F5 is bringing API code testing and telemetry analysis to F5 Distributed Cloud Services, creating the industry’s most comprehensive and AI-ready API security solution.
F5 also announced it is making AI pervasive across its entire solution portfolio, with intelligent capabilities to help customers protect against sophisticated AI-powered threats while making it easier to secure and manage multi-cloud application environments.
The new portfolio updates took centre stage today as the EMEA leg of AppWorld 2024 kicked off in style at the Waldorf Astoria, The Palm Jumeirah, in Dubai.
The event highlighted how organizations around the world are increasingly realizing that no single cloud is perfect for every application, whereas hybrid and multi-cloud architectures offer the flexibility necessary to deliver today’s modern digital experiences and meet sky-high user expectations.
In F5’s forthcoming 2024 State of Application Strategy report, 88% of enterprises report that they deploy apps and APIs across multiple locations. The same research found that the percentage of organizations hosting their applications in six different environments doubled in the past year, to 38%.
“AI is fuelling an explosion in the volume of apps and APIs, which is introducing significant new security challenges,” said Mohammed Abukhater, RVP for Sales in the Middle East, Türkiye and Africa at F5.
“We’re also seeing that new AI-driven digital experiences are highly distributed, with a mix of data sources, models, and services spread across on-premises, cloud, and edge environments – all connected by an expanding network of APIs. The protection of these API connections and the data that runs through them is now a critical security challenge that companies must face as they deploy more AI-enabled services.”
As a direct response to these increasingly prevalent challenges, Distributed Cloud Services will now offer the industry’s most comprehensive, AI-ready API security solution.
F5 can now enable vulnerability detection and observability in the application development processes, ensuring that risks are identified, and policies implemented before APIs enter production.
“At a time when API security has never been more important and more complex, F5 is eliminating the need for customers to pay for and manage separate API security solutions by offering API discovery, testing, posture management, and runtime protection—all in a single platform,” Abukhater added.
Making AI pervasive across the F5 portfolio
F5 also announced details of its new F5 AI Data Fabric, which is a foundation for building innovative solutions that help customers make more informed decisions and take quicker actions. Telemetry from Distributed Cloud Services, BIG-IP, and NGINX will surface unparalleled insights, produce real-time reports, automate actions, and power AI agents.
“F5 technology sits in the data path of nearly half of the world’s applications, so we are in a unique position to deliver AI-enabled solutions that benefit from an unmatched level of data,” Abukhater explained.
In addition, F5 will release an AI assistant later this year that will change the way customers interact with and manage F5 solutions using a natural language interface. Powered by the F5 AI Data Fabric, the tool will serve as an intelligent partner to stretched IT and security teams. It will easily generate data visualizations, identify anomalies, query, and generate policy configurations, and apply remediation steps. It will also act as an embedded customer support manager, allowing customers to ask questions and receive recommendations based on model training of entire product knowledge bases.
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