AI has been a transformative and polarizing force, ushering in ground-breaking innovations as well as widespread societal risks. As the use of generative AI (GenAI) and large language models (LLMs) become mainstream, many organizations find themselves perplexed but under pressure to embrace the latest AI-driven technology to remain relevant while navigating ongoing security concerns.
The AWS re:Inforce 2024 conference this month aims to help businesses along this journey with an immersive cloud security event designed to educate, plan for, and reduce risks in the GenAI era. In this blog, we spotlight three major themes surrounding this year’s event, plus what to expect and how F5 complements AWS investments for secure AI adoption in the cloud.
Generative AI
Generative AI is sure to dominate this year’s AWS re:Inforce event. While its meteoric rise has already propelled early adopters to leverage new forms of innovation and competitive advantages, we still have much to learn about the potential dangers of AI. From cyber threats to intellectual property exposure, businesses need a strong culture of security to help mitigate the risk of investing in the next generation of GenAI and LLMs.
AWS keynote speakers and industry practitioners are expected to share best practices on establishing a secure foundation for generative AI adoption, implementing parameters for its safe and ethical use, and how to build the next generation of AI workloads on AWS.
This could include applying generative AI to bolster security operations and incident response efforts using predictive capabilities and intelligence-driven insights. F5 has been at the forefront of this practice as we make AI pervasive across our portfolio of security solutions. The recent launch of our new data platform, F5 AI Data Fabric, helps illuminate how GenAI and LLMs can be applied to train data models faster, significantly reduce detection times, and run inference to better secure and optimize apps.
API security
APIs are the backbone of modern app development and have dramatically grown in recent months due to the number of applications now incorporating AI and ML models. Yet, as API footprints rapidly expand, many businesses still struggle to keep their critical interfaces secure from advanced and persistent threats. AWS re:Inforce 2024 seeks to address these concerns with several deep-dive sessions about using AWS propriety tools, configurations, and automation to protect growing API layers in Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) and cloud-hosted apps.
The discussion will also focus on securing APIs outside the AWS ecosystem as the complexity of protecting and powering applications across multicloud, on premises, and edge applications grows. F5 has equipped businesses to confront this challenge with our leading F5 Distributed Cloud Services platform—offering a single, AI-ready solution for API discovery, testing, posture management, and runtime protection of distributed app environments.
These capabilities were further enhanced by recent F5 acquisition of Wib technology, an investment bringing observability and vulnerability detection to application development processes and ensuring that risks are identified and policies implemented before APIs enter production.
Cyber defense
Not surprisingly, another emphasis of AWS re:Inforce 2024 will be on securing applications from emerging cyberattacks. Businesses across all sectors and markets seek to embrace AI while mitigating ever-evolving threats.
AWS boasts a deep lineup of sessions highlighting the latest tools and innovations to enforce cybersecurity while developing, supporting, or integrating AI-powered apps on the AWS platform. Included will be how to apply modern defenses to deter new waves of automated and sophisticated attacks—a daunting task that F5 sets up customers to take on with our robust protection for business-critical applications running in the AWS cloud and beyond.
For more security-sensitive organizations, F5 Distributed Cloud Web App and API Protection (WAAP) enhances the AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF) to dramatically boost security effectiveness while reducing the operational overhead of writing or managing multiple custom rules. With this combination, you can broadly prevent OWASP Top 10, API-level, DDoS, and DNS threats across AWS and other environments, all from a single platform.
F5 and AWS have also collaborated to enable the seamless delivery of F5 Distributed Cloud Bot Defense for Amazon CloudFront CDN to eliminate unwanted bot traffic and attacks while rapidly discovering and keeping pace with fraudster retooling.
Secure your generative AI journey with F5 and AWS
As the landscape of AI continues to evolve, organizations face the problem of harnessing its transformative potential while mitigating associated risks. AWS re:Inforce 2024 offers much-needed guidance to help businesses navigate this complex terrain and establish a robust security posture in the GenAI era.
F5 and AWS comprehensive security solutions empower businesses to derisk current investments, fortify their defenses in the cloud, and confidently adopt the next generation of AI innovations.
For more information on F5 services on AWS, please visit f5.com/aws.
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