Secure and Enhance AI Workloads on Azure: Visit F5 at Microsoft Ignite

Kunal AnandChief Product Officer

As generative AI takes hold, virtually every senior IT leader is being asked to determine where AI can fit into their company’s strategic plans.

A recent F5 report shows that 75% of organizations are making AI a core business focus, compared to just 17% four years ago. In addition, AI investments are increasing with 18% of IT budgets to be spent on AI initiatives during 2024.

As companies determine how they can leverage AI to enhance efficiency and improve decision-making, they’re challenged with securing and delivering workloads across diverse environments.

Today, 9 of 10 organizations store their data in a hybrid, multicloud environment, and AI is positioned to increase this complexity as businesses leverage that data for AI model training and inferencing. Moreover, thanks to AI workloads, the data landscape, traffic flows, and security threats are all becoming more difficult to manage.

• The data landscape is unique. AI relies on vast amounts of data, and many organizations grapple with effectively connecting workloads and data for optimal model training and inference.
• The traffic is different. Modern AI workloads significantly increase network traffic straining resources and preventing the retrieval, processing, or delivery of meaningful results.
• The threats are evolving. As cyberattacks become more sophisticated and widespread, safeguarding AI models and the APIs they depend on is more critical than ever.

F5 is working with Microsoft to empower enterprises to overcome common AI challenges in a hybrid and multicloud world. Together, we’re working to help customers simplify their AI deployments, improve training and inference, and safeguard AI models and APIs.

Simplify AI deployments

F5 application delivery and acceleration solutions empower businesses to optimize workload performance and accelerate their journey to the cloud. Our strong partnership with Microsoft enhances these capabilities, enabling seamless integration with key Azure services such as Microsoft Sentinel, Microsoft Entra ID, Azure Virtual WAN, and Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS).

Now, with our latest innovation—F5 NGINX as a Service (NGINXaaS) for Azure—we’re simplifying AI workload management. This solution helps organizations break down data silos, connect disparate data sources, and effortlessly provision, manage, and integrate ISV solutions.

NGINXaaS works with Azure management tools and services to create, update, and delete deployments.

Improve training and inference

Whether leveraging proprietary models or third-party solutions, successful AI implementations rely on effective model training and inference. F5 and Microsoft are partnering to help organizations scale their data stores for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) while enhancing both application and network performance.

With F5’s unified application delivery and security platform plus Microsoft Azure, businesses can efficiently manage traffic to collect, assemble, and distribute diverse data to models in real time. This capability ensures reliable and secure inference and allows organizations to seamlessly connect and optimize models in data centers, in the cloud, or at the edge—empowering AI to learn and execute from anywhere.

F5 secures AI apps while managing downstream traffic to enterprise data stores and AI factories.

Safeguard AI and APIs

F5 and Microsoft prevent malicious attacks on AI and machine learning (ML) models inside Azure, outside Azure, and across the entire attack surface. By combining F5 advanced protections with Azure’s native controls, IT and security teams can strengthen their security posture while enforcing consistent, uniform defenses against zero-day, OWASP Top 10, and automated cyber threats. This includes critical API layers, which remain the glue for the entire AI ecosystem, binding models, data, applications, and services together.

With these robust safeguards in place, businesses can secure AI apps and their underlying infrastructure, prevent oversharing, and better manage downstream traffic to AI factories—where model development, deployment, and interactions take place.

Ready to learn more? Join us at the 2024 Microsoft Ignite conference, happening November 18–22 at McCormick Place in Chicago, where we’ll showcase how F5 and Microsoft are partnering to transform the future of AI.

Visit booth #205 to talk with our experts, discuss real-life use cases, and experience a hands-on demo of F5 solutions. Also, tune into my online presentation and learn how F5 solutions on Azure enhance the security and performance of AI applications.

About the Author

Kunal AnandChief Product Officer

Kunal Anand leads the F5 product organization as Chief Product Officer. Responsible for product vision, strategy, and execution, he ensures development of breakthrough solutions that solve critical challenges and create exceptional experiences for customers. In his previous role as Chief Technology and AI Officer, Kunal charted the company’s technology and AI strategy and vision. Prior to F5, Kunal held the dual role of Chief Technology Officer and Chief Information Security Officer at Imperva. His journey to Imperva began in 2018 with the acquisition of Prevoty, an application security startup he co-founded in 2013. Before joining Prevoty, he was the Director of Technology at BBC Worldwide. Kunal has a deep history of innovation and technical expertise, and has held roles leading security, data, technology, and engineering teams at Gravity, MySpace, and the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab. Kunal has over 15 years of experience in AI and machine learning, ranging from model training, employing AI-driven algorithms to enhance products, and designing and implementing AI architectures. Kunal holds a Bachelor of Science degree in computer science from Babson College.

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