Simplify multicloud AI success with F5 and Google Cloud

Beth McElroySr. Alliances Manager | F5

The main challenge with deploying AI is that its primary ingredients—data, AI models, and infrastructure—are often distributed across several environments. Enterprise data accumulates all over the place, from edge devices and locations to the data center core, while processing power including GPUs and Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) are mostly found in the cloud. Complicating matters further, the data you need to support AI is sometimes locked to specific regions due to data sovereignty laws.

Despite these challenges, roughly three-quarters of organizations (74%) prefer hybrid multicloud environments for deploying AI, according to Google Cloud research. Connecting multiple clouds and on-premises environments presents several challenges, from the heavy lift of manually configuring and aligning networking tools across cloud vendors to enabling seamless data migration between AI models and repositories across the digital landscape. Organizations must also protect data as it traverses countless API connections and environments.

Planning an AI-ready, hybrid multicloud topology

There are four essential tenets to successful hybrid multicloud AI. As your organization starts planning its rollout and mapping out key functionalities, you need the ability to:

• Automatically establish secure, high-performance connections across diverse and distributed environments. Automation is the key to scalability; the less manual lift involved, the better.
• Apply intelligent traffic routing that understands AI’s variable processing requirements and uses health checks to verify service availability.
• Enforce security policies consistently across cloud, on-premises, and edge environments while protecting against AI threat vectors such as model manipulation and automated abuse.
• Unify visibility and control within a single dashboard, leveraging end-to-end telemetry to support troubleshooting and optimization efforts.

By enabling these capabilities in your multicloud topology, you’ll be well-equipped to manage cloud costs and protect your business from emerging threats. You’ll also be able to move data wherever it needs to be, even across cloud-to-edge boundaries. This data portability also makes it easier to deploy retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to improve the relevancy of your AI model and curb potential hallucinations.

A strong foundation already exists, and you can take advantage of it

Organizations embarking on their multicloud AI journey don’t have to start from scratch. Google Cloud serves as the foundation, and F5 extends its value with purpose-built solutions. F5 Distributed Cloud Services is a SaaS-based offering that simplifies connecting disparate cloud-to-edge networks and environments, so you can seamlessly move data wherever you need it. Integrated and centralized orchestration controls make it easy to connect new environments, automatically discover and lock down API endpoints, and navigate cloud vendor relationships from a single pane of glass. This suite of services includes AI-aware traffic routing and rate limiting to help maximize throughput for cost-intensive GPU- and TPU-enabled cloud resources, prevent resource congestion, and keep AI services responsive for end users.

Joint protection for AI apps and services

After you overcome connectivity and performance challenges, security is the next big hurdle that can hinder successful AI. Cyber criminals and bots erode the value you get from AI by stealing sensitive data and intellectual property (IP) and driving up cloud spend by flooding AI services with requests through distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.

Distributed Cloud Services enhance Google Cloud Model Armor by using behavioral analysis to differentiate legitimate users from bots and block access for the latter. You can also use F5 AI Guardrails with Google Cloud to monitor inputs and outputs going to and from AI models. Together, these solutions prevent model manipulation tactics such as prompt injection and model poisoning attempts, and they can automatically detect and redact confidential data and IP in both AI prompts and responses.

Tackling elevated security and data sovereignty needs

Many organizations use the public Internet to connect their environments and transmit data, but there are so many variables outside your control, including the cyber threats described previously. There is a better alternative. The F5 Global Network is a private backbone delivering high-bandwidth, low-latency connectivity designed for AI and sensitive data that completely bypasses public Internet exposure. Multiple points of presence worldwide also help you localize workloads to comply with data sovereignty requirements.

Simplify and scale hybrid multicloud AI

On your journey toward implementing multicloud AI, complexity and security threats are your biggest adversaries, but F5 and Google Cloud can be your greatest allies. Leverage these proven solutions as an “easy button” that makes it simple to connect and secure environments, no matter where they are.

Learn more about F5 and Google Cloud.

About the Author

Beth McElroySr. Alliances Manager | F5

More blogs by Beth McElroy