Air-gapped networking and security for critical infrastructure workloads
Geopolitical instability, supply-chain disruptions, and legal risks are driving digital sovereignty requirements that demand operational resilience and independence from external influences. F5 provides air-gapped application delivery and security solutions on customer-owned hardware and software, with offline licensing, local lifecycle management, monitoring, and manual threat signature updates.
Digital sovereignty and operational resilience
With no external kill switch and customer owned infrastructure,
governments retain complete control over mission-critical workloads, insulating them from external dependencies and geopolitical uncertainty
Application delivery and security services
High-performance layer 3–7 traffic management and security for critical workloads running in exclusive, customer-managed environments
Air‑gapped AI delivery and security
Local visibility, offline licensing, manual threat updates, and device automation enable operators to run critical infrastructure independently of F5, without external connectivity
Air‑gapped licensing and lifecycle management
Local visibility, offline licensing, manual threat updates, and device automation enable operators to run critical infrastructure independently of F5, without external connectivity
Air-gapped deployment and operations
Complete control and visibility for app delivery and security within the sovereign perimeter
All F5 L3–L4 and L7 services (load balancing, local DNS, firewall, DDoS, WAF, API security, TLS/SSL orchestration) run on customer-owned hardware/software within the air-gapped perimeter. On-premises tools manage logging, telemetry, analytics, policies, and automation, keeping operations self-contained under government control.
How F5 Helps
Air-gapped deployment
Hardware, software and cloud-native form factors
F5 BIG-IP and F5 NGINX run on customer-owned hardware, software, or Kubernetes environments within the air-gapped perimeter, with no cloud activation, vendor callbacks, or external dependencies.
F5 hardware
Purpose-built appliances with FPGA-accelerated performance for air-gapped application delivery
F5 software
Virtual editions with offline licensing for flexible deployment across sovereign infrastructure
F5 Cloud Native
Kubernetes ingress and API gateway for air-gapped container environments
Lifecycle management
Licensing, automation and policy management
F5 delivers end-to-end management within the air-gapped perimeter
F5 BIG-IQ Central Manager
Centralized on-premises management for BIG-IP licensing, policy, and upgrades in air-gapped environments
F5 Insight
Comprehensive visibility and actionable insights to keep apps, services and infrastructure healthy, secure and available
F5 NGINX Instance Manager
On-premises management and configuration for NGINX deployments without external connectivity
F5 BIG-IP Automation Toolchain
Automated provisioning and configuration management for BIG-IP in fully isolated environments
Application delivery and security
L3-L7 security and delivery services
F5 delivers application delivery and security services that operate entirely on-premises, with local enforcement and no external dependencies.
WAF
Network access control and segmentation within the sovereign environment
DDoS protection
Real-time on-premises DDoS defense without relying on cloud-based scrubbing services
Load balancing
High-performance traffic management built for mission-critical services in isolated environments
Firewall
Network access control and segmentation within the sovereign environment
API Gateway
Robust API security for Kubernetes
API Gateway
Robust API security for Kubernetes
Air-gapped AI security and data delivery
Secure and deliver sovereign AI workloads
F5 enables high-performance AI data delivery, runtime security, and load balancing for AI workloads operating entirely on-premises, with local guardrails and no cloud dependencies.
AI data delivery
Resilient AI data delivery to and from local storage clusters
AI runtime security
Local guardrails for AI models and agents in air-gapped environments
AI factory load balancing
Optimizes GPU utilization within the sovereign AI factory
Technology alliances
Resources
Featured
Digital sovereignty is reshaping application strategy
See how F5 AI Guardrails performed against 17,733 adversarial test cases, independently validated by SecureIQLab.
Blogs and articles
Using F5 Terraform modules in air-gapped environment ›
Observability in Air-gapped environment with application study tool ›
Deployment runbook for F5 AI Security on OpenShift ›
Webinars
Digital Sovereignty in a Multicloud world ›
Deployment guides
NGINX Instance Manager in disconnected environments ›