From emergency response ambulances to business zoning laws, citizens receive vital and impactful services from federal, state, and local governments. To boost service quality and efficiency, government organizations are deploying and operating digital applications to modernize programs and processes. Public sector organizations are rapidly adopting cloud-based applications to scale capabilities and improve positive outcomes for citizens.
Safeguard Citizen Data
Citizens rely upon government-operated applications to perform some of their most important civic duties. For example, over 91% of American tax returns were e-filed for the 2021 tax year. Storing an enormity of potentially lucrative personal and financial citizen data, public sector organizations are one of cybercriminals’ favorite targets. And 81% of the over 2,700 public sector data breach incidents in 2021 were perpetrated by either system intrusion, miscellaneous errors, or basic web application attacks.
Achieving the most security certifications of any cloud provider, Azure powers many public sector applications that process sensitive citizen data. Pairing NGINX’s application agility and performance with F5’s advanced web application firewall (WAF) technology, government organizations can bolster breach-preventative measures by securing their Azure applications with F5 NGINX App Protect.
Prevent Fraud
Federal, state, and local governments rely upon applications to verify eligibility and manage the distribution of essential services. While convenient for citizens, these applications can be susceptible to fraudulent schemes. California officials reported that they recovered over $1.1 billion in unemployment insurance fraud perpetrated during the COVID-19 pandemic. Fraudsters siphon money out of taxpayer-funded programs with a myriad of methods, including identity theft and using bots to overwhelm systems with faulty credentials
Government organizations can use Azure Cosmos DB, a fully managed and serverless distributed database, to develop high-performance applications that securely and accurately distribute vital services such as unemployment insurance and public pensions. Powered by AI, F5 Distributed Cloud Bot Defense can further safeguard Azure applications by thwarting fraud-perpetrating bots while adding zero friction to citizen user experience.
Empower Interagency Collaboration
In a recently completed pilot program, the Department of Education, NASA, the National Science Foundation, and the Small Business Administration used Microsoft Teams for cross-agency calendar sharing and real-time chat functionality. Increased agency collaboration could boost public sector work efficiencies and catalyze ground-breaking research.
With federal agencies leveraging a litany of Azure solutions, from Azure Virtual Desktops to Azure Synapse Analytics, departments could glean valuable insights and identify potential process improvements if they had ready access to information from other agencies. Co-developed by F5 and Microsoft, F5 NGINX as a Service for Azure applies the industry-leading load balancer to optimize the performance of government applications to meet any potentially increased traffic demands from enhanced interagency collaboration.
Provide Effective and Secure Public Services with F5 and Azure
F5 delivers industry-leading security and performance solutions to power the Azure applications that facilitate essential public services. F5 enables public sector organizations to realize tremendous value from their Azure investments while protecting citizen data, preventing fraud, and promoting cross-agency collaboration.
Available in the Azure Marketplace, F5 solutions can quickly integrate into existing Azure environments and are simple to manage. With flexible consumption models, F5 provides fast time to value for the public sector.
For more information, visit: https://www.f5.com/partners/technology-alliances/microsoft-azure
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