstinfrastrukturen verfügbar

Im Rahmen der KubeCon wurde eine Open Public Beta für Aspen Mesh angekündigt. Die Innovation von F5 Networks bietet ein vollständig unterstütztes und enterprisefähiges Service-Mesh auf Basis von Istio, das Unternehmen dabei unterstützen soll, ein Modell zu implementieren, mit dem Anwendungen fortlaufend entwickelt und bereitgestellt werden. >

Service-Meshes und Anwendungsmodernisierung

Lori MacVittie: Die Branche ist nach wie vor dazu geneigt, Container mit Mikrodiensten gleichzusetzen – und mit „gleichsetzen“ meine ich, dass der Begriff absolut gleichbedeutend verwendet wird. Probleme sind damit vorprogrammiert. >

Rückblick auf ein weiteres Jahr der Innovation für F5 auf AWS

Während sich der Wirbel um die jüngste re:Invent-Konferenz langsam legt, blickt Tom Atkins noch einmal zurück und befasst sich genauer mit den nennenswertesten Fortschritten eines weiteren dynamischen und produktiven Jahres für F5 auf AWS. >

12 Tage DevOps

Pünktlich zur nächste Woche in Seattle stattfindenden KubeCon, einer der größten DevOps-Konferenzen in 2018, lassen wir unsere zwölf liebsten DevOps-bezogenen Inhalte des vergangenen Jahres noch einmal Revue passieren. >

DevOps-Unterstützung durch ein Service-Mesh

Shawn Wormke von Aspen Mesh erläutert, warum ein Service-Mesh das Bindeglied zwischen Entwicklungs- und Betriebsteams darstellt und wie es einen zentralen Punkt im Stack zur Verfügung stellt, über den Mikrodienste ohne Änderungen an Anwendung oder Cluster während der Laufzeit verwaltet werden können. >

Zeit für eine unkonventionellere Anwendungsbereitstellung

Die Stabilität und die Geschwindigkeit der heutigen Netzwerke ermöglichen den Einsatz von Anwendungsdiensten innerhalb eines skalierbaren Systems. Somit kann auch die Anwendungsbereitstellung nach einem modernen, stackbasierten Konzept erfolgen, um den größtmöglichen Nutzen aus den Fortschritten im Bereich der Technologie und Software zu ziehen und gleichzeitig auch weiterhin von den in den vergangenen Jahren gewonnenen Fachkenntnissen zu profitieren. >

Die Lehren aus 2018 für 2019

2018 fuhr mit schwerwiegenderen Datendiebstählen, umfangreicheren DDoS-Angriffen und zunehmenden Herausforderungen für Unternehmen in Bezug auf die Verteidigung ihrer Infrastruktur gegen Kriminelle auf. Insbesondere Anwendungen waren ein beliebtes Ziel. Für 2019 gilt es also, für die unaufhaltsame Weiterentwicklung im Hinblick auf Cyberkriminalität und Sicherheit ausreichend gewappnet zu sein. >

Die strategische Bedeutung von Mainframes

Mainframes sind in der IT eher verpönt. Sie gelten als Fossilien, obwohl sie vielen Unternehmen in Wirklichkeit einen nicht zu verachtenden Quell an Rechenleistung bieten – Rechenleistung, die zunehmend intensiver genutzt wird. Außerdem hängen sie deutlich enger mit DevOps, Agile und anderen modernen Methoden zusammen, als man vielleicht meinen mag. >

Aufbau und Steigerung Ihres Anwendungskapitals mithilfe eines chaotisch geprägten Innovationsprozesses

Unternehmen, die Anwendungen in der Cloud entwickeln und bereitstellen, können von ineffizienten IT-Abläufen, Entwicklerknappheit, steigenden Erwartungen der Nutzer, zunehmenden Sicherheitsrisiken und Problemen bei der Cloud-Migration geplagt sein, um nur einige Herausforderungen zu nennen. Kara Sprague, leitende Vizepräsidentin, befasst sich damit, welche Rolle das Chaos bei der Förderung von IT-Innovationsprozessen spielt und wie die Lösungen von F5 das wertvollste Gut von Unternehmen schützen: Anwendungen. >

Wie Thingbots zu Angriffsplattformen werden

Lori MacVittie befasst sich mit den Forschungsergebnissen, die F5 Labs zwischen Januar und Juni 2018 bezüglich globaler Angriffe auf IoT-Geräte gesammelt hat, und stellt die ernüchternden Erkenntnisse heraus. IoT-Geräte werden nicht nur nach wie vor ausgenutzt, sondern gänzlich in Angriffsplattformen verwandelt. Angreifern wird es so ein Leichtes, das zuvor noch als garantierter Wachstumsmarkt geltende Sammelsurium aus Technologien noch besser für die eigenen Zwecke zu nutzen. >

Vorschau für F5 Cloud Services nun bei AWS verfügbar

Auf der AWS re:Invent 2018 werden wir die Einführung des Early-Access-Vorschauprogramms von F5 für den ersten unserer cloudbasierten Anwendungsdienste ankündigen. Nutzer erhalten nun sofortigen Testzugriff auf den DNS-Dienst und den Dienst zum globalen Serverlastenausgleich (GSLB). Weitere cloudnative, automatisierte und eigenständig verwaltete Lösungen folgen. Erfahren Sie mehr von Venu Aravamudan, leitender Vizepräsident und Geschäftsleiter für F5 Cloud Services. >

WAF-Support von F5 für AWS Security Hub – Förderung zentraler Sicherheitsberichte

Moderne Sicherheitslösungen fordern die Beteiligung mehrerer Anbieter. Die branchenführenden Web-Application-Firewall-Lösungen (wie Advanced WAF) von F5 können nun mit AWS Security Hub integriert werden. Auf diese Weise wird es möglich, vordefinierte Warnhinweise aus blockiertem Datenverkehr (z. B. Angriffsart, Ursprung usw.) sowie Daten anderer Sicherheitsprodukte zur weiteren Prüfung an die zentrale Konsole weiterzuleiten. >

Direkt loslegen auf AWS – mit dem neuen Schnellstart von F5

Noch vor dem Start der AWS re:Invent möchten wir Sie über die neue Schnellstartintegration zwischen F5 und AWS informieren. Tom Atkins von F5 erläutert, wie der Dienst die Computing-, Netzwerk-, Storage- und sonstigen Dienste von AWS, die zur Bereitstellung Ihrer Workloads auf AWS erforderlich sind, startet, konfiguriert und ausführt. >

Warum Sie die AWS re:Invent lieben werden (und wie Sie die Liebe zurück am Arbeitsplatz aufrecht erhalten können)

In freudiger Erwartung auf die AWS re:Invent teilt Robert Haynes von F5 seine Ansichten und Tipps dazu, wie man nach einer Woche voller berauschender Diskussionen rund um Cloud-Innovationen, verbesserte Funktionen und neue Möglichkeiten einem regelrechten „Begeisterungskater“ vorbeugen kann. >

Echtzeit-Änderung von Sicherheitsregeln mit maschinellem Lernen

Die Anwendung des maschinellen Lernens auf die Anwendungssicherheit bringt zahlreiche Vorzüge mit sich. Ein besonders überzeugender Vorteil besteht darin, dass den Systemen kontinuierlich ein Gefühl für Normalität angelernt wird, sodass atypische Situationen präzise identifiziert werden können. Lori MacVittie erläutert, inwiefern eine verhaltensgesteuerte Denial-of-Service-Abwehr (DoS) auf Schicht 7 einem Grippeimpfstoff gleicht, der in der Lage ist, den verantwortlichen Virus auf Grundlage seines Verhaltens anstelle seiner tatsächlichen Zusammensetzung zu erkennen. >

Praktische Überlegungen zur Cloud: Sicherheit

Die Kryptografie ist naturgemäß ein besonders rechenintensiver Prozess, was bedeutet, dass es verglichen mit der Ausführung der Geschäftslogik weit mehr CPU-Zyklen braucht, um eine Nachricht zu verschlüsseln oder zu entschlüsseln. Im Falle von Cloud-Bereitstellungen wurden diese zusätzlichen CPU-Zyklen als notwendiges Übel hingenommen, da es darum geht, den Kapitalaufwand auf die Betriebskosten zu verlagern. Jedoch können das wiederholte Entschlüsseln und Verschlüsseln einer Nachricht selbst zu geringen Kosten in der Summe recht schwer ins Gewicht fallen. >

Wie deklarative Schnittstellen die Infrastruktur demokratisieren

Im technologischen Sinne bedeutet Vereinfachung Abstraktion, wobei deklarative Schnittstellen als gutes Beispiel für eine solche Abstraktion dienen. Durch Vereinfachung der Schnittstellen, die heutzutage zur Bereitstellung, Konfiguration, Verwaltung und Integration der Infrastruktur verwendet werden, demokratisieren deklarative Schnittstellen die Infrastruktur und eröffnen gleichzeitig neue Möglichkeiten für NetOps und DevOps gleichermaßen. >

Blog des AWS-Partnernetzwerks: Einfachheit und Sicherheit dank zentraler Anwendungsbereitstellung und F5 Networks

Sei es das Verschieben vorhandener Anwendungen oder die Entwicklung von cloudnativen Lösungen – die Cloud von Amazon Web Services (AWS) bietet ein mannigfaltiges Spektrum an Vorzügen im Hinblick auf Skalierbarkeit und Verfügbarkeit. Greg Coward, Lösungsarchitekt bei F5, führt Schritt für Schritt durch eine typische Anwendungsbereitstellung unter Verwendung der BIG-IP Cloud Edition von F5, die die Einrichtung eines zentralen Punkts für die Bereitstellung, Konfiguration und Verwaltung von Application Delivery Controllern von F5 ermöglicht. >

Lagebericht zu Anwendungsdiensten: Auf der Suche nach Transparenz

Es ist erneut an der Zeit, sich etwas intensiver mit den Anwendungsdiensten auseinanderzusetzen, die Unternehmen tatsächlich nutzen, um ihre Anwendungen schneller und sicherer zu machen. Auch in diesem Quartal konnte ein zunehmender Einsatz von Bot-Abwehrdiensten sowie ein Wachstum in Bezug auf die Verwendung von analysebezogenen Diensten beobachtet werden. >

Steigerung der Sicherheit durch Nichtbeachtung von Schwachstellen

Normalerweise würde man von einem Sicherheitsunternehmen nicht erwarten, dass es dazu rät, Schwachstellen zu ignorieren. Ihnen mag sicherlich auch schleierhaft sein, wie das Ignorieren von Schwachstellen zu einer gesteigerten Sicherheit beitragen soll. Lori MacVittie von F5 wird Sie netterweise aufklären. >

Stadt Bellevue sorgt mithilfe von F5 für zukunftssichere Mobilität, Sicherheit und Compliance

Um ihren facettenreichen Anforderungen – beispielsweise in Bezug auf entfernte Mitarbeiter, Besucher der Bürgerwebsite, Polizei und Rettungsdienste und Wartungsmannschaften – gerecht werden zu können, wandte die Stadt Bellevue sich an F5 und bat um verbesserten Zugriff, Lastenausgleich, mehr Kapazitäten sowie um eine Lösung, die die Stadt hervorragend für ein künftiges Wachstum aufstellen würde. >

F5 Networks ernennt Edgar Dias zum Geschäftsleiter für Indien

Mit mehr als 22 Jahren Branchenerfahrung wird Edgar Dias für die Verwaltung und den Ausbau des Geschäftsbetriebs von F5 in Indien verantwortlich sein. Offiziell wird er F5 am 12. November 2018 beitreten und in Bangalore ansässig sein. In seiner Funktion ist er Adam Judd, leitender Vizepräsident für F5 in Asien-Pazifik, China und Japan, direkt unterstellt. >

Standardisierung ist gut für NetOps

Sollten Sie Ihre Produktionspipeline auf dem „As-Code“-Prinzip begründen wollen, so steht fest, dass gleich mehrere Gruppen von Betreibern und Entwicklern dafür verantwortlich sein werden. Eine Standardisierung ist hierfür unerlässlich – insbesondere da NetOps den Sprung ins kalte Wasser wagen und Systeme entwickeln und pflegen wird, die für die Automatisierung und Orchestrierung bestimmter Elemente der Infrastruktur für Netzwerk und Anwendungsdienste bestimmt sind.

F5 Networks gibt die Ergebnisse für das vierte Quartal und das Geschäftsjahr 2018 bekannt

F5 erzielte im vierten Quartal des Geschäftsjahres 2018 einen Umsatz in Höhe von 562,7 Mio. USD. Zum Vergleich: Der Vorjahresumsatz für das vierte Quartal des Geschäftsjahres 2017 lag bei 538,0 Mio. USD. Das erzielte Wachstum geht auf eine anhaltende Dynamik der Softwarelösungen zurück, die das Produktumsatzwachstum im Vergleich zum Vorjahr ankurbelten. Auf das gesamte Geschäftsjahr gesehen verzeichnete das Unternehmen außerdem ein Umsatzplus in Höhe von 3,4 %, das der starken operativen Leistung zu verdanken ist. >

F5 Friday: F5 Infrastructure-as-Code mit Terraform

Es ist bekannt, dass die Anwendungsplattform – der Web- oder Anwendungsserver oder die App-Engine – zuerst bereitgestellt werden muss. Gleiches gilt für die Plattformen für Netzwerk- und Anwendungsdienste – auch sie müssen bereitgestellt werden, bevor sie konfiguriert werden können. Dieser Bereitstellungs- und Konfigurationsprozess wird insbesondere in Cloud-Umgebungen zunehmend von Systemen wie Terraform von HashiCorp gesteuert. >

Herbeiführung einer erfolgreichen digitalen Transformation mit F5 und Rackspace

Wie arbeitet man eigentlich einen detaillierten Plan für die digitale Transformation aus? Betrachten Sie zunächst das Verhältnis zwischen Anwendungen und Ihren Zielsetzungen in Bezug auf die Digitalisierung. Schließen Sie sich anschließend mit Partnern und Anbietern zusammen, die sich seit Jahren mit der anwendungsorientierten Weiterentwicklung von Geschäftsprozessen befassen und in der Vergangenheit bereits konkrete Ergebnisse herbeigeführt haben. >

Der Open-Source-Wandel

Es wird weiter darüber spekuliert, warum Unternehmen und Branchen, die sich einst nur zögerlich offiziell für den Einsatz von Open-Source-Software ausgesprochen haben, selbige nun plötzlich nutzen. Häufig wird die Angst vor rechtlicher Haftung als ausschlaggebender Hinderungsgrund angenommen. Angesichts der Vorzüge solcher Software für die digitale Transformation scheint diese nun aber vergessen. >

Serverless ist Realität – und findet rasend schnell Anklang

Serverless bedeutet für Entwickler, dass sie sich nicht mehr länger um die Infrastruktur sorgen müssen. Auch das Unternehmen selbst erkennt einen Mehrwert in der gebotenen Geschwindigkeit und Effizienz. Hinzu kommt die reibungslose Bereitstellung von Code, sodass Ihre Anwendungen bereits binnen weniger Stunden anstelle von Wochen oder Monaten funktionstüchtig sind. >

Supply-Chain-Hacks und die Rolle der Hardware für die Sicherheit

Dave Schmitt, leitender Architekt, und das Amt des Technologievorstands sinnieren im Zusammenhang mit dem jüngsten Bloomberg-Artikel zu Supermicro über die Bedeutsamkeit von Kompetenzen im Bereich der Hardwaresicherheit. Dieser Artikel enthält außerdem Fragen, die Sie Ihren Anbietern stellen sollten, um sicherzustellen, dass Ihre Systeme geschützt sind. >

F5 unterstützt die Einführung des AWS-Programms für Beratungspartner für private Angebote

F5 gehört einer exklusiven Gruppe von Launch-Partnern des AWS-Programms für Beratungspartner für private Angebote an, das Partnern erweiterte Möglichkeiten bietet, um Kunden die Anwendungsdienste von F5 über AWS Marketplace bereitzustellen. >

As-Code: Der endlose IT-Stack

Infrastruktur, Konfiguration, Pipeline, Abläufe. Plötzlich trägt alles den Zusatz „as-Code“. Lori MacVittie versucht, die Begrifflichkeiten durchzugehen und die verschiedenen Komponenten innerhalb eines endlosen IT-Stacks herauszustellen. >

Mikrodienste: Weniger Mikro, mehr Dienste

Lori MacVittie ergründet, wie es dazu kam, dass die Branche sich plötzlich mit einer seltsamen Mischform aus serviceorientierten und Mikrodienst-Architekturen konfrontiert sah, die noch immer viele Zweifel darüber lässt, wo die eine endet und die andere beginnt. >

Geschäftsführer von F5 spricht über Cashews, Kolibris und die Bedeutsamkeit des Selbstwerts

François Locoh-Donou, ein Einwanderer aus Togo, der über Frankreich in die USA kam, spricht auf der Jahresversammlung 2018 der Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce über seine Ansichten zur Eingliederung und zum „Geschäft der guten Taten“. (GeekWire-Artikel mit Tonaufzeichnung) >

Sehen Sie sich das Interview mit Calvin Rowland von der Microsoft Ignite an

Im Zuge der jüngsten Ignite-Konferenz stattete der leitende Vizepräsident von F5 dem Livestreaming-Studio von SiliconANGLE Media einen Besuch ab, um darüber zu sprechen, welche Rolle die Anwendungsdienste von F5 für die Unterstützung von Multi-Cloud-Umgebungen spielen. Auch ging er auf die Betonung der Sicherheit durch das Unternehmen und die Auswirkungen aufkommender Technologien ein. >

F5 Friday: Eingliederung von F5 Telemetry in Ihre Pipeline

Im Zuge einer erst kürzlich durchgeführten Befragung von IT-Angehörigen zum Stand der Netzwerkautomatisierung stellten wir fest, dass der Markt mit einer Reihe von Herausforderungen konfrontiert ist. Eine dieser speziell von NetOps-Experten genannten Herausforderungen betrifft den Mangel an integrierten Tools, ohne die eine Automatisierung nicht effektiv herbeigeführt werden kann. >

Die wechselseitige Abhängigkeit zwischen Anwendungsdiensten, Anwendungen und Daten

Während die Umstellung auf Cloud und Container zu einem Umbruch in Bezug auf typische Netzwerkarchitekturen geführt hat, bleiben Anwendungen auch weiterhin an die Daten gebunden, für die sie als primäre Schnittstelle fungieren. Technologievorstand Ryan Kearny erläutert, warum der Kausalzusammenhang zwischen Anwendungen und Daten für die Zukunft der Anwendungsbereitstellung ausschlaggebend ist, insbesondere vor dem Hintergrund, dass wir zunehmend mehr Daten erzeugen, als wir verschieben können. >

Die IT muss über das Scripting hinaus zur Automatisierung finden

In praktisch jeder Branche zielt die Automatisierung auf eine Optimierung und Beseitigung von Engpässen ab. Aus Sicht der IT bezieht sich dies in der Regel darauf, sich mit den Zwischenschritten eines betrieblichen Prozesses zu befassen. >

Einige Clous der neuen Website von F5 Labs

Es folgt ein kurzer Rückblick auf die Verbesserungen, die in diesem Sommer an der Website von F5 Labs vorgenommen wurden. Auch gehen wir darauf ein, wie das Team Ihren Zugriff auf die Forschungsarbeiten zur Anwendungssicherheit und Bedrohungsanalyse fortlaufend optimiert. >

Tag 0 war Tag 1 der Entwicklung

Bereits vom ersten Tag der Entwicklung an bis hin zur Zeit nach der Bereitstellung klingen die Entscheidungen, die wir bezüglich der Sicherheit des gesamten Anwendungsstacks treffen, mit weitreichenden Folgen nach. >

Gesteigerte Leistung und Sicherheit in Microsoft Azure Stack mit F5 und Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Zahlreiche IT-Gruppen stehen unter immensem Druck, in öffentliche Clouds zu migrieren. Ein Gemeinschaftsprojekt von F5 vereinfacht die Einbettung von Anwendungen, die in verschiedenen Regionen von Microsoft Azure Stack ausgeführt werden, in eine konsolidierte Infrastruktur für den Geschäftsbetrieb. >

F5 zum Mitglied des neuen Innovationsbeirats von Seattle ernannt, um die dringendsten Herausforderungen der Stadt anzugehen

Mit der Unterstützung von Bürgermeister Durkan, der University of Washington, Amazon, Microsoft und anderen wird der Innovationsbeirat als Berater für Fragen und Richtlinien agieren, die die Stadt in Bezug auf Themen wie Obdachlosigkeit, Wohnbau und Verkehrsmittel betreffen. >

Gesucht: Ihre Meinung zum Stand der Anwendungsdienste

Die alljährliche Umfrage von F5 konzentriert sich nun intensiver auf die von Ihnen benötigten Anwendungsdienste und nicht mehr nur auf die Plattformen, die Sie für ihre Bereitstellung nutzen. Informieren Sie sich und nehmen Sie noch heute an der Umfrage teil. >

F5 Networks von TAG Cyber zu einem Distinguished Vendor 2019 ernannt

F5 wird in der diesjährigen Ausgabe des TAG Cyber Security Annual 2019 ins Scheinwerferlicht gerückt. Der Bericht ist darauf ausgelegt, Sicherheitsexperten zu beraten. >

Integration als Hindernis für die Erzielung einer kontinuierlichen Bereitstellung

APIs sind keine Integration. Sie sind lediglich ein Hilfsmittel zur Umsetzung der Integration – und den Herausforderungen in der Branche nach zu urteilen, reichen sie lange nicht aus, um eine Kontinuität in der IT herbeizuführen. >

Lagebericht zu Anwendungsdiensten: Sensible Dienste möglicherweise zugänglich

Es ist erneut an der Zeit, sich etwas intensiver mit den Anwendungsdiensten auseinanderzusetzen, die Unternehmen tatsächlich nutzen, um ihre Anwendungen schneller und sicherer zu machen. >

Container, APIs und die zweite Sicherheitsregel

Lori MacVittie kommentiert einen erst kürzlich veröffentlichten Bericht von Lacework, der die Notwendigkeit herausstellt, sich eine der wichtigsten Sicherheitsregeln wieder und wieder ins Gedächtnis zu rufen: Admin-Konsolen dürfen nicht offen gelassen werden. >

Warum Infrastruktur für Entwickler, die Container nutzen, von Bedeutung ist

Gleichwie frühere Anwendungsarchitekturen bewirken auch Container und Mikrodienste einen wahren Umbruch in der Netzwerkinfrastruktur. Dieses Mal nehmen die Änderungen jedoch eine deutlich andere Form an. Was aktuell beobachtet werden kann, ist der Versuch, eben die Anwendungsdienste in die Containerumgebung zu integrieren, die Entwickler wirklich benötigen. >

Gastblogs: SDN-Fähigkeit von ISP Threat Sharing

Im Zuge der jüngsten Agility-Konferenz von F5 in Boston fand sich eine Gruppe von Branchenteilnehmern aus der globalen Service-Provider-Gemeinde zusammen, um über Themen wie die Rolle neuer SDN-Infrastrukturen, Automatisierung und Sicherheit zu sprechen und zu debattieren. >

Warum sollten DevOps-Experten sich über anwendungsweise Architekturen Gedanken machen?

Seit Jahrzehnten werden Anwendungsdienste auf gemeinsamen Plattformen bereitgestellt. Neue Anwendungsarchitekturen wie Mikrodienste führen jedoch zwangsweise zu Änderungen in der Produktionspipeline, die optimaler auf moderne Bereitstellungspläne und betriebliche Verfahren wie Infrastructure-as-Code abgestimmt sind. >

Sehen Sie sich die Keynote des Geschäftsführers zum Anwendungskapital von der Global Agility Conference von F5 an

François Locoh-Donou beschreibt die Rolle, die die moderne Anwendung für die Beschleunigung der Wertschöpfung spielt, und wird von Gastrednern der Motorists Insurance Group und MarketAxess unterstützt. >

F5 Friday: Configuration-as-Code mit F5 AS3

Aus dem Amt des Technologievorstands von F5 zieht Lori MacVittie verschiedene Verbindungslinien zwischen DevOps-Praktiken und der neuen deklarativen Schnittstelle von F5, die die Abhängigkeit von APIs reduziert und dazu beitragen kann, eine voll automatisierte, kontinuierliche Bereitstellungspipeline zu implementieren. >

Steigerung Ihres Anwendungskapitals mit Anwendungsdiensten

Kara Sprague, leitende Vizepräsidentin, ergründet die Entstehung von Anwendungskapital im Zusammenhang mit Kundenerwartungen, Branchentrends und Innovationen von F5. >

Gibt es ein Minimum-Viable-Deployment für NetOps?

Lori MacVittie untersucht, ob es möglich wäre, ein „MVD“ für eine Anwendung zu erzielen, indem eine anwendungsweise Architektur für die eng mit ihr verbundenen Anwendungsdienste implementiert wird. >

IP-Adresse als Identität zeugt von sicherheitsbezogener Bequemlichkeit

Die Vorstellung, dass einer IP-Adresse eine eindeutige Identität zugeordnet werden kann, ist derart tief in unseren Köpfen verwurzelt, dass wir dazu neigen, sie auch auf andere Bereiche der Technologie anzuwenden – selbst wenn dies mehr als ineffektiv ist. >

F5 ernennt David Helfer zum leitenden Vizepräsidenten für den EMEA-Vertrieb

Als erfahrener Leiter von leistungsstarken globalen Teams ist David Helfer mit seinen mehr als 25 Jahren Erfahrung in der Technologiebranche künftig für die Betreuung des Vertriebs in der gesamten EMEA-Region (Europa, Nahost und Afrika) verantwortlich. >

F5 vereinfacht Virtualisierung von Netzwerkfunktionen für Service-Provider

Eine neue integrierte Lösung führt das Lebenszyklusmanagement mit den führenden VNF-Paketen von F5 zusammen – und das alles in einem kapazitätsbasierten Verbrauchsmodell. >

NetOps holt DevOps im Rennen um die Automatisierung (fast) ein

Daten zeigen, dass NetOps trotz aller Herausforderungen, die der Automatisierung innewohnen, gar nicht so weit zurückliegt, wie manche vielleicht meinen. >

Lob unseren Partnern für das starke Leistungsversprechen

Was die Branche der Netzsicherheit so interessant macht, ist das Ausmaß, in dem Anbieter im Wesentlichen auf derselben Seite landen. >

Vorläufer und Nachzügler in der Cloud: Alles dreht sich um Anwendungsdienste

Gelegentlich lese ich gerne die Kommentare von El Reg zur IT und Technologie. Mit genau der richtigen Menge an Biss treffen sie häufig mitten ins Schwarze. >

Bei der Netzwerkautomatisierung kommt es auf die Größe an (aber nicht allzu sehr)

Sagen zumindest die Daten. Es wäre ein Leichtes, die Bedeutsamkeit der Netzwerkautomatisierung unter den Tisch zu kehren, indem man lediglich behaupten würde, dass die Größe Ihrer Organisation ... >

Einsatz von F5 BIG-IP zur Beseitigung von Ebenen bei der Skalierung von Anwendungen in Containern

Oder spielt da etwa die Frustration mit? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Wahrscheinlich beides. Es besteht eine Beziehung zwischen Netzwerk- und Anwendungsarchitekturen. >

BIG-IP Cloud Edition: Sicherstellung, dass Ihre Anwendungen gut versorgt sind

Zach Westall erläutert, was ein intelligentes Datenverkehrsmanagement, Orchestrierung und Autoskalierung mit einer guten Bereitstellung zu tun haben, ... >

Software verspeist noch immer die IT: Nächster Gang – Anwendungsdienste

Im Jahre 2015 habe ich festgestellt, dass Software die IT verschlingt. Diese Feststellung basierte auf Daten, die aus einer Reihe von branchenrelevanten Quellen stammten ... >

SSL/TLS: Transparenz reicht nicht aus – es bedarf einer Orchestrierung

SSL Orchestrator präsentiert sich als Vollproxy für SSL/TLS wie auch HTTP und ist in der Lage, intelligente Entscheidungen zu treffen, um sowohl den eingehenden ... >

Verfügbarkeit ist lediglich ein Ablenkungsmanöver – und wir fallen darauf herein

In einer gerechteren Welt würden Anwendungsnutzer sich mindestens genauso viele Sorgen um die Sicherheit ihrer Daten machen, wie sie es aktuell im Hinblick auf ihren Zugriff auf diese Daten tun ... >

Richtige Vorbereitung für eine Cloud-zu-Cloud-Migration

Sie lesen richtig. Die Zeit ist gekommen. Erwägen Sie, die Vorbereitung zu einem Bestandteil Ihrer übergreifenden Cloud-Strategie zu machen, um sich das Schlimmste zu ersparen. Was haben die folgenden Dinge gemeinsam? Lachs, Kanadier ... >

Schutz des Identitätsperimeters

Welche Bedeutung haben Begriffe wie „Identitätsperimeter“ und „Zero-Trust“ eigentlich für Sie? Graham Alderson betrachtet das Ganze im Zusammenhang mit ... >

Neue Sicherheitsprodukte und Bedrohungsstudien von F5 verbessern den Schutz von Anwendungen

SEATTLE – F5 hat neue Angebote eingeführt, die eine erweiterte Zugriffssteuerung und dedizierte SSL-Transparenz mit ... >

F5 SSL Orchestrator kommt Kunden dank starker Partnerschaften auch weiterhin zugute

Frank Strobel unterstreicht die Bedeutsamkeit des Partnernetzwerks von F5 für die Steigerung von Sicherheit und Skalierung sowie ... >

F5 Networks gibt die Ergebnisse für das dritte Quartal des Geschäftsjahres 2018 bekannt

SEATTLE – F5 gab heute bekannt, dass das Unternehmen im dritten Quartal des Geschäftsjahres 2018 einen Umsatz in Höhe von 542,2 Mio. USD erzielte, was einem Wachstum von 4,7 % ... >

F5 Networks beruft Michel Combes in den Vorstand

Der Geschäftsführer von Sprint ist eine erfahrene Führungskraft mit 30 Jahren Erfahrung in der Telekommunikations- und Technologiebranche. >


 

Miner und Minions: Datendiebstähle sind nicht der einzige Kostenpunkt für Sie

Sicherlich mag ein Datendiebstahl Sie deutlich mehr kosten (zumindest jetzt), und gewiss rückt er Ihr Versagen ins Rampenlicht (Sie müssen ... >

Open-Source-Spotlight: F5 Eclipse-Plug-in für NetOps

Als Entwickler nutze ich am liebsten den Editor Vim zum Schreiben von Code. Ich weiß, ich weiß. Aber er ist schnell, ich finde mich gut in ihm zurecht und er ist nicht Emacs. (Ja, auch ich ... >

Nutzungsbasiert: BIG-IP VE und Advanced WAF jetzt für Azure Government verfügbar

Diese Instanzen eignen sich hervorragend für Entwicklungs- und Testzwecke. Sie bieten eine wahre cloudnative operative Flexibilität ohne langfristige ... >

Was macht F5 zu einem Marktführer im Bereich WAF?

Brian McHenry befasst sich im Zusammenhang mit einem aktuellen Analystenbericht mit dem mannigfaltigen Spektrum an WAF-Diensten und Sicherheitsfunktionen für Webanwendungen von F5. >

Big Data lügt nicht – aber die Leute, die die Daten eingeben, vielleicht schon

Es gibt einen alten Grundsatz, der uns allen bekannt ist und wie folgt lautet: Der Kunde hat immer recht. In der digitalen Wirtschaft stellt sich jedoch heraus, dass dieser Grundsatz ... >

F5 begrüßt Mary Gardner als Vorstand für Informationssicherheit

SEATTLE – F5 Networks (NASDAQ: FFIV) gab heute bekannt, dass Mary Gardner der Führungsriege des Unternehmens als ... >

Der Container-Jargon-Übersetzer für NetOps

Es gibt Tage, an denen der Jargon, der Ihnen im Zusammenhang mit Containern an den Kopf geworfen wird, Sie fast schon schwindelig werden lässt. Jede einzelne von zugehörigen Lösungen angebotene neue Fähigkeit oder Funktion – ob Service-Mesh ... >

Ausräumen Ihrer Bedenken zur Cloud-Sicherheit mit F5 Advanced WAF in AWS und Azure

Die Virtual Editions schützen Ihre Anwendungen und Daten mit Full-Feature-Parität sowohl in lokalen als auch in Multi-Cloud ... >

Anwendungskapital

Kara Sprague, leitende Vizepräsidentin von F5, skizziert die Weiterentwicklung von physischem und digitalem Kapital, die uns zum jetzigen Punkt geführt hat, an dem Anwendungskapital das wertvollste Gut eines Unternehmens darstellt. >

Bühne frei für die neuen FIPS- und Turbo SSL-Appliances von F5

F5 vervollständigt sein Appliance-Portfolio mit einem noch besseren Preis-Leistungs-Verhältnis sowie verbesserten Sicherheits- und Compliance-Funktionen. >

Unveränderliche Infrastruktur? Nicht ohne eine anwendungsweise Architektur

Im Jahre 2013 wurde uns das Konzept eines unveränderlichen Servers vorgestellt. Ein unveränderlicher Server ist, wie der Begriff „unveränderlich“ bereits vermuten lässt, statisch. Seine Konfiguration ist fix und kann nicht (oder sollte zumindest nicht ... >

Container-Automatisierung fördert reibungslose Anwendungsdienste

Zur Vereinfachung von Entwicklung und Tests haben Anwendungsentwickler unter anderem die Möglichkeit, Container und Mikrodienste für maximale ... >

F5 von einer unabhängigen Forschungsgesellschaft zu einem WAF-Marktführer ernannt

SEATTLE – F5 Networks (NASDAQ: FFIV) gab heute bekannt, dass das Unternehmen im Bericht „The Forrester Wave™: Web ... >

Der Mainstream-Mikrodienst-Wahn: Herausforderungen nehmen zu

Noch vor wenigen Jahren galten Mikrodienste als Kuriosität, die von Entwicklern mit fast schon schwindelnder Aufregung ... >

Zulassen von Änderungen: Kontinuierliches Lernen in der DevOps-Ära

Für den Netzwerkbetrieb können Veränderungen in der Branche sich als recht disruptiv erweisen, während Anwendungsteams fortlaufend Kontrollen und Systeme umgehen, die noch vor Kurzem absolut sinnvoll waren. >

Wirtschaftsspionage: Wie staatlich finanzierte APTs Geheimnisse mit einem Wert in Milliardenhöhe stehlen

Ray Pompon von F5 Labs ergründet, wie der Diebstahl von geistigem Eigentum mit Ihrem morgendlichen Kaffee zusammenhängt – und die USA alljährlich 600 Mrd. USD kostet. >

Die überraschende Wahrheit über die digitale Transformation: Container-Konfusion

Dies ist der letzte Blog in unserer Reihe zu den Herausforderungen, die eine digitale Transformation mit sich bringt. Die überraschende Wahrheit über die digitale Transformation Die überraschende Wahrheit über die digitale Transformation: ... >

BIG-IP Cloud Edition: Der Sicherheitsvorteil anwendungsweiser Architekturen

Anwendungen bringen Risiken mit sich. Anwendungen, die auf andere Anwendungen angewiesen sind, bringen sogar noch größere Risiken mit sich. Zach Westall setzt seine Blog-Reihe zu BIG-IP Cloud Edition ... >

Die überraschende Wahrheit über die digitale Transformation: Skalendefekte

Dies ist der vierte Blog in unserer Reihe zu den Herausforderungen, die eine digitale Transformation mit sich bringt ... >

Der Zustand Ihrer Anwendungen: Analysen in BIG-IP Cloud Edition und BIG-IQ 6.0

Eine genauere Betrachtung der Art und Weise, wie F5 eine anwendungsorientierte Ansicht zu Zustand, Leistung und Sicherheit Ihrer Anwendungen und ... >

Fortgeschrittene Angreifer: unauffällig, geduldig, gefährlich

Verschiedene Vorstände für Informationssicherheit haben erst kürzlich fortgeschrittene, andauernde Bedrohungen (APTs) als persönliche Hauptsorge genannt. Ray Pompon von F5 Labs vermittelt Ihnen einen Einblick in Tipps, Tools ... >

F5 unterstützt nun offiziell Ansible für die Bereitstellung von Anwendungsdiensten

Als Bestandteil des robusten und wachsenden Ansible-Netzwerks bietet F5 nun ein breites Spektrum an Ansible-Modulen zur Automatisierung von Integration ... >

BIG-IP Cloud Edition: Was Sie wissen müssen

BIG-IP Cloud Edition von F5 kann nun bestellt werden. Da Ihnen die allgemeinen Informationen vielleicht schon aus unserer Pressemitteilung bekannt sind, die wir im letzten Monat veröffentlicht haben, werde ich diesen Blog nutzen, um ... >

Bot-Abwehr sollte integraler Bestandteil einer proaktiven Sicherheitsstrategie sein

Wenn wir über den Schutz von Anwendungen sprechen, konzentrieren wir uns zumeist unweigerlich auf Web Application Firewalls. Insbesondere neigen wir dazu, uns auf die OWASP Top Ten und die Schwachstellen auf Anwendungsschicht zu versteifen, die ... >

Ein kurzer Rückblick auf den AWS Public Sector Summit

Alljährlich ist Washington der Schauplatz eines der weltweit größten Treffen für den cloudorientierten öffentlichen Sektor – den von AWS passenderweise ... >

Verfügbarkeit von BIG-IP VE für die US-Nachrichtendienste auf AWS

AWS C2S oder Commercial Cloud Services ist der Name eines Regierungsprogramms und Vertragswerkzeugs, das ... >

Russland greift globale Netzwerkinfrastruktur über Schwachstellen an, die weit über die Ziele hinausgehen

Die technische Warnmeldung US-CERT TL18-106A unterstreicht, wie unsicher Internetsysteme wirklich sind und dass ein Ignorieren des Problems ... >

Die überraschende Wahrheit über die digitale Transformation: Sicherheit schwänzen

Viele IT-Veteranen wird es nicht überraschen, zu hören, dass die Sicherheit im Falle von Problemen mit der Anwendungsleistung zumeist der erste Dienst ist, der schwächelt ... >