Protect against the ever-changing threat landscape

The time between a vulnerability becoming known and a working exploit appearing has collapsed. Attackers now automate discovery and weaponization at machine speed, which means the traditional sequence of disclose, develop a patch, test it, schedule a maintenance window, deploy, now leaves applications exposed for the entire interval. Virtual patching closes that gap at the runtime layer. F5 links web application and API discovery and vulnerability scanning directly to F5 WAF products, so when a scan finds an exploitable flaw, a protective rule is applied to the live application automatically. The vulnerability still gets fixed in code, but the application is shielded in the meantime, which buys developers the time to build, test, and deploy a real patch without that time becoming a window of exposure. When the patch window is effectively zero, blocking the exploit at runtime stops being a nice-to-have and becomes the primary line of defense.

AI security has to defend the AI system itself, not just the infrastructure around it, and nearly every AI threat travels through an API into the model, which is why the right place to enforce protection is a runtime control point rather than something retrofitted application by application. F5 secures and governs AI apps, models, agents, APIs, and data at runtime across several disciplines. Runtime guardrails inspect inputs and outputs to block prompt injection and sensitive-data leakage and to keep interactions aligned to policy and regulation; in independent SecureIQLab testing across 20,000 adversarial cases, F5 AI Guardrails achieved a 98.36% overall security score, including 99.3% against direct prompt injection, 99.0% against sensitive-data leakage, and 98.7% against excessive agency. Red teaming probes the AI attack surface before deployment and explains, in natural language, exactly how a vulnerability was exploited and why. F5 API Security delivers continuous discovery, monitoring and vulnerability detection across the OWASP API Top 10, plus critical protection and enforcement functionality. Zero Trust access secures authentication and authorization to MCP servers and agents. And because people adopt AI whether it's sanctioned or not, the same controls help surface and contain shadow AI before it leaks PII, PHI, or proprietary code.

Zero Trust is often described at the network level, but the threats that matter most travel through applications and APIs, so the controls have to live there too. Application-centric Zero Trust applies the principles — never trust, always verify, continuously monitor — to every app and API rather than to a network perimeter. In practice that means identity- and context-aware access granted per application and per user, and, increasingly, identity-aware controls on machine-to-machine API traffic and on AI tools like MCP servers and agents. The reason this matters is lateral movement. Most damaging breaches don't stop at the initial foothold; the attacker pivots from one system to the next. Per-app-request access limits that movement and shrinks the blast radius of any single compromise. Consolidating these access controls onto one data plane also removes the cost and complexity of stitching together siloed point solutions, which is exactly where misconfigurations and gaps tend to appear.

Post-quantum cryptography (PQC) refers to a new generation of encryption algorithms designed to withstand attacks from quantum computers, which will eventually be able to break much of the public-key cryptography protecting data today. The threat is not purely a future one. In a "harvest now, decrypt later" attack, an adversary captures encrypted sensitive data today and simply stores it, betting that quantum computing will mature enough to decrypt it later — so any data with a long shelf life is already at risk. F5's approach is crypto-agility rather than a forklift upgrade. F5 enables NIST-standardized algorithms like ML-KEM across the data plane without disruptive architectural overhauls. Deploying hybrid cryptography, pairing ML-KEM with established elliptic-curve cryptography, lets organizations begin mitigating harvest-now-decrypt-later risk immediately, while BIG-IP SSL Orchestrator preserves full traffic visibility through the transition.

The best-of-breed instinct is reasonable, but it carries a hidden cost: every additional point product is another console to operate, another integration to maintain, and another stream of telemetry that may never reach the tools that need it. When defenses don't share data, visibility fragments, the security posture becomes hard to reason about, and the seams between products turn into the attack surface, precisely what coordinated, multi-stage attacks exploit. Consolidating onto the F5 Application Delivery and Security Platform converges application delivery and security and enforces one consistent policy across hybrid multicloud, on-premises, cloud, edge, and containerized environments. The benefits compound: centralized visibility, lower total cost of ownership, fewer blind spots, and the ability to enforce protection wherever a workload runs, including air-gapped and sovereign environments. The goal isn't to own every box on the diagram; it's to remove the gaps that appear between them.