Every industry and organization is under pressure to do more with less, respond faster, and secure increasingly complex infrastructure environments while safely adopting AI. These are some of the reasons why so many turn to F5 for help.
Yet the reality most IT teams face is not a cloud-native environment purpose-built with AI in mind. Instead, they’re faced with a sprawling mix of on-premises servers, legacy systems, and multicloud deployments that were never designed with AI orchestration in mind. Given the reality, how can most organizations adopt AI-driven operations in a secure and practical way without starting over from scratch?
That’s exactly the challenge our partner Presidio solved by combining our industry-leading F5 solutions with Red Hat technologies and their own deep automation expertise.
The challenge facing today’s IT teams
The day-to-day responsibilities of Linux, network, and infrastructure admins to configure, provision, and secure their environments while proving compliance are growing more difficult. A compliance report for a single server can generate hundreds of critical findings across networking, storage, compute, and operating system layers. Multiply that across an entire data center, add cloud systems and firewalls on top, and the manual work involved is enormous.
Simply resolving a single vulnerability that involves both network policy and OS configuration typically means pulling in multiple specialists just to diagnose the problem. The more experts that need to chime in, the slower the resolution. Automation certainly helps here, but traditional automation tools cannot analyze, interpret, or intelligently decide what to do next.This is where AI could certainly help.
However, the simple answer of “just add an agent” has steep architectural challenges. Most existing data center infrastructure is not natively accessible to AI agents. Sometimes that is purposeful and sometimes just an historical accident of design. No matter which, organizations cannot simply point an AI at their environment and expect results. Without a cohesive framework that connects legacy and modern infrastructure, there is no secure, scalable path to AI-driven operations.
Building AI-driven intelligent operations
Our partner, Presidio, has developed an AI-agent-driven, intelligent IT operations framework purpose-built for IT teams managing today’s real-world, brownfield infrastructure. Powered at its core by Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, and secured end-to-end by F5, the framework combines AI agents with proven automation tooling to intelligently orchestrate IT operations across on-premises, hybrid, and multicloud environments without requiring organizations to rearchitect their existing systems.
According to Presidio, one of the most critical design decisions in building this framework was achieving deterministic behavior from AI agents. When dealing with infrastructure, you must ensure that no matter how an IT operator phrases a request, the system responds in a consistent, pre-determined, and compliant way.
“One of the most critical design decisions in building this framework was achieving deterministic behavior from AI agents.”
Presidio solved this challenge by placing the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform at the core of execution. Rather than allowing AI agents to interact directly with infrastructure, which introduces unpredictability and security risks, the framework has agents determine which Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform Playbooks to run, while the platform itself carries out the actual changes. The AI agents serve as the brains, and the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform acts as the hands, with every action following a pre-defined, tested Playbook to ensure full auditability.
Equally important is the challenge of securely connecting AI agents to infrastructure wherever it lives. Presidio’s framework leverages F5 Distributed Cloud Services, part of our F5 Application Delivery and Security Platform, to provide API protection, deploy bot defense, and easily bridge on-premises and multicloud environments. Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform then provide the foundation for easily containerizing and automating any infrastructure or tools needed.
F5 AI Guardrails further protects the AI layer itself, inspecting prompts and responses at runtime to defend against prompt injection, personally identifiable information (PII), and sensitive-data exfiltration, harmful outputs, and adversarial attacks. The result is a fully connected, fully secured architecture that works across any combination of on-premises, hybrid, and multicloud infrastructure.
Security and compliance: A real-world example
Let’s consider the common IT task of ensuring the security and compliance of a server to show this solution’s benefits. When a compliance scan runs against a server, it returns a report that may contain hundreds of findings at varying severity levels across networking, storage, and OS layers. In the past, admins were required to manually interpret every finding, determine which are false positives, figure out the correct remediation for each issue, and then either fix it themselves or route it to the right specialist.
Presidio’s intelligent operations framework, secured and connected by F5, changes this entirely. AI agents analyze the compliance report, distinguish genuine critical vulnerabilities from false positives, recommend the appropriate remediation path, and generate Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform Playbooks to execute the fixes—all in a single pass. What once required hours of manual work and multiple expert consultations now produces a complete remediation plan and the automation code to carry it out, ready to scale across hundreds of systems simultaneously. Admins simply provide the expert “human-in-the-loop” review of the remediation plan and automations before they are implemented.
No matter what IT operations use case an organization might face, Presidio implements the framework around it and delivers a secure path to execute it using F5 and Red Hat technologies. This solution is a flexible, extensible foundation built on industry-leading technology that adapts to each organization’s specific requirements.
Securely modernize IT operations with AI
The powerful combination of F5 with Red Hat and Presidio has created an ideal solution that is built for the infrastructure organizations have today and the AI-driven future they are aiming for. No matter if an environment is on-premises, hybrid, or multicloud, there is a secure, scalable, and immediately practical path to intelligent, automated IT operations.
If you’d like to learn more about how F5, Red Hat, and Presidio can help enable secure, intelligent operations as you move toward your AI future, join us for the Presidio happy hour at the Red Hat Summit happening this week in Atlanta, Georgia.
To learn more about the joint solution, you can also join us for the F5 Academy Roadshow: Unlock the Power of AI Data Delivery and Runtime Security in San Jose, CA on May 21.
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