Industrial Automation Magazine India

Dhananjay Ganjoo, Managing Director for India and SAARC at F5

Published on : Saturday 08-04-2023

Enhanced API defenses, granular machine learning capabilities, and new managed service offerings provide comprehensive protection across distributed environments.

Bengaluru, April 2023 – F5 has recently announced new security capabilities to give customers comprehensive protection and control in managing apps and APIs across on-premises, cloud, and edge locations. Specifically, new machine learning enhancements provide F5s cloud security portfolio with advanced API endpoint discovery, anomaly detection, telemetry, and behavioral analysis. As more transactions and customer engagements occur through digital channels such as web and mobile apps, organisations are seeking better solutions to provide secure experiences for their end users and maintain their trust. With APIs as the building blocks of modern web and mobile experiences, protecting these assets is the cornerstone of securing digital services.

F5 customers can now strengthen their security posture with a continuously improving analysis engine and unified policy enforcement. These capabilities enable secure app-to-app communications through validated and monitored APIs, thereby reducing the time security teams spend correcting false positives and accelerating time-to-deployment for new services. The enhancements, as well as new managed service offerings for enterprises and service providers, accelerate the momentum of F5 Distributed Cloud Services, introduced in 2022 and bolstered by the recent launch of multi-cloud networking solutions.

Modern organisations continue to demonstrate a clear preference for hybrid solutions. According to F5s 2023 State of Application Strategy (SOAS) Report, 85% of respondents have deployed apps and APIs in distributed environments spanning multiple public clouds, as well as on-premises and edge locations. More than 20% of respondents are deploying apps and APIs in six different environments. At the same time, security teams struggle to provide consistent protection and visibility for a rapidly expanding attack surface area. This is primarily because many contemporary web application and API protection (WAAP) solutions rely on point products or offerings based on (and provided by) CDN vendor technologies that cannot adequately scale beyond cloud-based apps and lack the ability to be deployed on premises, in public clouds, or in other edge locations.

Organisations in India are increasingly adopting innovative technologies and solutions to deploy their apps in different environments. However, this move towards digitalisation brings with it new challenges, such as the need for consistent security across different environments and a lack of visibility of deployments in various cloud environments, networks, and data centers at the edge, said Dhananjay Ganjoo, Managing Director for India and SAARC at F5. At F5, we recognise these challenges and the evolving needs of our customers. We are well-equipped to provide secure and simplified digital transformation through our cross-cloud security capabilities and managed services that help businesses stay safe and agile in this competitive landscape.

F5 offers a full suite of capabilities to provide robust protection for apps and APIs across on-premises, cloud, and edge locations. Moreover, F5s end-to-end approach to security means that threat data can be gathered and analysed across all deployed locations, including ongoing and emerging attack campaigns detected by the F5 Threat Campaigns service. As part of a larger hardware, software, SaaS, and managed services portfolio that also provides best-in-class application delivery capabilities, F5 security solutions protect a diverse mix of distributed apps and APIs in any environment without adding further operational complexity.