As F5 Distributed Cloud Services celebrates its three-year anniversary, it has reached a pair of significant milestones—benchmarks that validate how F5 revolutionizes the way organizations deliver and secure their most critical applications in today’s complex hybrid, multicloud world. In 2024, F5’s next-generation app security and delivery platform protected customers by stopping more than 20 billion malicious attacks on the way to surpassing 1,000 customers.
Since its introduction in February 2022, Distributed Cloud Services has become the go-to platform for customers wanting to simplify security and application management across today’s increasingly complex hybrid, multi-cloud IT landscape. F5 is the only vendor with the vision of offering a comprehensive platform that addresses application security and delivery for hybrid, multicloud deployments —whose increasing complexity we refer to as the “Ball of Fire.” Over the past few years, F5 has made significant investments to reshape Distributed Cloud Services along with the rest of our product portfolio and give customers a complete solution to deliver and secure every app and API, regardless of where it lives. This trend has played out exactly as we envisioned, as nearly 90% of enterprises report that they deploy apps and APIs across multiple environments.
Our innovation journey with Distributed Cloud Services has led F5 to take bold steps to redefine the nature of application security and delivery. With a flexible platform-based approach, F5 offers customers the powerful combination of high-performance application traffic management and the best of breed app and API security solutions and platform.
Protecting customers in the AI era
As organizations prepare for the AI era, Distributed Cloud Services is leading the way with end-to-end API security and AI capabilities that simplify the way customers protect their AI-powered applications. It makes sense why F5 Distributed Cloud Services is highly in-demand as organizations rush to introduce cutting edge AI-powered apps. AI’s data-heavy, highly distributed nature and its reliance on APIs as the connective fabric that makes these apps a possibility demands a solution that can manage, deliver, and secure the massive amounts of data necessary to fuel AI apps.
Distributed Cloud Services rises to the challenge of simplifying AI—offering powerful traffic management and app delivery capabilities paired with the industry’s most comprehensive API security solution—providing API discovery, OWASP API Top 10 detections, testing, and runtime protection in a single offering. We recently introduced an AI assistant within Distributed Cloud Services that gives customers the intelligent capabilities they need to improve operational efficiency and better secure their apps and APIs at scale. The AI assistant is powered by F5 AI Data Fabric, which analyzes massive amounts of data from products across our portfolio to generate important insights.
These are just a few of the innovations we’ve added as we continue to bolster Distributed Cloud Services for the AI era.
Taking an innovative platform approach
Using Distributed Cloud Services, customers get comprehensive security, networking, and application management services on an easy-to-use Software as a Service (SaaS) platform. And they get a single solution to defend against cybersecurity threats ranging from malicious bots to API security events to distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.
As cybersecurity attacks continue to intensify in number and sophistication, Distributed Cloud Services has earned an industrywide reputation as the fierce defender of organizations of all sizes. In 2024 alone, the platform blocked 20 billion cybersecurity attacks from 204 million bad actors. Of these attacks, 63% targeted APIs specifically.
Distributed Cloud Services offers a flexible, platform-based approach that combines high-performance application traffic management and best-of-breed app and API security solutions.
Customers around the globe are turning to Distributed Cloud Services to secure and power their apps and APIs no matter where they’re deployed. Partners are relying on the SaaS platform to extend the capabilities of their own solutions. And a growing number of analysts and trade publications are recognizing Distributed Cloud Services for its leadership and comprehensive approach.
Recognized as a leader across the industry
The simplicity Distributed Cloud Services offers is a gamechanger for companies struggling to manage their increasingly complex IT landscapes. Over the past three years, the SaaS platform has received numerous recognitions from analysts and trade publications alike. Consider the following:
- GigaOm recently recognized Distributed Cloud Web Application and API Protection (WAAP) as a “Leader” and “Fast Mover” for application and API security, positioning F5 among the most innovative and mature application security companies.
- IDC named F5 a leader in its IDC Marketscape: Worldwide WAAP Enterprise Platforms 2024 Vendor Assessment, noting that “F5 has demonstrated a long history of delivering the high performance, advanced security capabilities to secure applications and APIs.”
- Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) singled out F5 as a visionary in API security for Distributed Cloud WAAP.
- KuppingerCole recognized Distributed Cloud WAAP as an overall leader in its Leadership Compass 2024 for web application firewalls
““F5 invented API security. They developed it, evangelized it, improved upon it some more, and pushed the rest of the security world to pay attention to it. They are the leaders when it comes to cloud, application, and network security.” —Christopher Steffen, VP of Research at Enterprise Management Associates”
- The buyer intelligence platform TrustRadius acknowledged Distributed Cloud Services with four 2025 Buyer’s Choice awards. A year earlier, the organization gave Distributed Cloud Services three 2024 Top Rated Awards.
- The independent cloud security solution validator SecureIQLab gave Distributed Cloud WAAP a “Secure by Design” rating—one of only seven vendors in 2024 to pass the WAAP vulnerability assessment with a perfect score.
- SC Media named Distributed Cloud API Security the winner of the “Best API Security Solution” in 2024. It named Distributed Cloud WAAP winner of the “Best Web Application Solution" in 2023.
- CRN recognized Distributed Cloud Network Connect with a “2023 Product of the Year Award” in the “networking—enterprise” category.
Simplifying today’s complex, distributed environments
Distributed Cloud Services makes it possible to capture the benefits of today’s distributed environments by easily connecting, managing, and securing apps and APIs no matter where they’re deployed. This ability to simplify today’s complex environments is one of the reasons why customers around the globe have made Distributed Cloud Services their SaaS platform of choice.
Take the publishing company McGraw Hill, for example. As the company moved apps from its physical data centers to a multicloud environment, the company decided to take advantage of the availability and security that Distributed Cloud Services offers. “Distributed Cloud Services could be applied no matter where the apps were hosted and deployed quickly as a SaaS-based solution, which fits our company’s cloud and SaaS focus,” said Adam Wang, McGraw Hill’s Director of Networking.
The three words Wang uses to describe Distributed Cloud Services are secure, scalable and simple. “Everything is a single pane of glass,” he says. “We can just go into the Distributed Cloud portal and manage everything. That is a huge advantage.”
Likewise, SA Water, a government-owned utility in South Australia, needed robust API security and the ability to scale across hybrid and multicloud environments as it modernized its aging infrastructure.
After a rigorous proof-of-concept that included comprehensive penetration testing with over 25,000 simulated automated attacks, the utility chose Distributed Cloud Services. “The flexibility of the F5 Distributed Cloud Platform, combined with native capabilities to secure our API environment, was a key factor in our decision,” says Leelan Abeyarathna, Senior Technology Network Engineer at SA Water.
A strong partner ecosystem
Not only are customers turning to Distributed Cloud Services to simplify their complex environments, but partners are building on top of the platform to strengthen customer security and expand their offerings.
One such partner is Telefónica Tech, the digital business unit of the Telefónica Group, one of the world’s largest multinational telecommunications service providers. With Distributed Cloud Services as a foundation, Telefónica Tech created a new managed cybersecurity service called Web Application Defense (WAD)—which combines massive volumes of telemetry with programmable rules, advanced AI, and machine learning to secure customers’ web apps in real time.
“The deployment of WAD on F5’s Distributed Cloud Platform will add speed to a critical security layer, while providing flexibility for our enterprise customers to deploy, secure, and operate applications in a multicloud environment,” says Juan Campillo, Director of Cybersecurity Product Marketing at Telefónica Tech.
This is just the beginning. Over the coming months, F5 will continue to evolve Distributed Cloud Services to drive the AI-driven digital experiences organizations need to set their companies apart. And we will continue to unleash innovative solutions that make it ridiculously easy to connect and secure workloads in today’s increasingly distributed environment.
To learn more, visit our F5 Distributed Cloud Services webpage.
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