Government agencies stand at the forefront of delivering critical services to the public, often amidst tight budgets, legacy infrastructure, strict compliance mandates, and rapidly evolving cyber threats. As agencies accelerate digital transformation and scale AI initiatives, new challenges emerge for both AIOps and SecOps teams. As large amounts of sensitive data will be processed by AI, it is crucial for the teams to manage this data effectively and efficiently in a timely manner.
With the introduction of F5 AI Guardrails and F5 AI Red Team, F5 is raising the bar for trusted, secure, and intelligent application delivery and security. Engineered for the AI era, the F5 Application Delivery and Security Platform (ADSP) empowers agencies with the control and insights they need to protect sensitive data and ensure public service apps are always available and secure.
Unlocking safe, responsible AI
For government AIOps teams, adopting AI is not only about efficiency. They must also ensure that every step forward is on solid ground. F5 AI runtime security solutions add large language model (LLM) model security and observability, model-agnostic policy enforcement, and shadow AI detection to F5 ADSP.
This helps agencies ensure compliance by enforcing policy guardrails and conducting audits of AI interactions to align all practices with privacy, ethical, and regulatory standards, while safeguarding the integrity of public data. Detecting and preventing shadow AI involves identifying any unauthorized or unmonitored use of AI and mitigating these risks through centralized visibility and control across departments and distributed environments.
“AI runtime security solutions from F5 help public sector agencies unlock safe, responsible AI by ensuring compliance and alignment with privacy, ethical, and regulatory standards while safeguarding the integrity of public data.”
AI guardrails serve as a safety mechanism to guarantee AI systems remain secure and function as intended, helping organizations reduce risk as they leverage AI responsibly. Securing AI data-source connectivity establishes reliable connections for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), which, in turn, enables more accurate inference outcomes with minimal latency.
As a result, AIOps teams can deploy, monitor, and secure AI-powered workflows across hybrid multicloud environments without compromising compliance, control, or mission outcomes.
Strengthening security in the AI era
For SecOps professionals, the convergence of legacy apps, APIs, and modern AI workflows expands the attack surface for bad actors. Traditional defenses alone can’t keep pace with sophisticated, AI-driven threats. Some AI models are more susceptible to jailbreak attacks, while others may have higher vulnerability to specific prompt injection techniques, distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, and so on. That risk profile changes dramatically with every new model version or fine-tuning.
Multiply this phenomenon to nation-state scale with multiple agencies, each with varying security standards, thousands of models in production, and little uniformity across model provider guardrails, and the result is untenable. The integration of F5 AI runtime security capabilities enables public sector organizations to protect any AI model or app from data leakage and misuse.
Key benefits for agencies include end-to-end protection through integrated LLM model security and observability, comprehensive API safeguards, and secure AI model inference, all unified with robust bot and DDoS defenses. In addition, adaptive, automated mitigation is achieved by implementing layered defenses and unified policies, allowing teams to respond in real time to new threats and maintain the availability and security of essential services.
Other benefits include comprehensive visibility, which is provided by deep observability and unified logging, to deliver actionable insights throughout distributed environments for accelerated response and continuous operational improvement. Zero trust, policy-driven controls also ensure consistent protection of sensitive intellectual property and citizen data across hybrid multicloud deployments.
Scale AI with high-performance delivery
Scaling AI requires high-performance networking, advanced traffic management, and robust security. F5 ADSP streamlines AI data ingestion and accelerates delivery so agencies can do more with constrained budgets, including:
- Optimize GPU utilization. Intelligent traffic management and adaptive load balancing eliminate data pipeline bottlenecks and shorten model training and inference cycles.
- Reduce congestion and sprawl. Consolidate into a unified network ingress tier for lower complexity, operational overhead, and total cost of ownership.
- Accelerate data throughput. High-throughput data ingestion optimized with hardware acceleration—including F5 VELOS systems and F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM), as well as deployments on NVIDIA BlueField3 DPUs—supports ultra-low latency at scale.
F5 AI runtime security: Ideal for the public sector
F5 has a great track record. It’s trusted by organizations in over 170 countries, protects apps for over 80% of global Fortune 500 businesses, and blocked 20 billion malicious attacks last year. F5 AI security empowers public agencies to scale AI initiatives with confidence.
F5 AI runtime security solutions provide a converged platform deployable in any form factor across distributed environments. These solutions also provide programmability to automate security policy management with unified telemetry, and offer auditable controls for AI deployments based on zero trust principles.
Deploy trustworthy AI with less risk
As digital government accelerates and AI adoption expands, public sector teams need solutions that make AI both trustworthy and fast, with strong governance, transparency, and compliance, and the ability to move quickly from pilot to production.
With the right platforms and operating practices, agencies can standardize how models are evaluated, monitored, and improved, while protecting sensitive data and ensuring responsible use. AIOps and SecOps leaders can deploy and scale AI-powered services confidently. F5 AI runtime security solutions enable reliable, mission-ready AI services that deliver measurable outcomes without sacrificing risk management or public trust.
Learn more about F5 AI runtime security solutions. F5 can also help your organization deliver smarter and more secure public services: Learn how.
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