In the modern cloud era, enterprises have evolved beyond delivering network-based services from the confines of physical data centers.
As cloud adoption has increased, many "cloud-adjacent" vendors have emerged, using remote caching to extend content delivery. These caches allow for the extension of the enterprise edge deeper into remote markets, enabling companies to serve static content from origins closer to their users, reducing latency and improving the customer experience. The content delivery network (CDN) has quickly evolved as an essential mechanism to deliver video and other static content efficiently at scale.
Adapting to new requirements
The adoption of CDN services by enterprise organizations has enabled them to extend their global reach. But new data sovereignty regulations require solutions designed to deliver enhanced data residency and privacy capabilities.
As a result, enterprises have begun to rearchitect their solutions to utilize dynamic applications at the edge with new edge compute capabilities from third-party infrastructure providers. This has empowered enterprises to cost-effectively increase the global reach of their applications using third-party infrastructure, overlay frameworks, and hybrid topologies spanning on-premises, public, and private infrastructures.
F5's transformation and growth
F5 has a longstanding reputation for delivering enterprise-grade load balancing and security solutions for traditional data centers.
After its early years of being largely a hardware-focused company, today more than half of F5's revenue is derived from software, consumed either via self-management or SaaS. To meet this new market opportunity, F5 has evolved its portfolio to include SaaS as a key growth driver for the company.
In 2022, F5 launched F5 Distributed Cloud Services—a cloud-native, SaaS-delivered portfolio of application delivery and security services.
Scaling and enhancing the network
F5 leverages a private global fiber network to deliver SaaS services. This network, along with its points of presence (PoPs), is ranked among the top 10 interconnected networks globally, according to Hurricane Electric, an international Internet services provider.
With direct fiber connectivity and extensive peering at leading cloud exchange points, F5 delivers high-performance connectivity with low latency and increased privacy. F5's strength lies in its peering capacity, which is actively expanding through strategic relationships with industry stalwarts such as Lumen, Tata, NTT, Arelion, Telstra, and Telxius.
Further, peering relationships with leading network providers in South America, the Middle East, and Asia extend the F5 footprint into growing markets. This footprint enables F5 to scale its SaaS services while maintaining performance and privacy, leveraging these strategic partnerships.
Delivering extensible and flexible solutions
The F5 Distributed Cloud Platform offers unrivaled extensibility. Services such as multicloud networking (MCN), enhanced CDN, and customer edge (CE) deployments enable customers to mirror or extend their presence and capability into remote third-party environments using hybrid, heterogenous topologies.
As customers repatriate workloads from public cloud providers, these hybrid deployments are becoming critical to enterprise service delivery. A CE is a lightweight node or software deployment that can be placed anywhere—on-premises, remote data centers, private/public clouds, or even remote network edges. This reduces dependence on traditional data centers and allows customers to control data in managed environments while leveraging F5's globally distributed network and console.
A CE in a public cloud allows Distributed Cloud Services customers to leverage public cloud regions to securely increase reach. F5 also uses nodes in public clouds to complement its physical PoP infrastructure, providing increased flexibility and service deployment velocity, ensuring swift and reliable application and content delivery using any cloud provider or region.
By combining physical PoPs with cloud nodes, F5 offers a resilient, secure, and adaptive service portfolio with availability wherever workloads need to run.
Conclusion
F5’s global network connectivity is central to the cloud transformation success of its customers and the Distributed Cloud Platform. With an extensive, secure network spanning multiple continents and infrastructure providers, all managed through the Distributed Cloud Console, F5 delivers superior performance for customer applications and security services.
As F5 continues to expand its SaaS capabilities, it remains well-positioned to meet the evolving demands of the digital era, providing exceptional value and service to customers worldwide.
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