As we discussed before, protecting your applications in the cloud against layer 7 attacks is an essential piece of any organization’s security strategy. The challenge lies in finding the right balance of strong security, operational efficiency, and deployment speed. Deploy an insecure application, and you risk breaches, regulatory fines, downtime, and damage to the business. Deploy an application with excessive security policies, and you increase operational complexity, leading to inefficiencies and loss of productivity. Fail to deploy an application on time—or at all—and you lose business opportunity and risk damage to your reputation.
To deploy applications with the right level of protection, without excess overhead, and as fast—or nearly as fast—as the business would like, you need to take the best parts of your enterprise security practice and fuse them with the speed and agility that is sweeping through IT. The delivery of enterprise-grade protection combined with the flexibility of cloud deployment can help organizations defend their critical applications against ever-more sophisticated and numerous attacks.
So you must industrialize your security. With predefined templates and automation systems that offer “security services as code,” application security policies can be defined centrally and distributed globally to the right enforcement points. Security services must be deployed as part of an integrated, orchestrated system that builds and deploys all of the application delivery services required as part of a coordinated application deployment process.
If you architect a system like this, you can have a number of different security policies to match the requirements of different applications, as well as templates that can be deployed via API from management and orchestration tools. This kind of integration delivers the optimal balance of protection, agility, and operational efficiency your business requires. As an added bonus, it can remove the IT bottleneck when deploying applications, reducing the chances of potentially harmful shadow IT. The bottom line: you get enterprise-grade security, deployed as simply and easily as the most basic load balancing policy.
About the Author
Related Blog Posts
F5 accelerates and secures AI inference at scale with NVIDIA Cloud Partner reference architecture
F5’s inclusion within the NVIDIA Cloud Partner (NCP) reference architecture enables secure, high-performance AI infrastructure that scales efficiently to support advanced AI workloads.
F5 Silverline Mitigates Record-Breaking DDoS Attacks
Malicious attacks are increasing in scale and complexity, threatening to overwhelm and breach the internal resources of businesses globally. Often, these attacks combine high-volume traffic with stealthy, low-and-slow, application-targeted attack techniques, powered by either automated botnets or human-driven tools.
F5 Silverline: Our Data Centers are your Data Centers
Customers count on F5 Silverline Managed Security Services to secure their digital assets, and in order for us to deliver a highly dependable service at global scale we host our infrastructure in the most reliable and well-connected locations in the world. And when F5 needs reliable and well-connected locations, we turn to Equinix, a leading provider of digital infrastructure.
Volterra and the Power of the Distributed Cloud (Video)
How can organizations fully harness the power of multi-cloud and edge computing? VPs Mark Weiner and James Feger join the DevCentral team for a video discussion on how F5 and Volterra can help.
Phishing Attacks Soar 220% During COVID-19 Peak as Cybercriminal Opportunism Intensifies
David Warburton, author of the F5 Labs 2020 Phishing and Fraud Report, describes how fraudsters are adapting to the pandemic and maps out the trends ahead in this video, with summary comments.
The Internet of (Increasingly Scary) Things
There is a lot of FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) that gets attached to any emerging technology trend, particularly when it involves vast legions of consumers eager to participate. And while it’s easy enough to shrug off the paranoia that bots...