Build secure and resilient digital experiences with F5’s enterprise application delivery and security architecture

Tom AtkinsSenior Product Marketing Manager

Applications play a pivotal role in how you interact with customers, drive internal operations, and fuel innovation. As organizations increasingly scale across hybrid multicloud environments, managing complexity has become a critical technical and business challenge. Distributed platforms, sprawling APIs, intricate app-to-app dependencies, and ever-evolving AI-driven security threats contribute to an environment we at F5 aptly term the “Ball of Fire.”

Today’s enterprises are managing an exploding number of apps and APIs across an increasingly distributed environment—resulting in an operational “Ball of Fire.”

This growing complexity isn’t just a hurdle; it’s an existential threat to infrastructure health and operational efficiency. The lack of unified visibility, increasing attack surfaces, and mounting security vulnerabilities make delivering seamless, secure application experiences a steep uphill battle. As attack vectors grow and stakeholder expectations rise, enterprises face a pressing need for a unified platform that simplifies operations, enhances resilience, and secures against emerging threats.

This is where an application delivery and security platform can bear fruit. Offering a flexible suite of services, they help ensure apps are fast, available, and secure across distributed locations. As the market leader, the F5 Application Delivery and Security Platform (ADSP) provides the most comprehensive suite of app delivery and security functionality, designed to support any app or API, in any environment. With unified policy enforcement, streamlined management, granular visibility, and AI assistance, it helps organizations bring their Ball of Fire under control.

However, just having the right tools at your disposal isn’t always enough; they need to be deployed strategically to unlock their full potential. That’s why implementing a tiered application services architecture can help maximize performance, control, and security, while simplifying your day-to-day operations.

Introducing F5’s enterprise application delivery and security architecture

The F5 application delivery and security architecture includes five tiers designed to address the specific service needs of modern multicloud environments.

The architecture encompasses five key tiers, each tailored to address specific service needs throughout modern hybrid multicloud environments—offering a practical framework for efficient application delivery and security insertion, as well as end-to-end visibility and control:

Tier 1: Global services: These functions operate across regions and environments, ensuring seamless global connectivity, reliability, and a first line of defense against attacks. Services such as DNS, global server load balancing, identity management, and DDoS mitigation play a pivotal role here, providing resilience and security across all workloads and environments.

Tier 2: Site services: At this tier, services are localized to specific data centers, cloud regions, or edge clusters. By addressing site-specific needs, such as local network security or traffic management, site-level services provide operational granularity while ensuring compliance with local regulatory requirements.

Tier 3: Platform services: Shared services at the platform level help optimize efficiency and security for workloads collectively deployed within specific platforms, such as containerized environments like Kubernetes, or virtualized environments like KVM. These services can include ingress controls, API gateways, identity and access services, or further security controls such as web app and API protection.

Tier 4: Application services: Tailored directly to individual applications, these services offer the closest layer of protection and traffic management services for applications. This tier is typically where fine-tuned controls are enforced, intended to meet the security and performance requirements of individual workloads.

Tier 5: Management and operational services: This tier provides centralized control, observability, orchestration, and governance across an entire multicloud ecosystem. With unified dashboards, automated workflows, and a single policy enforcement point, this tier scales operations across entire application portfolios and enables policy consistency, rapid incident response and streamlines day-to-day operations.

It's important to note that these tiers don’t necessarily correspond to distinct physical, virtual, or SaaS deployments, as single devices or services configured correctly could span multiple tiers.

Why adopt a tiered application services architecture?

Regardless of the makeup of your unique application ecosystem, implementing a tiered application services architecture offers numerous benefits—including enhanced scalability, layered security, simplified regulatory compliance, and improved operational efficiency—all designed to help you maintain control, maximize uptime, and increase agility under increasingly complex operating conditions. Let’s take a closer look at some of the key advantages:

• Defense in depth: Every tier adds an additional layer of protection—progressively more attuned to a specific deployment environment or form factor—safeguarding the workloads within it. At the application layer, the most fine-grained policies deliver precise, per-app security for maximum protection.
• Scalability and reusability: By reusing services across tiers, you’re able to streamline scaling while avoiding siloed solutions. Services designed for one application, platform, or site can be reused across others, saving time and resources when expanding your infrastructure and apps.
• Consistency and standardization: By standardizing services at each tier, you’re able to establish a centralized enforcement point that ensures policy consistency—the remedy for complexity—for all workloads nested beneath it.
• Simplified compliance and governance: A tiered services architecture enables consistent global governance while allowing site-and-region-specific enforcement, ensuring holistic control and making it much easier to comply with even the most stringent local data privacy and regulatory requirements.

Explore F5’s enterprise application delivery and security architecture tool

If you’re considering implementing a tiered services architecture, we’ve developed an interactive tool to help get you started. Highlighting today’s most critical application security and delivery challenges—including the OWASP Top 10, OWASP API Top 10, and the F5 Application Delivery Top 10—this new tool illustrates where these challenges emerge across the various architecture tiers, while factoring in considerations for different site and platform types.

But it doesn’t stop at identifying these obstacles, the enterprise application delivery and security architecture tool goes a step further by recommending solutions and products from the F5 Application Delivery and Security Platform to help you overcome them.

F5’s interactive tool identifies the most critical app and API challenges in your environment, while highlighting F5 solutions to overcome them.

Take a tour of the interactive tool to begin planning how to optimize application delivery and security across your hybrid multicloud ecosystem today.

About the Author

Tom AtkinsSenior Product Marketing Manager

More blogs by Tom Atkins