Office of the CTO

What is F5’s latest thinking?

Securing digital experiences without disrupting business is more than a technology challenge: it’s a matter of survival. However, today’s apps are built on multiple architectures, distributed over various cloud environments, and connected by an exploding number of APIs. This unprecedented level of complexity requires more skill and resources to manage, and creates more points of vulnerability.

Stay up to date on the latest trends in app and API protection, secure multicloud networking, the future of application services, technology and architectures evolving from the transition to an AI-assisted future, and insights into emerging technologies and threats with articles and blogs from the Office of the CTO.

BLOG | Lori Macvittie

API Security: Programmability Is Required

Programmability is essential for API security, enabling testing, threat mitigation, seamless upgrades, and integration. It’s crucial for handling zero-day vulnerabilities.

BLOG | Oscar Spencer

Why Should You Care About WebAssembly

WebAssemby (Wasm) is a portable, fast, and secure binary instruction set enabling high-performance applications on any platform.

BLOG | Lori Macvittie

State of Application Strategy: Who Should Drive Your API Security Strategy?

The most comprehensive security controls are achieved when organizations assign API security to these teams. Make sure your APIs are protected from attacks.

BLOG | Lori Macvittie

AI Changes Nothing and Everything

AI's impact on app delivery and security is nuanced: while AI apps use the same security and delivery services, architectural changes necessitate new deployment strategies.

BLOG | Lori Macvittie

Hybrid: The Future of Application Delivery and Security

Explore hybrid IT and how application delivery and security strategies need to flex to accommodate architecture needs across different enterprises.

BLOG | Lori Macvittie

Application Delivery and Security for AI Applications: Navigating Modern AI Architecture

Discover how generative AI applications and API security are shaping modern application delivery and security.

BLOG | Lori Macvittie

A Comprehensive Guide to Delivery and Security for AI Applications

Explore optimal strategies for securing and delivering AI Applications.

Easing the tension between data security and automation

Automation vs. data security tension can be eased with timely credential renewals or least privilege service credentials, treating automation as a special user type within enterprise governance.

BLOG | Lori Macvittie

State of Digital Enterprise Maturity: Not Done with Digital Transformation Yet

Dive into how AI impacts businesses, uses of generative AI, tactics for modernizing IT operations, and the benefits of digital maturity with F5.

BLOG | Lori Macvittie

Understanding AI Application Architecture

Dive into AI application architecture, new components like vector databases, and operational impacts of deploying AI models and cloud AI services.

Gen AI Apps: Moving from experiment to production

Generative AI applications have potential for enhancing productivity and profits, but transitioning from experimental to production stages requires companies to navigate through a maze of ethical, legal, and technical hurdles. Find out how to reap the benefits of rapidly evolving AI.

Crucial Concepts in AI: Transparency and Explainability

While transparency and explainability are imperative to building trust in AI so that businesses can reap the benefits of the technology, neither of these are the responsibility of AI security.

BLOG | Lori Macvittie

The Need for AI Infrastructure Solutions to Focus on GPU Optimization

Discover how AI infrastructure solutions are needed to scale AI and optimize GPU utilization.

BLOG | Lori Macvittie

No “One Model to Rule Them All” with Generative AI

Three AI deployment patterns are emerging, each with their own operational responsibilities and trade-offs. The choice of model and deployment pattern should be strategic while acknowledging the fast-evolving landscape of generative AI for enterprises.

BLOG | Lori Macvittie

Three Things You Should Know about AI Applications

AI applications are modern apps, but they do have differences. Learn the key things to know when it comes to AI-powered applications.

BLOG | Lori Macvittie

F5 is Scaling AI Inference from the Inside Out

Don't let GPU resources sit idle, build out scalable and secure AI compute complexes with the right hardware that lets inferencing inference.

BLOG | Lori Macvittie

F5 is Scaling AI Inference from the Inside Out

Don't let GPU resources sit idle, build out scalable and secure AI compute complexes with the right hardware that lets inferencing inference.

BLOG | Lori Macvittie

The Impact of AI Inferencing on Data Center Architecture

To support the full AI life cycle, organizations will require significant updates in their architecture—specifically changes in the network. Failure to do so may lead to the inability scale and unreliable operations.

BLOG | Lori Macvittie

State of AI Application Strategy: Digital Maturity or Madness

Explore F5's 'State of AI Application Strategy', focusing on enterprise AI adoption, security concerns, technology stack, and model management practices.

BLOG | Chris Hain

AI Inference Patterns

AI inference services enable AI access for developers, and can be consumed in a variety of ways. Key patterns include SaaS, Cloud Managed, and Self-Managed, each with unique trade-offs in scalability, cost, and data control.

BLOG | Lori Macvittie

Generative AI’s Impact on Application Performance

Explore the impact of generative AI on latency, user experience, performance metrics, and the broader consequences of AI that could impact your applications.

BLOG | Lori Macvittie

State of Application Strategy 2024: Generative AI Redefines Automation Evolution

Explore how generative AI is revolutionizing automation strategies, accelerating digital transformation, optimizing delivery, and addressing AIOps challenges.

BLOG | Lori Macvittie

State of Application Strategy 2024: Exploring Hybrid IT Trends

Dive into the State of Application Strategy report to understand the latest hybrid IT trends, statistics, and benefits shaping enterprise landscapes in 2024.

BLOG | Lori Macvittie

From Conventional to Conversational: How Generative AI Applications Transform Digital Interactions

Discover how AI applications reshape interactions via unstructured data and conversational interfaces and learn how to tackle generative AI challenges.

BLOG | Lori Macvittie

Generative AI & Emerging Data Types Impact App Architecture

Explore the impact of generative AI & emerging data types on app architecture. Learn how APIs, knowledge graphs, & telemetry data fuel digital transformation.

BLOG | Lori Macvittie

State of Application Strategy 2024: The Impact of Digital Services

Explore the decisive trends shaping our world in the 2024 State of Application Strategy, emphasizing digital transformation's role in driving the adoption of digital services.

BLOG | LAURENT QUEREL & GILAD BRACHA

Transforming the Web: The End of Silos

The way we use the internet is about to change in a big way. The shift towards a more unified and efficient web navigation method is a big leap from the traditional siloed web browsing we’ve gotten used to.

BLOG | Lori Macvittie

How Generative AI Accelerates Digital Transformation

See how Generative AI catalyzes enterprise digital transformation, accelerating trends like API integration, hybrid IT operating model challenges & AIOps shift.

BLOG | Lori Macvittie

App vs. API Security? Bots don't care. Defend Your Digital Assets

Discover why bot security for both apps and APIs is crucial. Learn strategies to detect and prevent bot attacks in your organization's digital environment.

BLOG | Lori Macvittie

Protecting API Endpoints Makes APIs Hard to Secure

Explore the complexities of API security, why organizations face challenges, evolving API endpoint attacks, and the need for tailored security policies.

BLOG | Lori Macvittie

Prompt Engineering is Producing Natural Language Algorithms

As prompt engineering evolves, the techniques being produced are transforming into natural language algorithms for effective AI communication. 

LORI MACVITTIE

Solving for Security and Reliability of Generative AI

Generative AI comes with benefits, but also with risks. Get valuable insights to solve for AI security and reliability with the data that it handles.

BLOG | Lori Macvittie

Data Masking and How It Differs from Data Leak Prevention

Explore the differences between data masking and data leak prevention strategies and learn about the emerging role of data masking in the era of generative AI.

BLOG | Lori Macvittie

eBPF: Revolutionizing Security and Observability in 2023

Discover eBPF's impact on security and observability, strategic choice for enterprise cost-cutting, visibility boost, and fueling AI data pipelines.

BLOG | Maxwell Wynter

Mitigating AI Hallucinations and Protecting Privacy with GraphQL

Learn how we're garnering insights from Generative AI while minimizing hallucinations and addressing data privacy concerns with the use of GraphQL. 

ARTICLE | lori macvittie

F5 2024 Technology Outlook

Generative AI's impact on the market has been seismic, but there's another trend on the rise for 2024—the convergence of security and observability—and four technologies accelerating it.

BLOG | Sam Bisbee

Common Cybersecurity Awareness Myths

Don't fall prey to common cybersecurity awareness myths and misconceptions. Instead, use a data-driven, risk-aware approach to security education and help your teams make informed decisions when it comes to the usage of email links, public-WiFi, and USB charging.

BLOG | lori macVittie

AIOps solutions need both traditional AI and generative AI

AIOps solutions need a combined approach of both traditional AI and generative AI to reach their full potential. Learn more about the future of AIOps.

BLOG | lori macVittie

Supercloud Simplicity Via Multi-Cloud Networking

Supercloud is more than a buzzword. It’s a vision of simplicity that starts with multi-cloud networking to enable hybrid IT across cloud providers.

BLOG | lori macVittie

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.

BLOG | lori macVittie

The Case for Integrated App and API Security Strategies

Discover the key differences between app and API security, and why an integrated strategy is the way forward. Learn about shared risks, unique challenges, and how combining solutions streamlines operations and increases response speed.

ARTICLE | lori macVittie

App delivery patterns for scaling apps and APIs

Load balancing algorithms play a vital role in application delivery, but the overall architectural approach has a greater impact on performance and scale. Explore various modern capabilities and application delivery patterns to enhance customer satisfaction, conversion rates, and revenue generation from your digital services.

BLOG | lori macVittie

Generative AI and the Urgency to Accelerate Digital Transformation

Discover the impact of generative AI on organizations and the urgency to accelerate digital transformation. Download the full report by F5 to learn more.

BLOG | lori macVittie

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.

BLOG | ADITYA SOOD, BHARATHASIMHA REDDY, AMIT NAGAL

F5 Published Cybersecurity Research: Performance and Effectiveness on ML/AI Frameworks

Solve cybersecurity challenges in a fast and scalable way with F5 research that looks at the effectiveness and performance of ML/AI frameworks.

BLOG | TABITHA R. R. POWELL

Digital Business Maps to Observability and Automation

Digital business can't thrive when restricted to the limits of human scale. Observability and Automation are the solution to enabling real-time insight and action and must be included as core capabilities in modernized enterprise architectures.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

Apache Arrow and OpenTelemetry: How open source fuels observability

Observability relies on data points from the entire IT stack, but transporting and process that data is cumbersome and costly. Open source projects and standards are contributing significant advantages to speed and efficiency for telemetry processing.

BLOG | KEN ARORA

Zero Trust: Three Key Strategic Components of Assume Breach

Breaches and failures occur. Cybersecurity professionals must embrace the ZT principle of assume breach to internalize what other professions have long understood.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

Telemetry and Digital Business

Leverage telemetry data to go beyond application monitoring and observability. Learn the importance of this in a maturing digital business and IT modernization.

BLOG | SAM BISBEE

Whether to Allow and Adopt AI with Lessons from the Public Cloud

AI adoption is imminent and could be critical to remaining competitive. This means security must be proactive and get ahead of AI adoption now to guide it along a risk-appropriate path.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

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

Security services are being increasingly deployed off-premises as organizations recognize SECaaS benefits speed twofold—for performance speed and speed to address emerging threats.

BLOG | TABITHA R. R. POWELL

Modern App Delivery Sets Stage for Digital Business Success

App delivery and security needs to be incorporated into the design process, rather than viewed as individual component decisions to be made after the fact, or businesses risk eliciting poor digital experiences.

BLOG | GENG LIN

Multi-Cloud Networking: Challenges and Opportunities

F5 knew it couldn’t approach a multi-cloud world with a legacy mindset. And because our customers' digital journeys involve the evolution from traditional data centers to cloud to edge architectures, we meet them where they are and invest in the capabilities that will give them the resilience and agility to grow with confidence.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

State of App Strategy 2023: Cost and Complexity Top Drivers of Multi-Cloud Networking

Multi-cloud networking solutions spur excitement in industry with seamless and secure interconnection solutions across core, cloud, and edge, as it looks to solve the challenges of today's hybrid IT.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

What is AI Bias and Why It Matters to IT?

Learn about the basis of AI learning. See how bias can develop in AI, and the risks it poses for IT and digital transformation.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

State of App Strategy 2023: Digital Transformation Journey Is Finally Paying Off

Learn about the digital transformation journey progress across organizations, as we give a sneak peek into F5's State of Application Strategy report for 2023.

Blog | TABITHA R. R. POWELL

All Digital Assets Secure within Modern Enterprise Architectures

Digital assets should have layers of protection proportional to their value, enabling a risk versus reward security approach that is supported by modern enterprise architectures. 

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

What is Generative AI and is it the Way to AIOps?

Discover generative AI and explore how this new technology could kick off the way to AIOps. It has broader applications than simply writing high school essays.

BLOG | GILAD BRACHA, MICHAEL FICARRA, LAURENT QUEREL

Beyond the C

The C family programming languages have been the standard for systems code for decades, but they're memory unsafe. Lack of memory safety is the largest single source of security vulnerabilities in software and its urgent the industry moves to memory safe languages for new system code.

Blog | TABITHA R. R. POWELL

SRE Brings Modern Enterprise Architectures into Focus

The siloes experienced by business and IT can be bridged with the incorporation of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) into modern enterprise architectures, thereby supporting the transformation journey into an efficient and scalable digital business.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

What Hybrid IT Means for App and API Security

The year 2022 will be remembered as the year the industry finally reconciled itself to the fact that IT is and will be for the foreseeable future, hybrid. The question is, what does that mean for security and, specifically, for app and API security.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

You Can’t Build a Digital Experience

Experience is based on perspective, and since you can't build perspective, focus needs to be directed toward architecting a digital service that addresses the technical requirements of a positive digital experience: availability, security, and performance.

BLOG | GENG LIN

Six Technical Capabilities to Accelerate Digital Transformation

Today's enterprise architectures lack the necessary factors of agility, scale, security, and observability, which are key to driving technological change, but these six core capabilities will help businesses manage risk and challenges throughout their digital transformation.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

Using AI for IT Automation Security

Learn how artificial intelligence and machine learning aid in mitigating cybersecurity threats to your IT automation processes.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

Headless architecture is on the rise

The explosive and expansive use of APIs is contributing to the rise of headless architecture and providing GraphQL a prominent place in this neomodern application architecture.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

What is a Digital Service?

Businesses are on a digital transformation journey and the quality of their digital services impact the digital experience of their consumers—be it human, software, or system. App delivery and security is critical to supporting these digital services and enabling companies to compete in a digital world.

Blog | TABITHA R. R. POWELL

Modern Hardware Enables Digital Business to Scale

Today’s xPU technology is the enabler for economies of scale because it exponentially improves performance and drives digital transformation through a specialized piece of hardware that contains specific acceleration functions in silicon that are meaningful to networking and applications. But to leverage the maximized computing and processing power of xPUs, organizations need to modernize their enterprise architecture around their applications.

BLOG | SAM BISBEE

Reframing the Cybersecurity Talent Shortage

Measures being taken to address the shortage of cyber security professionals need to be corrected. There's a leadership shortage, not a talent shortage. Organizations need to address these challenges by creating actionable plans to foster the sustainability of their security programs and people.

BLOG | RAJESH NARAYANAN

Inverting the API is the Digital Transformation that Enterprises Need to Participate and Compete in an API Economy

Organizations hold latent value—in the form of internal APIs—that they need to tap into in order to compete in an API economy. While security and technical challenges deter some, businesses need to recognize that inverting their APIs will unlock the value of the enterprise as a platform.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

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.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

What is Confidential Computing and Why is it Important?

The whole technology industry shares interest in confidential computing and establishing standards due to its ability to protect sensitive data where cryptography falls short—in processing. Its design will be the enabler of securely leveraging the benefits of cloud and edge infrastructure.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

Security Rule Zero is a Core Component of Zero Trust

Security Rule Zero is a core component of Zero Trust and leads to more efficient, safer services and APIs.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

Modernizing IT Starts with Infrastructure

Hardware and software have evolved rapidly since the early days of the internet, but to take full advantage of their ensuing benefits organizations must evaluate and modernize their infrastructure and app delivery. Accelerate modernization efforts with our new F5 rSeries.

BLOG | TABITHA R. R. POWELL

Enterprise Architecture Must Evolve for Digital Transformation

Organizations face friction on their digital transformation journeys that can only be addressed with a modernized enterprise architecture.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

The Curious Connection Between Cloud Repatriation and SRE Operations

While the topic of public cloud repatriation may be taboo, more organizations are doing it. And our research and data indicate companies applying SRE practices are the most significant 'offenders.'

Blog | Lori Macvittie

The Commodification of Cloud

Public cloud is no longer the bright new shiny toy, but it paved the way for XaaS, Edge, and a new cycle of innovation.

BLOG | JAMES HENDERGART

eBPF: It's all about observability

Full-stack observability is possible today, but at a price: cost efficiency and efficacy. eBPF is about to become ubiquitous - supporting Linux and Windows - and change that equation in the process.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

State of Application Strategy 2022: Security Shifts to Identity

Evidence shows a significant shift toward identity-based security, driven by accelerated transformation and the growing importance of APIs. The end result is the eager embrace of Zero Trust as a foundational approach to security.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

State of Application Strategy 2022: Edge Workloads Expanding to Apps and Data

Many organizations are planning to deploy data and app distribution workloads at the edge, but to do that will require an edge application platform capable of supporting those workloads. That platform will need to meet the needs of new application patterns and focus on both the ops experience and flow of data and control.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

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. 

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

Meet the Minds behind F5’s Advanced Threat Research Center of Excellence (ATRCoE)

Not even the stealthiest threats can hide from F5's Advanced Threat Research Center of Excellence. The team conducts rigorous research to unravel the details of today's cybersecurity threats and then shares their insights to help shut them down.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

The Move to Modernize Ops Will Increase the Need for Software Supply Chain Security

Existing security for the software supply chain is lacking, and it's only going to get worse as organizations modernize ops with SRE approaches. Organizations wanting to survive their digital transformation journey should take this deficit seriously, incorporating secure software supply chain approaches to tooling and operational software from the start.

BLOG | KEN ARORA

What Hollywood Taught Me about Zero Trust

If the intergalactic spacecrafts from our favorite sci-fi shows were to incorporate the core beliefs of Zero Trust when securing their critical systems, they would have successfully prevented a substantial amount of systems attacks and malfunctions.

BLOG | KEN ARORA

What Hollywood Taught Me about Zero Trust

If the intergalactic spacecrafts from our favorite sci-fi shows were to incorporate the core beliefs of Zero Trust when securing their critical systems, they would have successfully prevented a substantial amount of systems attacks and malfunctions.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

State of Application Strategy 2022: Multi-Cloud Complexity Continues

Complexity is synonymous with operating in multiple clouds. Magnified by the use of APIs and the increasing skills and tools deficit, this complexity isn't going away, but it can be managed.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

Modernizing IT: An Enterprise Architecture for Digital Business

The enterprise architecture frameworks used by business, established nearly half a century ago, are not sufficient to support today's digital transformation. To successfully become a digital business, business and IT need to modernize their enterprise architecture.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

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.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

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. 

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

F5 to Demonstrate Advanced Threat Research at NVIDIA GTC

Traditional cybersecurity methods and tools are falling behind as a digital world offers nearly unlimited targets for attackers. Security companies need to capitalize on new hardware and technologies that leverage AI/ML for real-time detection and mitigation of threats at scale.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

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.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

The Cost of Data Bias is Shared by IT and the Business

Operating a digital business requires analysis of data for insights. Data bias - the opinionated collection of data - impacts the ability to glean insights for performance, availability, and security, resulting in missed or "false" insights. To achieve a fully digital business, IT and business must develop a data and observability strategy.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

Legal functions are finally a priority for digital transformation in 2022

Digital business functions are just as critical to supporting customer experience and legal is starting to get the much-needed attention it deserves. Organizations far along their digital transformation journey are taking a step back to phase one, addressing functions that have remained manual through recent rapid digitization.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

The Need for the Evolution of Operations

In a digital as default world, operations is still too reliant on manual methods and needs to evolve to enable adaptive applications. This evolution requires significant change across all of IT. It needs AI-enabled adaptability that will maintain availability, optimize performance, and ensure security.

BLOG | ADVANCED THREAT RESEARCH CENTER OF EXCELLENCE

Advanced Threat Research: Dissecting the Russian Origin Collector-Stealer Malware

Collector-stealer is an active piece of malware used across the globe. It uses a variety of mechanisms to infiltrate user systems and quietly steal sensitive data. Our security experts have uncovered its secrets and expose how it works in this latest threat research.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

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.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

FinTechs grow in popularity amongst consumers and criminal organizations

As the digital economy grows so does the processing of payments through financial services institutions, and malicious actors are taking notice of the lucrative opportunities this presents. The digital payment ecosystem relies on the use of APIs to facilitate digital financial transactions and the number of API security incidents are growing yearly. Digital firms, especially those in financial services, need to increase focus on securing their APIs to protect their customers and business.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

CX is a human-first approach to technology

Assuming customer experience correlates only to uptime is a faux pax. CX 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 pertinent to the development lifecycle.

BLOG | RAJESH NARAYANAN & LORI MACVITTIE

Digital Transformation Danger Ahead: API Sprawl

Enterprises are naturally siloed with information shared on a need-to-know basis. As enterprises expand, so do the various business units, product teams, and operational teams. In essence, the business sprawls, limiting overall effectiveness and efficiency. Because teams and business units today rely significantly on APIs, a similar effect is nearly inevitable: API sprawl.

BLOG | RENUKA NADKARNI & ASH BHALGAT, NVIDIA

Redefining Cybersecurity at the Distributed Cloud Edge with AI and Real-time Telemetry

Digital transformation and adoption of Cloud technologies is causing changes in application architectures. These changes introduce new attack surfaces, which are being targeted by advanced, highly organized, and financially driven attack methods. Utilizing NVIDIA's Morpheus framework, F5 is researching techniques to detect these advanced threats with real-time telemetry and AI-powered analytics.

BLOG | Geng Lin

Multiple Clouds Versus Multi-Cloud

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.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

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.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

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.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

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.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

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.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

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.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

CX is Just the Tip of the DX Iceberg

Savvy CIOs know that the interface is just that: a means to a much more comprehensive digital experience that crosses functional and organizational boundaries. With most organizations firmly entrenched in the second phase of digital transformation—digital expansion—the need to digitize the entire enterprise architecture should be clearly rising as an inevitability.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

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.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

The role of cloud in edge-native applications

It should be no surprise that just as the emergence of cloud gave us cloud-native applications, edge is driving a set of edge-native applications. These applications, however, will not reside solely at the edge. Simultaneously, new architectural patterns are emerging that take advantage of applications residing in the cloud and data center.

BLOG | KEN ARORA

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 towards what is becoming the application edge.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

The Edge Use Case You’ve Been Waiting For

Let’s say your cat has wandered off. You can’t find them anywhere and tasty treats are not working their magic today. Then imagine that you could leverage the video doorbells in your neighborhood—i.e., idle compute and processing power from endpoints and nodes at the edge—to find them.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

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.

BLOG | RENUKA NADKARNI

Secure the FDX API to Defend Data in Open Banking

Cybercriminals targeting the financial services sector are focusing more of their attacks on application programming interfaces (APIs). At the same time, different development teams working on multiple applications often use disparate tool sets, pointing to the increasing importance of industry standards. F5 works closely with financial services customers worldwide to implement and secure the APIs driving open banking.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

Increasing Diversity of Location and Users is Driving Business to the Edge

User, within the context of the application domain, has always referred to the entity that interacts with an application. Just as shifts in application architectures drive changes in the technologies that deliver and secure them, shifts in the definition of user have driven changes in where apps are deployed.

BLOG | Geng Lin

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.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

Modernizing our Perspective: Applications versus Experiences

Like Greek and Roman gods, multiple manifestations of the same persona are evident throughout many mythologies. At the core, each incarnation is a new face to an existing persona. A similar reality is true in the digital world; what we call “applications” can often be considered as incarnations of existing functionality.

BLOG | Geng Lin

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.

BLOG | KEN ARORA

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).

BLOG | Geng Lin

Fighting for a Radically Inclusive World

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.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

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.

BLOG | Geng Lin

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.

BLOG | MARTIN DUKE

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.

BLOG | Geng Lin

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.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

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.

BLOG | KEN ARORA

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.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

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.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

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.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

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.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

Musings on Monitoring after App Modernization

Whether through a mobile app using APIs to interface with an existing monolithic mainframe app or via message queues that connect Slack to a traditional client-server based customer service application, the task facing enterprise IT today is not merely to transform monoliths to microservices, but to make microservices talk to monoliths.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

Edge is Driving an Infrastructure Renaissance

As organizations ramp up their generation of data and seek to extract business value from it, analytics 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. 

BLOG | Ken Arora

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.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

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.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

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.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

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.

BLOG | JASON FELDT

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.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

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.

BLOG | RENUKA NADKARNI

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.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

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.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

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 business 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.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

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.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

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.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

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.

BLOG | KEN ARORA

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.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

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.

BLOG | Geng Lin

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

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. 

BLOG | MICHAEL WILEY & LORI MACVITTIE

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.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

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.

BLOG | RENUKA NADKARNI

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. This article highlights established best practices that can help both businesses and consumers protect themselves.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

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.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

Optimizing Remote Access to Support WFH during COVID-19

The 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.

BLOG | KEN ARORA

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

"Data is the new oil" or "Data is the grease of the digital economy." If you're like me, you've probably heard these phrases, or perhaps even the more business school-esque phrase "data exhaust monetization," to the point of being clichés. But like all good clichés, they are grounded in a fundamental truth, or in this case, in a complementary pair of truths.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

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.

BLOG | JOEL MOSES

AI and the Role of Application Services

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.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

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.

BLOG | RENUKA NADKARNI

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.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

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.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

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.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

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.

BLOG | RENUKA NADKARNI

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.

BLOG | Geng Lin

The Three Phases of Digital Transformation

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.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

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.

BLOG | RENUKA NADKARNI

When the Digital Mice Get Smarter So Must the Digital Mousetrap

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.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

Meet the Minds behind F5’s Advanced Threat Research Center of Excellence (ATRCoE)

Not even the stealthiest threats can hide from F5's Advanced Threat Research Center of Excellence. The team conducts rigorous research to unravel the details of today's cybersecurity threats and then shares their insights to help shut them down.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

The Move to Modernize Ops Will Increase the Need for Software Supply Chain Security

Existing security for the software supply chain is lacking, and it's only going to get worse as organizations modernize ops with SRE approaches. Organizations wanting to survive their digital transformation journey should take this deficit seriously, incorporating secure software supply chain approaches to tooling and operational software from the start.

BLOG | KEN ARORA

What Hollywood Taught Me about Zero Trust

If the intergalactic spacecrafts from our favorite sci-fi shows were to incorporate the core beliefs of Zero Trust when securing their critical systems, they would have successfully prevented a substantial amount of systems attacks and malfunctions.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

State of Application Strategy 2022: Multi-Cloud Complexity Continues

Complexity is synonymous with operating in multiple clouds. Magnified by the use of APIs and the increasing skills and tools deficit, this complexity isn't going away, but it can be managed.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

Modernizing IT: An Enterprise Architecture for Digital Business

The enterprise architecture frameworks used by business, established nearly half a century ago, are not sufficient to support today's digital transformation. To successfully become a digital business, business and IT need to modernize their enterprise architecture.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

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.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

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. 

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

F5 to Demonstrate Advanced Threat Research at NVIDIA GTC

Traditional cybersecurity methods and tools are falling behind as a digital world offers nearly unlimited targets for attackers. Security companies need to capitalize on new hardware and technologies that leverage AI/ML for real-time detection and mitigation of threats at scale.

BLOG | ADITYA SOOD

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.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

Most Exciting Tech Trend in 2022: IT/OT Convergence

The line between operation and digital systems continues to blur as homes and businesses increase their reliance on connected devices, accelerating the convergence of IT and OT. While this trend of integration brings excitement, it also presents its own challenges and concerns to be considered.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

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.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

The Cost of Data Bias is Shared by IT and the Business

Operating a digital business requires analysis of data for insights. Data bias - the opinionated collection of data - impacts the ability to glean insights for performance, availability, and security, resulting in missed or "false" insights. To achieve a fully digital business, IT and business must develop a data and observability strategy.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

Legal functions are finally a priority for digital transformation in 2022

Digital business functions are just as critical to supporting customer experience and legal is starting to get the much-needed attention it deserves. Organizations far along their digital transformation journey are taking a step back to phase one, addressing functions that have remained manual through recent rapid digitization.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

The Need for the Evolution of Operations

In a digital as default world, operations is still too reliant on manual methods and needs to evolve to enable adaptive applications. This evolution requires significant change across all of IT. It needs AI-enabled adaptability that will maintain availability, optimize performance, and ensure security.

BLOG | ADVANCED THREAT RESEARCH CENTER OF EXCELLENCE

Advanced Threat Research: Dissecting the Russian Origin Collector-Stealer Malware

Collector-stealer is an active piece of malware used across the globe. It uses a variety of mechanisms to infiltrate user systems and quietly steal sensitive data. Our security experts have uncovered its secrets and expose how it works in this latest threat research.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

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.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

FinTechs grow in popularity amongst consumers and criminal organizations

As the digital economy grows so does the processing of payments through financial services institutions, and malicious actors are taking notice of the lucrative opportunities this presents. The digital payment ecosystem relies on the use of APIs to facilitate digital financial transactions and the number of API security incidents are growing yearly. Digital firms, especially those in financial services, need to increase focus on securing their APIs to protect their customers and business.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

CX is a human-first approach to technology

Assuming customer experience correlates only to uptime is a faux pax. CX 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 pertinent to the development lifecycle.

BLOG | RAJESH NARAYANAN & LORI MACVITTIE

Digital Transformation Danger Ahead: API Sprawl

Enterprises are naturally siloed with information shared on a need-to-know basis. As enterprises expand, so do the various business units, product teams, and operational teams. In essence, the business sprawls, limiting overall effectiveness and efficiency. Because teams and business units today rely significantly on APIs, a similar effect is nearly inevitable: API sprawl.

BLOG | RENUKA NADKARNI & ASH BHALGAT, NVIDIA

Redefining Cybersecurity at the Distributed Cloud Edge with AI and Real-time Telemetry

Digital transformation and adoption of Cloud technologies is causing changes in application architectures. These changes introduce new attack surfaces, which are being targeted by advanced, highly organized, and financially driven attack methods. Utilizing NVIDIA's Morpheus framework, F5 is researching techniques to detect these advanced threats with real-time telemetry and AI-powered analytics.

BLOG | Geng Lin

Multiple Clouds Versus Multi-Cloud

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.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

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.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

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.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

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.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

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.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

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.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

CX is Just the Tip of the DX Iceberg

Savvy CIOs know that the interface is just that: a means to a much more comprehensive digital experience that crosses functional and organizational boundaries. With most organizations firmly entrenched in the second phase of digital transformation—digital expansion—the need to digitize the entire enterprise architecture should be clearly rising as an inevitability.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

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.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

The role of cloud in edge-native applications

It should be no surprise that just as the emergence of cloud gave us cloud-native applications, edge is driving a set of edge-native applications. These applications, however, will not reside solely at the edge. Simultaneously, new architectural patterns are emerging that take advantage of applications residing in the cloud and data center.

BLOG | KEN ARORA

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 towards what is becoming the application edge.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

The Edge Use Case You’ve Been Waiting For

Let’s say your cat has wandered off. You can’t find them anywhere and tasty treats are not working their magic today. Then imagine that you could leverage the video doorbells in your neighborhood—i.e., idle compute and processing power from endpoints and nodes at the edge—to find them.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

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.

BLOG | RENUKA NADKARNI

Secure the FDX API to Defend Data in Open Banking

Cybercriminals targeting the financial services sector are focusing more of their attacks on application programming interfaces (APIs). At the same time, different development teams working on multiple applications often use disparate tool sets, pointing to the increasing importance of industry standards. F5 works closely with financial services customers worldwide to implement and secure the APIs driving open banking.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

Increasing Diversity of Location and Users is Driving Business to the Edge

User, within the context of the application domain, has always referred to the entity that interacts with an application. Just as shifts in application architectures drive changes in the technologies that deliver and secure them, shifts in the definition of user have driven changes in where apps are deployed.

BLOG | Geng Lin

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.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

Modernizing our Perspective: Applications versus Experiences

Like Greek and Roman gods, multiple manifestations of the same persona are evident throughout many mythologies. At the core, each incarnation is a new face to an existing persona. A similar reality is true in the digital world; what we call “applications” can often be considered as incarnations of existing functionality.

BLOG | Geng Lin

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.

BLOG | KEN ARORA

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).

BLOG | Geng Lin

Fighting for a Radically Inclusive World

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.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

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.

BLOG | Geng Lin

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.

BLOG | MARTIN DUKE

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.

BLOG | Geng Lin

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.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

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.

BLOG | KEN ARORA

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.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

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.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

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.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

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.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

Musings on Monitoring after App Modernization

Whether through a mobile app using APIs to interface with an existing monolithic mainframe app or via message queues that connect Slack to a traditional client-server based customer service application, the task facing enterprise IT today is not merely to transform monoliths to microservices, but to make microservices talk to monoliths.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

Edge is Driving an Infrastructure Renaissance

As organizations ramp up their generation of data and seek to extract business value from it, analytics 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. 

BLOG | Ken Arora

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.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

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.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

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.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

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.

BLOG | JASON FELDT

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.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

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.

BLOG | RENUKA NADKARNI

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.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

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.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

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 business 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.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

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.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

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.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

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.

BLOG | KEN ARORA

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.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

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.

BLOG | Geng Lin

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

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. 

BLOG | MICHAEL WILEY & LORI MACVITTIE

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.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

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.

BLOG | RENUKA NADKARNI

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. This article highlights established best practices that can help both businesses and consumers protect themselves.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

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.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

Optimizing Remote Access to Support WFH during COVID-19

The 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.

BLOG | KEN ARORA

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

"Data is the new oil" or "Data is the grease of the digital economy." If you're like me, you've probably heard these phrases, or perhaps even the more business school-esque phrase "data exhaust monetization," to the point of being clichés. But like all good clichés, they are grounded in a fundamental truth, or in this case, in a complementary pair of truths.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

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.

BLOG | JOEL MOSES

AI and the Role of Application Services

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.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

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.

BLOG | RENUKA NADKARNI

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.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

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.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

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.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

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.

BLOG | RENUKA NADKARNI

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.

BLOG | Geng Lin

The Three Phases of Digital Transformation

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.

BLOG | LORI MACVITTIE

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.

BLOG | RENUKA NADKARNI

When the Digital Mice Get Smarter So Must the Digital Mousetrap

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.