Securely adopt healthcare AI with F5 and Google Cloud

F5 Newsroom Staff

AI and the cloud offer healthcare organizations tremendous opportunities to evolve patient care and improve staff efficiency for better outcomes. Most healthcare professionals believe AI will help them operate more efficiently by automating repetitive tasks (84%), improve access to clinical research (84%), and expand their capacity to serve more patients (78%), according to a recent survey.

But there are specific challenges that many healthcare organizations face when it comes to innovating with AI in the cloud:

Reducing technical debt from legacy systems and infrastructure: Most healthcare and life sciences companies struggle to prioritize digital transformation amid complexity and legacy burdens. This technical debt can significantly eat up a large portion of any healthcare IT budget.

Defending against cybersecurity threats: With hacking and IT incidents accounting for 77.6% of all data breaches in healthcare for the first half of 2025, organizations need to be constantly vigilant against increasing and evolving cybersecurity threats.

Meeting regulatory requirements and addressing risks: While healthcare leaders believe their organizations will benefit from modernization and emerging technologies, few have addressed how to effectively govern the risks unique to AI.

AI trends shaping healthcare

Despite these challenges, healthcare AI has catalyzed a wave of rapid innovation—and the pace shows no sign of slowing. Experts at Google Cloud highlighted five trending use cases for healthcare enabled by AI, including:

• Multimodal AI: AI trained using images, video, audio, and text data from diagnostic tests, medical records, and research can help inform decisions.
• AI agents: Autonomous processes can handle administrative tasks such as nurse hand-offs so staff can tackle patient care.
• AI-powered search: Contextual, intuitive search that understands medical terminology can accelerate research and educate patients.
• Improved experiences: Researchers can reduce review times by using AI to summarize complex data and automate regulatory submissions.
• Enhanced security: Automated threat detection can keep systems and data safe while helping identify deepfakes and disinformation.

Multiple cloud deployments offer a flexible approach to implementing these capabilities. However, as applications and digital services sprawl, managing and securing everything gets complex and costly.

F5 and Google Cloud accelerate innovation

Together, F5 and Google Cloud offer a path to embracing multicloud AI technologies that’s simple, secure, and cost-efficient, removing barriers to entry for healthcare organizations at any level. With F5 and Google Cloud, public sector organizations can rapidly deploy new services and actively defend them from automated attacks, including OWASP Top 10 threats.

Google Cloud gives healthcare organizations several integrated tools and platforms to speed up AI development. The Google Cloud Vertex AI platform with Vertex AI Search for healthcare integrated with MedLM and Healthcare Data Engine enables end-to-end machine learning model development, with pre-trained first- and third-party models that serve as a jumping off point for additional fine-tuning, along with flexible AI deployments through Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE).

The F5 Application Delivery and Security Platform (ADSP) complements Google Cloud by simplifying the connection, security, and movement of data across multiple environments to support AI wherever it’s deployed. AI depends on large volumes of data, whether it’s used for model training or retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). However, often this data is spread across multiple sites. With F5 and Google Cloud, you can reduce the complexity of networking and security across multiple data stores, while gaining greater control over data transfer performance with intelligent traffic management for efficient ingestion of multi-modal data.

Key F5 security capabilities within F5 ADSP include web application firewall (WAF) solutions, API security, distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) mitigation, DNS protection, and SSL orchestration to inspect SSL/TLS traffic for threats and safeguard networks from volumetric layer 3-7 attacks. Additional identity protection features accurately validate users and prevent account takeovers without excessive or burdensome authentication steps, while integrated bot defense identifies and filters malicious bot behavior from real user traffic.

Using F5 ADSP, healthcare providers, payers, partners, and researchers benefit from centralized control with reduced overhead and the ability to enforce policies consistently across cloud, on-premises, and edge environments, while satisfying stringent compliance protocols such as HIPAA, HITECH, PCI DSS, and more.

Optimize and secure AI models, agents, and apps

F5 solutions address the unique delivery, security and performance needs of AI models, agents, and apps. These AI-focused technologies provide layered protection, from model security to API connectivity, allowing healthcare to innovate without compromising on data protection or regulatory compliance.

Wherever AI apps or models are deployed, F5 AI Guardrails mitigates risks like data leakage, harmful outputs, and adversarial attacks with comprehensive runtime security for AI models and agents.

Securely modernize healthcare with F5 and Google Cloud

Together, F5 and Google Cloud deliver the security, performance, and connectivity that healthcare needs to fully embrace multicloud technologies, navigate new AI realities, and ultimately improve outcomes for providers, payers, and patients.

Get started with F5 solutions on the Google Cloud Marketplace.

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F5 Newsroom Staff

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