Skip to footer Skip to search ® F5 open search open navigation Company F5 Newsroom Say Hello to the New F5 What we call ourselves in this world matters. And when our lives and identities change, our names often do too. In the quarter century since F5 Networks was founded, we’ve gone through many evolutions, but our name hasn't. It’s time for a change. CX is a Human-First Approach to Technology Customer experience is impacted by perception, which stems from the overall interaction, not just whether or not the power is on. And CX is not relegated strictly to customer-facing apps. Apps primarily accessed by non-human entities (machines, script, etc.) still have a human somewhere in the process. The result: CX is an increasingly important part of digital transformation and development lifecycles. F5 Reports 11% Fourth Quarter Revenue Growth and 11% Fiscal Year Revenue Growth Fueled by Strong Software and Systems Demand “With software revenue representing 45% of product revenue in the fourth quarter, and 80% of this software revenue coming from subscriptions, we continue to mark milestone after milestone in our rapid transformation to a software led business model,” said François Locoh-Donou, F5’s President and CEO. Award Recognition: For(bes) The Culture 50 Honoree For(bes) The Culture 50 Champions are models of business excellence in their own various industries who also uplift Black and Brown communities through their crafts and philanthropic efforts. Multiple Clouds Versus Multi-Cloud: Making it Easier to Bridge the Gap Multi-cloud strategies are taking hold in the enterprise. But those strategies come with a formidable challenge—how to securely manage workloads across multiple cloud providers. Closing the Digital Business Loop: Adaptive Apps Observability, aka Monitoring 2.0, is a significant step forward in this technology journey for operators and digital business as they strive to understand and stabilize the relationship between user experience and business outcomes. But it’s only half the battle, and the other half involves analytics and automation. Scottish Government Maintains Security Edge and Drives Multi-Cloud Transformation The Scottish Government’s Agriculture and Rural Economy Directorate manages the payment of around $1 billion in subsidies to farmers each year. As a customer of F5 for almost 20 years, it has implemented solutions that enable it to maximize the security and delivery of applications that process payments on which Scotland’s agricultural industry depends. F5 Completes Acquisition of Threat Stack to Enhance Cloud Security Portfolio The addition of Threat Stack’s cloud security capabilities to F5’s application and API protection solutions will enhance visibility across application infrastructure and workloads to deliver more actionable security insights for customers. Constrained Compute: The Case for Hardware Optimization at the Edge Compute power in not limitless, and if there’s a limit to our ability to increase size and space as we move to the edge, then we must instead focus on optimization. When we have needed to improve capacity in the past, there’s been an introduction of optimized hardware components. Hardware-optimized computes will be a necessary capability for any application-centric platforms looking to support organizational enablement at the edge. F5 Enhances Cloud Security Portfolio with Acquisition of Threat Stack F5’s application and API protection solutions combined with Threat Stack's cloud security capabilities and expertise will enhance visibility across application infrastructure, making it easier for customers to apply consistent security in any cloud. How Security Automation Can Mitigate the Risk in Cybersecurity The banking and financial services industry has been experiencing digital transformation for several years and customer digital expectations combined with COVID-19 are accelerating key initiatives, such as Open Banking and Platform Banking. Digital as Default: Dealing with Unintended Consequences As businesses continue to move toward a “digital as default” operating model the ease of operations results in an increase of complexity – task automation requires more code, digital expansion requires more connections, AI-assisted business requires more data. And complexity is the enemy of security. Therefore businesses will have to adapt their security stack to keep up. F5 Silverline Mitigates Record-Breaking DDoS Attacks Malicious attacks are increasing in scale and complexity, threatening to overwhelm and breach the internal resources of businesses globally. Often, these attacks combine high-volume traffic with stealthy, low-and-slow, application-targeted attack techniques, powered by either automated botnets or human-driven tools. Ahrefs Optimizes Platform Performance with F5 NGINX Plus As Ahrefs continued to grow and expand its subscriber base, it needed to enhance its internal services and significantly improve business workflows to deliver exceptional customer experiences. Hybrid Work is Driving a Shift to Identity-Centric Security The explosive growth of automation and digitization along with a trend toward hybrid work models will accelerate the momentum away from IP-based security toward identity-based access strategies. Modern Hire and NGINX Deliver Modern App Security in the Cloud Modern Hire, a science-based hiring platform that serves clients in more than 200 countries, turned to NGINX when the organization needed to migrate its disparate SaaS technology platforms into one modern, unified, and fully cloud‑based solution while still providing security backed by a hardware security module (HSM) for customers who required it. Most Missing Insights are Due to Data Bias As business approaches a default-digital model, it necessarily relies more and more on data. Eliminating bias in that data will be a critical step in ensuring that decisions based on that data will lead to the best outcome possible for customers and the business. F5 Named Microsoft 2021 Commercial Marketplace Partner of the Year The Microsoft Partner of the Year Awards honor companies that demonstrate excellence in innovation and implementation of customer solutions based on Microsoft technology. This is an especially meaningful award for the company because it recognizes F5’s marketplace sales and marketing expertise, as well as consistent, high-quality, predictable delivery to marketplace customers. Audi Future-Proofs Tech Vision and App Innovation With NGINX Audi’s Kubernetes Competence Centre conceived Kubika O as a cloud‑independent Kubernetes platform operating as a seamless application environment. The big challenge ahead of launch was deciding how to secure everything. Audi needed a proven WAF solution with certified Red Hat OpenShift interoperability, plus robust, 24/7 technical support. NGINX Plus Authorized by U.S. Department of Defense’s Iron Bank It was recently confirmed by the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) that NGINX Plus has received formal authorization from the DoD’s Enterprise DevSecOps Initiative, Iron Bank. This gives DoD teams expanded capabilities as part of a verified digital infrastructure, while also signaling the company’s growing presence in the Federal sector. Íslandsbanki Accelerates and Secures Digital Transformation with NGINX Plus Íslandsbanki underwent a multi-year transformation to become a “digital companion” for its customers and turned to NGINX Plus to help meet its particular needs. Hands-Off Security Empowers Hands-On Innovation for Hamline University Hamline University is unique for its emphasis on students’ contributions to community needs and social service organizations across its programs. This means getting hands-on learning working with students at a local elementary school, for example, or interning for an environmental cleanup organization. This educational philosophy shows up in its IT department as a constant need to expand and innovate on technology services for students and faculty. Facing this need, but constrained by a small staff and budget, Hamline IT turned to F5 for help. HTTP: The Sequel The Dark Night. Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. Thor: Ragnarök. The Empire Strikes Back—sequels are frequently better than the originals. Sometimes writers need an additional opportunity to build out a fictional world or refine plots and characters. Similarly, in technology it seems the story is never quite over, with solutions like F5’s SSL Orchestrator well positioned to take advantage of industry narrative developments. Adaptive Applications and Event-Driven Infrastructure as Code Most organizations employ automation with infrastructure as code but still retain control over deployments. Looking forward, we’ll see more of an event-driven approach, where the trigger itself is automated based on an event. This is a significant part of what will make applications adaptive in the future—the ability to react to automatically to events and adapt location, security, and capacity to meet service-level objectives. Zipwhip bridges the gap between legacy tech and cloud with F5, NGINX As more and more customers opt-in to texting as their preferred method of business communication, organizations have scrambled to enable text messaging support at scale without over-extending internal teams that are already stretched thin with day-to-day IT projects and maintenance needs. A Conversation with Black Leaders in Tech A year after companies around the world pledged to make the workplace more inviting and equitable, what has changed? F5 CEO François Locoh-Donou and top Black leaders in tech discuss the opportunities and potential pitfalls of navigating a career as a Black professional in technology, with perspectives on how successful Black leaders in tech use challenging moments to build career momentum. Supporting Pride Month Through Action This Pride Month, Scott De Buitléir reflects on life lessons he's learned on his LGBTQ+ rugby team, and reviews some projects undertaken by NGINX and F5 over the past year to benefit our local and global communities: "At NGINX, we have always taken pride in our LGBTQ+ employees, and since joining F5, we’ve strengthened that commitment to the community even further." Application Edge Integration: A Study in Evolution The path that application delivery has taken over the last 20 years is a story of convergent evolution. More specifically, this era has seen the development of multiple delivery technologies that—when looked upon in hindsight—have revealed themselves to be the initial, nascent evolutionary steps toward what is becoming the application edge. Infrastructure is still an attractive attack vector Cloud computing has long sought to remove the need to deal with infrastructure, with APIs and drag-and-drop configuration tools to help keep those adverse to the network and infrastructure from getting their hands dirty. But we can't just ignore it either, or its profile as a key attack target. F5 Delivers Second Consecutive Quarter of Double-Digit Revenue Growth with 19% GAAP and 18% Non-GAAP Product Revenue Growth CEO François Locoh-Donou: Business and consumers’ increasing reliance on applications has accelerated all prior expectations about the pace of digital transformation and our customers across the globe are scaling their digital assets faster, resulting in growing demand for F5’s application security and delivery solutions. DNS Management Just Got Easier with General Availability of Primary DNS Service on F5 Cloud DNS As enterprises pursue DNS solutions capable of supporting adaptive applications, they look for solutions that match their need for automation, speed, and ability to respond to infrastructure changes in seconds rather than hours. F5 Cloud DNS promotes modern DevOps practices, helping to speed new application rollouts by adding DNS updates seamlessly into surrounding process elements. 3 Tips for Maintaining a High-Performing App Portfolio EVP Kara Sprague: Maintaining a healthy application portfolio is a like maintaining a healthy body. Both are subject to endless stresses and unanticipated conditions. Both require specific care, proactive maintenance, and targeted interventions. Over time, eating right and exercising regularly go a long way toward keeping your day-to-day running smoothly, and the same is true metaphorically for your apps. NGINX Is the Foundation of Modern App Performance Our goal at NGINX has always been to provide the foundation our customers and community need to deliver modern apps. Based on Abraham Maslow's famous hierarchy of needs for humans, here we show how NGINX offerings satisfy an app's hierarchy of needs at multiple levels. F5 Secures the Applications and APIs Driving Modern Digital Experiences New solutions highlight F5’s progressive approach to application security, enabling customers to deliver safe, frictionless, and modern digital experiences as consumers increasingly rely on applications, bolstering F5’s technology leadership position in combining multi-cloud application security and delivery with bot mitigation and anti-fraud capabilities to guard against sophisticated threats. Secure Your Apps and APIs. Everywhere. EVP of Security Haiyan Song: Delivering comprehensive security that doesn't slow the speed of innovation isn't easy given the complexities of the modern digital business. Our vision is simple, clear, and comprehensive. F5 helps you to secure your applications and APIs by providing visibility and control wherever you need it from L4 to L7—and across clouds, data centers, and a growing set of edge locations. F5 Collaborates with NVIDIA to Accelerate and Secure Cloud and Edge Computing Digital transformation and the associated data generation are threatening to overwhelm the systems and companies that rely on data to create value. Accordingly, organizations are looking for more efficient, modern computing architectures that can support multi-tenancy and deliver applications at data center scale with all the necessary levels of performance and security. NGINX Steps Up to F5 Agility 2021 with App-Driven Events F5 Agility 2021 takes the virtual stage on April 20–22 this year, and the NGINX team will be there in full force. Don't miss our sessions and demos on production-grade Kubernetes, real-time API management, and synergies between F5 and NGINX products. The Future of the AI-Based Enterprise We are living in an unprecedented time. Technology innovations routinely disrupt existing business models, and in some cases, completely replace existing industries—continuously and fundamentally changing the way we live and interact with each other. This post identifies three areas where AI is currently having a major impact on the enterprise. Living on the Edge: How We Got Here The first in a series of blogs that looks at application-related technologies whose tide will be coming in during the next few years, especially as we evolve toward a more fully dispersed application delivery fabric and the emergent role of the edge. We’ll begin by examining where we are today (and the paths taken so far). Fighting for a Radically Inclusive World F5 CTO Geng Lin: The fight for anti-racism in support of our friends, family, and coworkers of Asian and Pacific Islander ancestry is part of a much bigger battle. We are fighting for a world that is radically inclusive—where we, as a global community, don’t just tolerate differences, we celebrate them. The Rise of the Modern Monolith While there’s a tendency to focus on applications that directly implement a customer experience, every business domain will see the rise of applications that ultimately become critical to their digital presence. These applications, then, become the modern equivalent of a monolith. F5 Teams with IBM to Help Enterprises Manage Hybrid Cloud Workloads IBM Cloud Satellite is designed to bring cloud services to where clients’ data already resides—and help them bridge to where they want to go. This aligns with F5’s ambitions for Edge 2.0 and our vision of distributing applications—at the data center, in the public cloud, and at the edge—to help assure a seamless, consistent, and secure user experience. Investing in the Next Generation of Black Leaders Education is the key to changing a life trajectory—and F5 is thrilled to support Rainier Scholars as it prepares students of color for long-term academic success and lives of leadership. F5 Annual Survey Highlights Accelerated App Modernization and Edge Computing In its seventh iteration, F5's State of Application Strategy report identifies several converging trends, many of which have been significantly impacted as organizations revamp digital experiences to address the evolving realities of COVID-era consumers. With limited in-person interactions, applications—and the digital experiences they facilitate—have become synonymous with an organization’s presence and ability to thrive. The State of Application Strategy: Enabling Adaptive Apps EVP Kara Sprague: The pandemic has affected every aspect of our lives, including the way we work, how we learn, and the ways we connect with each other. That's why it's striking to me that the results of our State of Application Strategy report show not so much a sea change as a dramatic acceleration of the digital transformation initiatives that were already in motion well before COVID-19 swept across the globe. NGINX blog: Welcome to Microservices March! For much of the Northern Hemisphere, March signals an important time of growth, new beginnings, and preparation for the coming season's blooms. To celebrate, NGINX is hosting “Microservices March,” a month-long virtual festival of microservices-themed activities. Whether you’re already using Kubernetes in production or your interest is just blossoming, you’re sure to find sessions that will pique your interest. F5 Invests in Cloud Edge “Real Estate” with Volterra From the ONUG blog: Volterra enables F5 to bring to market a new SaaS-based platform for the dual trends of multi-cloud and edge. Developers and infrastructure teams in the enterprise market can now consistently deploy advanced security to the edge and across applications, with a build-once-deploy-global approach to orchestration. This enables multi-cloud scale without the significant added expense of bloated operational teams. Extending Our Recognition of Black Leaders Who Shaped History As Black History Month comes to a close, EVP Scot Rogers pays tribute to 7 LGBTQ+ Black American activists, artists, and writers who broke barriers, fought for equality, and made significant contributions to our national discourse. Tailoring Kubernetes for Telcos Flexibility and scalability are fundamental to the modern telco cloud vision, advising that 5G networks will become a versatile platform for a wide range of services and apps developed by third parties. As it enables telcos to deploy apps in portable containers, Kubernetes can bring services to the edge of the network, closer to end-users, reducing latency and yielding additional advantages. OK 2021 Ox, Now What? According to the Chinese zodiac cycle, the year of the (Metal) Ox has arrived. As the second animal in the zodiac, the stabilizing influence of the Ox points to a calmer atmosphere. Peter Silva gives his thoughts on the months to come and what they might hold for the industry. QUIC Will Eat the Internet QUIC has broad industry support and the potential to be the basis of most applications that deliver business value over the internet. Anyone delivering applications over the internet should start thinking about how their operations should change to reflect the new threats and opportunities that these protocols bring. Edge 2.0 Manifesto: Redefining Edge Computing F5’s completion of its acquisition of Volterra marks the beginning of the next phase of edge computing, ushering in the Edge 2.0 era. We envision that in the Edge 2.0 era, digital business in every industry sector will adopt edge computing platforms to deliver applications and to process and analyze data. The edge platform will be an essential component of the user experience for all digital services. Your Product is My Digital Experience It's no surprise that we all have at least a few devices in our homes that can and do connect to the Internet. What's surprising is that most of us—and most businesses, too—don't include the "IoT" as part of digital transformation. They should because digitizing products is absolutely a part of the business journey. F5 Completes Acquisition of Volterra With the addition of Volterra’s technology, F5 is creating an edge platform built for enterprises and service providers that will be security-first and app-driven with unlimited scale. The F5+Volterra Edge 2.0 platform will be designed to address challenges found with current edge solutions that are built on CDNs and have limited security features. F5 Delivers 10% Revenue Growth in its First Quarter Fiscal Year 2021 “Our investments over the last several years have fueled innovation, enhancing our strategic position with customers at a time when they are experiencing explosive application growth, and contributing to revenue growth in the first quarter," said François Locoh-Donou, F5’s President and CEO. 5G, Farming, and Economic Recovery In partnership with the 5G Open Innovation Lab and additional vendors such as Microsoft, T-Mobile, and VMware, F5 is providing technology support for The Food Resiliency Project in Snohomish County, Washington, with ties to the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act. A recent blog from F5's James Feger helps put these efforts in context. 5G Open Innovation Lab launches application development field lab for real-time data to support agricultural logistics and food resiliency [Press Release] "Because farming is a critical business which may lack easy access to certain technology advances due to terrain and geography, F5 is collaborating with other leading technology companies to source and co-develop local networks to improve supply chains and more efficiently get food on tables," said James Feger, VP and GM for Service Provider, F5. AI and Protecting against the Next Generation of Privacy Threats You are likely quite familiar with the most common threats that put your data at risk, such as using insecure passwords, sharing passwords, and not installing required security updates on your devices. But there are many other privacy risks that go beyond these typical cases. How to Ensure Data Privacy and Organizational Security With the level of encrypted traffic today, the need to ensure user and consumer data privacy, and the computationally intensive task of decryption and re-encryption, leveraging a traditional security solution to pull double-duty to deliver security by simply decrypting and re-encrypting traffic can be a very bad idea. Extending Adaptive Applications to the Edge EVP Kara Sprague: Volterra's universal, multi-cloud technology enables industry-standard containers to execute anywhere, across any public cloud, private cloud, or enterprise data center. Together with F5’s industry-leading application security and delivery technology, we will introduce the first Edge 2.0 platform, providing an edge that meets the demanding needs of enterprises and service providers. Strategic Benefits of a Robust Data Architecture The payoffs of a well-constructed data architecture go beyond operational process. The benefits extend into strategic operational efficiencies, deeper business insights, and the ability to reach adjacent business opportunities, all executed in a more agile manner. Stop Phishing and Cut Encrypted Exfiltration and Communication Phishing and spearphishing attacks drastically increased in 2020, driven by the threat of a worldwide pandemic, nations under quarantine or lockdown, work from home mandates, and contemporary political events. Jay Kelley examines modern threats in the context of F5 Labs' recent Phishing and Fraud Report, as well as how organizations can better protect users, applications, and data. Machine Learning for Product Managers Written by F5's Taggart Bonham, this article walks you through the five steps of building and deploying machine learning models, using time-series anomaly detection to demonstrate a real-world example. The best part: this distilled approach will apply to any product or feature. F5 to Acquire Volterra to Create the First Edge 2.0 Platform for Enterprises and Service Providers With the addition of Volterra’s technology platform, F5 is creating an edge platform built for enterprises and service providers that will be security-first and app-driven with unlimited scale. Enabling the Edge 2.0 Revolution With Volterra, F5 will transform how customers deliver digital experiences and address the application security and delivery challenges we’re seeing from existing edge technologies. F5+Volterra creates a new paradigm that unifies security and applications across cloud and edge with global consistency. Open Banking Will Unlock Opportunities in the Platform Economy for Financial Institutions Today, financial institutions are ripe with opportunity to participate in a broader ecosystem of services. The demand from consumers for new ways to manage their money and facilitate payments has never been higher, in part due to the accelerated rate of digitization brought on by COVID-19. But it's also driven by the arrival of digital natives to the marketplace. The Unfiltered State of Application Survey Respondents Whether we’re talking digital transformation, application architectures, or the importance of telemetry in maintaining a digital business, the soon-to-be-released results of our annual survey help shape F5's understanding of the market and strategic decisions. This year, we gave respondents a bit more latitude in providing freeform answers. They did not disappoint. The Top 10, Top 10 Predictions for 2021 As each year comes to a close, tech pundits blow the dust off their crystal balls and share their predictions for the coming year. For Peter Silva's annual list, he's compiled a collection of what the industry is saying (and expecting) for 2021. How Multi-Cloud Made Automation a Necessity This is the reality of cloud properties. They all use the same mechanisms—APIs, consoles, processes—to perform common operational tasks. This is one of the benefits of cloud. And in terms of onboarding new technology professionals, it can dramatically reduce time required for onboarding. A Friction-Free Experience with F5 Professional Services in AWS Marketplace Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers can now find and purchase consulting and training services from F5 in AWS Marketplace, a curated digital catalog of software, data, and services that makes it easy to find, test, buy, and deploy software and data products that run on AWS. As a participant in the launch, F5 is one of the first AWS Partners to quote and contract services in AWS Marketplace to help customers implement, support, and manage their software on AWS. Transforming Network Services with F5 Cloud DNS – Primary DNS Service Given DNS is a foundational networking service, it’s not a stretch to claim that digital transformation begins with DNS. Unfortunately, DNS is the last frontier of networking technology modernization. F5 Cloud DNS Service empowers network operations teams and DevOps teams to take advantage of these tectonic shifts in culture (DevOps) and technology (elastic consumption of computing and networking infrastructure). The Fourth Wave of Cloud is Imminent We recently crested the third wave of cloud. Concurrently, the pandemic has shifted a lot of enterprise attitudes. One has been the approach to remote work. Another is that toward public cloud. In fact, just about every survey out there now says the market is full steam ahead on cloud migrations—but, while certainly related, an important distinction exists between cloud migration and cloud adoption. Insights: There is more to it… At F5, our vision for your application portfolio is continuously adapting to its changing environment. With our SaaS solution, F5 Beacon, we enhance your application visibility posture irrespective of the actual architectures and data planes in use. Beacon provides you with the right level of insights that are easy to consume in order to support your adaptive applications. F5 Introduces Solutions for Cloud-Native 5G Infrastructure Enabling Service Providers to Accelerate Delivery of New Digital Experiences BIG-IP Service Proxy for Kubernetes and Carrier-Grade Aspen Mesh help bridge 4G and 5G networks while monetizing new capabilities for Kubernetes. The solutions feature scalable performance, visibility, and security advancements that enable service providers to deliver innovative 5G-based services to consumers and enterprises. Bringing the Adaptive Apps Vision to Life for Traditional Applications EVP Kara Sprague: F5 is delivering on the vision of adaptive apps for both traditional and modern applications. We define “traditional applications” as those that have a monolithic, client-server, or three-tier architecture. In contrast, “modern applications” are architected as distributed cloud- or container-native services that interact via APIs. How to Capture Packets that Don’t Exist – Blog post from F5's Aspen Mesh team Aspen Mesh Packet Inspector enables users to capture packets even in Kubernetes. That’s the part you need to address to power all the existing tools you probably already have. Leveraging these tools is important because customers are often heavily invested in them. And not just monetarily, as their reputation for reliable apps, services, and networks relies on the usefulness of their tools, procedures, and experience powered by a packet view. Veterans Day 2020 at F5 Nathan Kurtz, VP of Performance & Strategy at F5 and Executive Sponsor for the company’s Military Veterans Employee Inclusion Group, reflects on the significance of Veterans Day in the U.S., expands on what it means as an F5 employee, and identifies related resources. How Cloud-Based Infrastructure Enables 5G Innovation When it comes to 5G and innovation, one's imagination is the only limit. We all know that 5G is largely meant to satisfy the insatiable appetite for lightning-fast speeds and real-time (sub-millisecond) latencies. But it’s also the fundamental basis for enterprise vertical industries and academia enabling the development of some really remarkable technological advances. Aviatrix and F5 SSL Orchestrator Simplify Public Cloud Security Public cloud solutions offer a lot of well-known benefits, but they also pose the occasional challenge. For example, organizations are used to having precise control over all the network traffic in their data centers, and they count on that level of control to perform critical security checks. As corporate workloads move to the public cloud, IT operators are challenged to ensure that their security measures come along as well. Delivering Deeper Insight and Visibility for BIG-IP with Splunk BIG-IP excels at inspecting, analyzing, filtering, and reporting on network traffic, it creates a lot of very useful data. However, parsing and extracting insight from this stream of information can be no small feat. This was one of the primary drivers for the development of the Splunk Add-on for F5 BIG-IP. What is SOAR and How Can Agencies Leverage it in their Cybersecurity Efforts? By its industry definition, SOAR (Security Orchestration, Automation and Response) comprises “technologies that enable organizations to collect inputs monitored by the security operations team…SOAR tools allow an organization to define incident analysis and response procedures in a digital workflow format.” But it is far more than just a set of tools. National STEM Day: Closing the Gap for Women and Girls of Color in Technology Kara Sprague: While I enjoyed many advantages and privileges growing up, the fact remains just as it does today—girls are chronically under-represented in STEM. And the situation, I am sorry to say, is getting even worse, and most especially when it comes to girls and women of color. Credential Stuffing Increasingly Targets Video Games Gaming accounts and microtransactions are valuable enough to have become substantial targets for hackers. Given that these accounts—like those in other industries—can be used across platforms (website, console, mobile phone), they can pose lucrative opportunities with multiple attack vectors for those savvy enough to go after them. Edge is Driving an Infrastructure Renaissance As organizations ramp up their generation of data and seek to extract business value from it, analytics and automation powered by AI and ML will certainly be on the table as technologies put to the task. These are exactly the type of workloads that will benefit from optimized infrastructure, and yet they are the ones least likely to be able to take advantage of it today. F5 Delivers 5% Revenue Growth in Fiscal Year 2020 on Building Software Momentum “F5 is well on its way to becoming a software-led business, with customer demand for our multi-cloud application security and delivery services driving 5% GAAP and non-GAAP annual revenue growth in fiscal year 2020,” said François Locoh-Donou, president and CEO of F5. Cloud Native and Open Source (without the Hassle) It’s hard to find an enterprise company who hasn’t considered cloud native technologies to help meet user demands or to be more agile. So, what's holding organizations back? Some are wary of the critical parts of the cloud native stack that are open source. Others hesitate upon finding the cloud native market saturated. The choices can be overwhelming—and the downside of making the wrong bet on a soon-to-be-obsolete technology can outweigh the potential upside. What Government Organizations Need to Know about Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) CMMC, as it’s rolled out over the course of five years, is meant to reduce, if not eliminate, vulnerabilities and address a critical national security challenge. The defense industrial base (DIB) includes more than 300,000 companies, over which there has been a glaring lack of previous oversight. These companies access and store sensitive defense information on their own systems. CMMC represents an important step toward protecting this information. Why a Structured Data Design Strategy Matters: An Example A thoughtful and deliberate data strategy is fundamental to enabling the quality and cost-effectiveness of the most important business workflows. Further, when the workflows are instrumented to transmit their observed data exhaust to a collection and analysis infrastructure, the workflows themselves can be continuously analyzed and improved, resulting in constantly adaptive and optimized business workflows. Announcing F5 Essential App Protect and Amazon CloudFront Integration – Secure, Fast and Available as a Service Many companies have seen years of transformation take place in just the past several months. While adapting to a global crisis has been a catalyst, the long-term requirements have remained the same while the urgency has increased. Organizations want to deliver a superior customer experience. They want business agility, the ability to respond rapidly to changing market conditions. And, ultimately, they want return on their investments. Hispanic Heritage Month 2020: Opportunity, Welcome, and Family This blog concludes a two-part series celebrating National Hispanic Heritage Month through the voices of our employees and members of F5’s Latinx e Hispanos Unidos Employee Inclusion Group (EIG). Alejandro (Alex) Figueroa, a manager at our Security Operation Center based in Guadalajara, shares his story and thoughts on the importance of this celebration. Scaling DDoS Protection at the Edge While it's true that 2020 has seen different DDoS attack patterns emerge, what is also true is that DDoS attacks at the infrastructure layer are still DDoS attacks. They are what we might call "traditional" attacks. What is changing are targets and opportunities that come with a distributed workforce, along with considerations around 5G and Edge computing. F5 Introduces AI-powered Solution that Blocks Fraud Missed by Existing Technologies and Improves Online Experiences for Users F5 introduces Shape AI Fraud Engine (SAFE), a new SaaS solution that eliminates fraudulent online transactions that get past existing fraud tools. SAFE utilizes a battle-tested AI engine to evaluate each online transaction across a variety of telemetry, environmental, and behavioral signals to accurately understand user intent and block human fraudsters before the fraud occurs. Adaptive Applications are Data-Driven There's a big difference between knowing something's wrong and knowing what to do about it. Only after monitoring the right elements can we discern the health of a user experience, deriving from the analysis of those measurements the relationships and patterns that can be inferred. Ultimately, the automation that will give rise to truly adaptive applications is based on measurements and our understanding of them. Reducing Time to Know with F5 Beacon In most fictional stories, whether told through text or on the screen, there is a point at which a main plotline is seemingly but not actually resolved. The same thing happens in IT organizations. The clock is ticking, and too often just when IT thinks they've seen the last of an issue, it returns and they have to redouble their efforts while a customer grows more and more frustrated. It’s Time to Get Cloud Smart about Application Security Back in 2018 the Office of Management and Budget introduced a new strategy designed to provide organizations with a roadmap to migrate their applications to the cloud, dubbed Cloud Smart. The message is clear: the traditional definition of a network perimeter has eroded; applications are the new network edge. We have entered into a new phase of digital transformation that is dominated by cloud services and multi-cloud applications. EXIM Bank creates a more seamless and secure customer experience with F5 solutions The Export Import Bank of Bangladesh Limited (EXIM Bank) transitioned into a full-fledged bank with activities that adhere to Islamic law and use a real-time banking application called Temenos Transact. To ensure it could scale this solution across its branches and enhance the security of online banking transactions, EXIM Bank leveraged F5 Advanced Web Application Firewall (WAF) and Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM). COVID-19 Illuminates New Digital Sales Realities COVID-19 has forced many to tear up the rulebook and (virtually) start again, as the lines between field sales and digital operations continue to blur beyond recognition. The pandemic has put a rocket behind sales’ natural evolutionary trajectory, just as previous societal and technological shifts moved organizations away from Rolodexes to Salesforce, or from landlines to mobile phones and videoconferencing. Making Security Cool: National Cybersecurity Awareness Month 2020 National Cybersecurity Awareness Month is happening now. For nearly 20 years, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has devoted every October to telling Americans how to be safer and more secure online. In all that time, has anything changed? Why Telcos are Exploring ‘Best of Suite’ over ‘Best of Breed’ Solutions In the 5G era, the ability to maintain deterministic low latency is an unavoidable must-have. As a result, some operators are refocusing efforts to embrace a ‘best of suite’ approach in which they deploy a consolidated set of virtual functions/solutions to simplify network service delivery, rather than trying to stitch together a range of separate products. Virtualization and flexible licensing help fuel CSG’s dramatic modernization CSG, a 35-year-old provider of customer engagement services for the telecommunications and cable industry, leveraged an F5 Enterprise Licensing Agreement to facilitate its digital transformation journey. F5 Appoints Elizabeth Buse to Board of Directors Elizabeth Buse, former CEO of Monitise PLC, a global mobile banking and payments company, has been appointed to F5's Board of Directors. Ms. Buse brings broad financial services industry expertise and public company board experience to F5. Detecting Fraud in Digital Workflows Requires More than Data The industry saw nearly 250,000 attempts of credit card fraud in 2019. That breaks down to about one attempt every two minutes. Detecting fraud today requires a correlation of data, collected from as many points in the digital workflow as possible, and the ability to analyze it at speeds far greater than manual data processing can offer. Hispanic Heritage Month in 2020 F5's Lupita Vallejo provides thoughts and personal context on this monthlong celebration: "Mexico is a country rich in culture, language, music, artifacts, and far more. We are more than our world-renowned food, historic landmarks, and perfect weather. What really defines my Mexico is something far more important: the people." NGINX Announces Eight Solutions that Let Developers Run Safely with Scissors Rob Whiteley: We're announcing solutions that unleash developer speed without sacrificing the control infrastructure teams require. Get the details on NGINX Controller, App Protect, Ingress Controller, Service Mesh, and Analytics Cloud Service; F5 DNS Cloud Services; and Red Hat integrations. Slow is the New Down The central problem with measuring site performance today can be summed up as: "We don't measure the cost of slow. We measure the cost of downtime." Humans tend to work toward what they're measured on. This is not a new concept and, in fact, it's one of the tenets of DevOps and the reason the methodology includes a shift in measurements toward what matters most. Today, that means more than just available—it means fast and reliable too. Apps in the Firing Line: DDoS Attacks on the Rise The first known incident resembling a denial of service attack reportedly occurred in 1974 when a 13-year-old took down a room full of terminals connected to a learning management system at the University of Illinois. Times have obviously changed since, but DDoS attacks have continued to evolve and wreak havoc. This is particularly true in the wake of COVID-19. Impressions of the virtual Sprint conference from Gus Robertson, SVP & GM, NGINX, F5 We explore three factors that hamper the speed of software development and delivery: dev teams are battling fatigue, tools aren't automated, and infrastructure is too complex. Find out how NGINX Open Source, NGINX Plus, NGINX App Protect, and NGINX Controller can help. At U.S. Federal Agencies, the Time is Right for Zero Trust Nearly half of federal government IT executives reported that their agencies are shifting toward identity-centered, or Zero Trust, security strategies to protect their digital resources. The accelerated use of this model coincides with the growing realization that traditional methods to secure a network’s perimeter are no longer sufficient. National Coding Week – A Q&A With Kara Sprague, EVP and GM of BIG-IP and Girls Who Code Board Member It’s National Coding Week in the UK! To mark the occasion, we connected with Kara Sprague, EVP and GM of BIG-IP and a board member at Girls Who Code, to talk about the way coding is viewed, its role in her professional development, and its continuing impact on industries of every type. Using the Modernizing Government Technology Act to Improve Cybersecurity (Now) When the Modernizing Government Technology Act (MGT Act) was signed into law in 2017, its purpose was so agencies could apply for support from the Technology Modernization Fund, designed to help them move on from legacy systems and invest in agile, transformative technologies. Over time, the establishment of the MGT Act has proven even more visionary than anyone could have imagined. How AI will automate cybersecurity in the post-COVID world Shuman Ghosemajumder: By now, it is obvious to everyone that widespread remote working is accelerating the trend of digitization in society that has been happening for decades. What takes longer for most people to identify are the derivative trends. One such trend is that increased reliance on online applications means that cybercrime is becoming even more lucrative. Should TIC 3.0 Guidance Change Your Security Approach? The Trusted Internet Connections (TIC) initiative’s 3.0 guidance marks an excellent opportunity to review your security approach. Because of evolving threats, federal government security experts know it’s important to stay vigilant. While technology changes, the ultimate goal remains the same—to protect your agency, partners, and customers. Lifewire Helps Domestic Violence Survivors Find a Lifeline through Remote Digital Support With help from an F5 Global Good Tech for Good grant for COVID-19 response, LifeWire was able to quickly transition to remote services for victims of domestic abuse. Consistently Control Access to Multi-Cloud Applications with F5 Access Manager and Equinix Consistency of policy across multiple cloud properties has been the top challenge facing organizations for as long as we've been asking about multi-cloud challenges. The recent diaspora of applications and access control only serves to exacerbate the importance of implementing a unified access control point able to enforce a consistent set of access policies. Packing Up and Moving to SaaS While SaaS is not really all that new, what is new is the range of activities being commoditized and packaged as SaaS. All manner of business functions are joining CRM, SFA, productivity, and communications as SaaS offerings. And we anticipate that organizations will quickly jump at the chance to offload the operation of such software to a provider. Cloud-Native Architectures Accelerate Need for New Ways to Solve Security Challenges Despite changes in architectures and location, security problems do not change. Customers still need to protect applications, ensure availability, and defend against DDoS attacks. Application security is just a bigger challenge now due to the expanding attack surfaces and vulnerabilities. United Way Bay Area Helps SparkPoint Centers Adapt During the Pandemic With the help of an F5 Global Good Tech for Good grant, United Way Bay Area was able to transition to virtual service delivery for its clients during the pandemic. This infusion of funds helped expand the digital infrastructure of the SparkPoint Centers and supported virtual training for helpline volunteers. We are Entering a New World of “Adaptive Applications.” Here’s What that Means. F5 believes an important element of this more sophisticated automation is enabling applications to adapt. Much like a living organism, adaptive applications grow, shrink, defend, and heal themselves based on the environment they’re in and how they’re being used. This applies to born-in-the cloud, digital-native organizations as much as established companies with a complex mix of traditional and modern architectures. The Advantages and Necessity of Open Source Agile processes enable rapid releases to deliver customer value quickly and seamlessly; and new technologies make it viable to deliver daily releases, particularly for customers operating on a massive, global scale. Open source provides a model that offers the flexibility, agility, and stability companies need to efficiently deliver applications to their end-users—without the restrictions of vendor lock-in. Beyond Visibility is Operability There are two walls in the delivery path for applications. The first (which has been the cause of much friction) is between development and production. And while DevOps methodologies have begun to break down this wall, the other—the one between production and delivery to consumers—is not so easily breached. As the Cloud Wins over the Financial Sector, Keeping Customers Secure Requires Technology and Talent F5's Chad Davis: Digital disruption has arrived for notoriously cautious financial services firms. Applications are one of the most important competitive differentiators in the industry today, powering everything from accounting systems to transaction engines to the customer experience. What’s more eye-opening is that those apps are increasingly running in the cloud. Multiple Clouds? Multiple Risks. Most organizations are operating in multiple cloud properties in addition to their own on-premises, private cloud. For the past three years we've asked about the challenges and frustrations professionals in every role within IT experience while operating in this mode. Every year the top answer is the same: consistency. F5 Delivers 4% Revenue Growth on Continued Strong Software Demand in Third Quarter Fiscal Year 2020 F5's CEO: "Customers continue to look to F5 to enable their mission-critical application needs and deploy a combination of solutions spanning our F5, NGINX and Shape multi-cloud application services portfolio. In a challenging COVID-19 environment, our deep incumbency and close alignment with customers' investment priorities are proving distinct competitive advantages and driving resiliency in our business.” Digital Transformation: Progressing from Automation to Workflows In the three phases of digital transformation, the first phase is all about automation. The focus on digitizing of workflows in phase two will ultimately offer businesses a path forward to the third phase, where data-driven services will generate actionable insights that improve efficiency, reduce process friction, and increase both productivity and profits. A Nonprofit Pivots from In-Person to Digital Relationships to Serve those Hit Hard by the Pandemic Big Table is dedicated to caring for those in the restaurant and hospitality industry who are in crisis, in transition, or in danger of falling through the cracks. They applied for and received an F5 Global Good “Tech for Good” COVID-19 Response grant, upgrading laptops and purchasing cameras, lighting, backdrops, a teleprompter, and other equipment to enable live-streaming events. The Changing World of Encryption: TLS Deployments in 2020 Online privacy is no longer about simply staying away from prying eyes. Encryption on the web plays a key role in affording us our privacy, and it is constantly changing. Lancashire Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust banks on F5 for secure remote access during COVID-19 Due to COVID-19, Lancashire Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust required significantly more staff to work from home. F5 and its partner, Full Proxy, rapidly combined forces to ensure that even a ten-fold increase in remote users had no impact on the user experience. Traffic Management User Interface Vulnerability: How to Mitigate [F5 DevCentral Article] A new Remote Code Execution vulnerability announcement that affects several versions of BIG-IP was just released on June 30, 2020. Because of the severity of this vulnerability, we recommend immediately installing the latest patched version in order to protect your BIG-IP system from compromise. Video from F5's Security Incident Response Team (SIRT) Peter Silva walks you through the details, and why locking down the Management Port is F5 SIRT’s top tip for keeping your BIG-IP and your network secure from intruders. New F5 Solution Defends Customers’ Websites through Protection against Bots and Credential Stuffing Silverline Shape Defense, a fully managed service from F5, helps customers better focus on their users and safeguard businesses against bots, credential stuffing, scraping, and other automated attacks that result in fraud and abuse—leading to compromised efficiency, loss of revenue, and damage to the brand. F5 Adds AI-Powered Anti-Bot and Fraud Prevention to Popular F5 Silverline Managed Services Gail Coury: With Silverline Shape Defense, companies get the visibility, detection, and mitigation outcomes they need to slash fraud; reduce cloud hosting, bandwidth, and compute costs; improve user experiences; and optimize their business based on real human traffic. The Next Phase of Application Monitoring is Predictive First confined to the data center, Application Performance Monitoring (APM) has become increasingly context-driven around web-based user experiences. Today, it isn't enough to identify what went wrong after the fact. Businesses need to identify where trouble might occur before it happens. Shape makes it ridiculously easy for Fastly users to identify threats and deliver targeted mitigation If you’re a Fastly CDN user, Shape’s industry-leading log analysis capabilities are just a flip of the switch away. There is zero impact on production traffic, so there is no risk of negative consequences—just straight up information gathering. F5's Frank Strobel takes a closer look. A letter from the F5 Appreciates Blackness (FAB) employee inclusion group in response to Black Lives Matter We want to share this powerful message to F5ers from our FAB employee inclusion group leaders as a blog post to help channel our collective energy into concrete action. F5 stands in solidarity with the Black community and those who protest in support of social justice around the world. Fireside Chat with F5 CEO François Locoh-Donou Originally published for Black History Month, François Locoh-Donou talks with F5 Appreciates Blackness co-chair Monique Thompson about his personal journey, what it’s like to be a Black man in corporate America, and how to foster dialogue and understanding about the challenges Black Americans face. Read F5's Pledge against Racism and Discrimination At F5, our commitment to the fight against racism is a foundational part of our culture as a company. We consider diversity and inclusion part of being an F5er. Accordingly, our F5 Appreciates Blackness (FAB) employee inclusion group, the Diversity & Inclusion team, and executives are sharing the steps we are taking as a company, and the pledge we are taking as individuals. The Third Wave of Cloud is Cresting There is an ebb and flow to technology cycles. Its inevitability is extant in many theories, such as the S-curve of innovation and a certain well-known analyst firm's hype cycle. Cloud is subject to these same waves. We've seen two very strong cycles over the past ten years, and it appears that a third wave is beginning to crest. F5 Fortifies Partnership with Rakuten Mobile to Provide Advanced Application Security Services for the Rakuten Communications Platform Yuichi Gonda, Regional VP at F5 Networks Japan, commented: “We are delighted to be supporting Rakuten Mobile on their 5G journey to becoming a global telco provider. This demonstrates how F5 solutions deliver and protect apps—from code to customer, reducing telcos’ operational complexity and costs.” The Technology Playbook for COVID-19 and a More Agile Future EVP Kara Sprague: The pandemic has raised the stakes overnight on digital experiences. The playbook for thriving has four distinct phases, which I’ve heard consistently from both customers and industry observers. Several organizations are applying this approach to enhance their operations with new digital processes that will drive ongoing differentiation. Improving Business Outcomes and Application Experiences with a Cloud Gateway in Equinix Equinix addresses the challenges of distributed applications with connectivity, latency, and capacity at the network layers with its cloud edge locations and networking magic. With security and full visibility of traffic flows, it also acts as a control point between users, locations, clouds, and data in which organizations can deploy and enjoy the benefits and capabilities of a cloud gateway (such as F5 BIG-IP). How Containers Change Scalability In the cloud era, the focus has flipped from vertical to horizontal scale. We still need more bandwidth and compute and processing power, but we've learned how to distribute that need. It's the way resources are assembled that changes the game. And make no mistake, the game has changed thanks to containers. Mitigate DDoS attacks up to 300x greater in magnitude in Cloud environments: Introducing BIG-IP VE for SmartNICs For service providers and enterprises transitioning to 5G network infrastructure and modern cloud architectures, virtual environments can now be hosted on low-cost, standards-based servers while moving specific functions to a Smart Network Interface Card, thereby boosting performance and lowering latency in the core and at the network edge. International Women in Engineering Day 2020 – Q&A with Sara Boddy, Sr. Director, F5 Communities To mark this year’s Women in Engineering Day, we connected with Sara Boddy, Senior Director of F5 Communities (F5 Labs and DevCentral), to discuss her career to date and why we need to continually strive for more diversity in tech. Embrace All People for Who They Are: Life Lessons from Uncle Johnny Scot Rogers, Executive sponsor of the F5 Pride employee inclusion group (EIG) shares his thoughts on advocacy for the LGBTQ+ community at F5, and how the experiences and perspective of a close relative illustrated "the importance of embracing all people for who they are, as they are, and wherever they are on their life’s journey.” Why NFV is More Relevant Than Ever While it is true that adoption rates have fallen short of initial predictions, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that NFV is as relevant as it’s ever been. Perhaps even more so. F5's Shape Security Wins Award for Application Security Fortress Cybersecurity Awards highlight the world’s leading companies and products that are working to keep data and electronic assets safe among growing threats from hackers. Privacy Matters in a Data-Driven Economy Data comes from a variety of sources across the code-to-customer path. Applications. Platforms. Application services. Infrastructure. Devices. All are capable of emitting data that can be turned into business value by the right solution. The elephant in the room during any discussion on the use of data is, of course, privacy. How COVID-19 is Testing Telcos’ Mettle We live in testing times. For telecoms operators, the COVID-19 pandemic is throwing up challenge after challenge. These range from a major mismatch between network configuration and the new traffic patterns, to physical attacks on 5G infrastructure and elaborate forms of fraud devised by a new breed of bad actors. At the same time, under-employed customers are querying bills and questioning their tariff plans. The Foundational Role of Data Architecture (in an analytics-focused world) The first step in a discussion about data architecture is to define what the concept of “data architecture” encompasses. Unsurprisingly, the answer turns out to be nuanced—it is layered and multifaceted. To help ground the discussion, it is useful to start by thinking about it in terms of the journey of collected telemetry data. Corporate Payments Go Digital in the Wake of COVID-19 Digital payments have become as common as cash used to be. Shutdowns due to the COVID-19 pandemic have only accelerated the rate consumers rely on such services. But it has also accelerated digital payments on the corporate side. After all, businesses still have accounts payable and receivable whether they're open to the public or not. Improving Support for Containerized Apps: Announcing Container Ingress Services 2.0 With the development of container orchestration technologies, working with containers is easier and more programmatic than ever. But orchestration is only half the battle. Effective container strategies also require solutions for the different elements tied to applications, such as networks, storage, security, traffic management, and DNS. F5’s Path to a Multi-Purpose Application Analytics Platform CTO Geng Lin: Today, F5 offers the most comprehensive application services along the code to customer path. For the future, we are doubling down on application telemetries and analytics to help our customers discover insights about their applications, business flows, and user experiences. As we build out our cloud analytics capabilities, we'll further leverage ML/AI to help our customers to improve their business services. Don’t Leave Security Behind – 6 Months of SaaS-based Web App Protection Free for Healthcare, Non-Profits, and Education In a get-it-done-now kind of environment, you need a fast and easy way to make sure your web apps are covered by fundamental protections. F5 recognizes the pressures those on the frontlines of the COVID-19 crisis are under, and we don’t want new technology to be another one. Zero Trust in an Application-Centric World Zero Trust is a powerful strategy that can help a business go faster and be more secure. While not a new concept, it is one that has taken on particular relevance for today's application-driven businesses and multi-cloud environments. F5 Names Tom Fountain as Head of Global Services and Strategy F5 announces the appointment of Tom Fountain as Executive Vice President of Global Services and Chief Strategy Officer. In this role, he will head F5’s global support, professional consulting, educational services, customer success, manufacturing, and technology services operations. The Two Questions You Need to Answer to Achieve High Availability Demand for digital experiences is up. And there’s very little more frustrating to a user than an app or website failing to load. To be honest, there's very little more frustrating to an operator than an app or website failing to load. Achieving high availability is not just a matter of inserting a load balancer into the data path. That's part of the equation, but it's just one of the steps needed to ensure an app or website stays available. Securing Remote Access While Protecting Against Encrypted Threats Jay Kelley looks at how organizations are beginning to shift their technology concerns from application access and maintaining user productivity toward application security. The article also notes how cybercriminals are adapting and what you can do about it. The Evolution of Load Balancing is Tied to Application Architecture It should be no surprise that as there evolves a new generation of application architectures that a new generation of load balancing accompanies it. Since the birth of load balancing, just before the turn of the century, the technology has moved in a predictable pace, which means it is time for innovation. F5 Accelerates Customers’ Digital Transformation with End-to-End Application Visibility and Control F5’s Beacon, BIG-IQ, and NGINX Controller solutions give customers end-to-end visibility into the health and performance of applications, along with integrated traffic, security, and API management controls to take action based on those insights, surfacing new ways to lower operational overhead and achieve faster time to market. Light It Up: A Look at F5’s New Tools for Application-Centric Visibility With F5’s portfolio of visibility solutions, customers can collect and analyze application metrics no matter where the application or app services are deployed. They can connect to applications wherever they live, scale analytics natively, and close unknown gaps in application visibility to expand and strengthen security and reliability. Supporting our Partners and Customers Through Change As we begin to grapple with the fact that our rebound will not happen as quickly as we’d all like, we are coming up with innovative ways to keep businesses moving forward. We are offering new tools and resources for our partner community to help solve customer challenges with remote access and security. Maintaining Pride and Unity in Uncertain Times It may seem like a million years ago since we hosted our first EMEA LGBT+ @ Work Symposium in London (which included the official launch of the UK & Ireland branch of F5 Pride), but our work behind the scenes has continued apace. In many ways, our mission is only just getting started. The Importance of Calibrating Application Health Measurements Lori MacVittie: Much like the health of our household reef tank, the health of applications requires careful attention to key metrics. Deviations, especially wild fluctuations, can indicate a problem. Manual adjustment of metrics is not a process you want to mimic when it comes to applications (as the average organization maintains 100–200 applications in its digital portfolio). F5 and Microsoft: Simplifying the User and Administrator Application Access Experience Together, Azure Active Directory and BIG-IP APM offer unified security and user experience between modern and classic applications, providing a single identity control plane and delivering SSO from any device to all applications, whether they are hosted on-premises or in the cloud, and whether or not they support modern authentication and authorization. Microsoft and F5: Together Addressing Secure Remote Access and Productivity With the impacts of COVID-19, now home-based and remote employees require secure and seamless access to the applications they need to be productive—especially with all the new challenges they’re facing every day. F5 BIG-IP APM and Azure Active Directory simplify the user experience for application access by enabling users to log in once and access all applications they have the right to access in any location. Agility in a Time of Disruption Mika Yamamoto, Chief Marketing and Customer Experience Officer, discusses F5's virtual Agility conference, the industry-leading event for architects, engineers, and developers to learn how building, managing, and securing applications in multi-cloud environments can accelerate digital transformation and deliver better customer experiences. How a Crisis Reveals the Value of Human-Centered Systems Culture is not something that can be switched on in response to a crisis. Digital transformation, first and foremost, is a response to a business need. So, the initiatives that support it need to be designed with business outcomes in mind. F5’s Teri Patrick looks at how business outcomes have been informed by organizational culture in the context of the current pandemic. Powerful Choices for Service Providers: F5 Partners with IBM Telco Network Cloud Ecosystem James Feger, GM, Service Provider, F5: This new partnership area is significant as it casts a global spotlight on the shared values of both F5 and IBM to enable Service Providers with broader choices of modern architectures and infrastructures—with both hardware and software options to enable open source hybrid cloud containers and innovate toward rapid network transformation. Microservices will be the new COBOL Amid this pandemic, the systems processing unemployment claims in many U.S. states found themselves in peril. Developed using COBOL, the systems faced overwhelming demand, prompting urgent calls for those proficient in a programming language dating back to 1959. In parallel, many applications driving contemporary digital transformation efforts are microservices-based. These apps, like their COBOL forebears, are likely to be so critical that they, too, may still be running in 50 or 60 years. Security is (Still) Everyone's Responsibility The expansion of applications tied to organizations’ digital transformation efforts also increases the number of attack surfaces for bad actors to target, with the effects of the current pandemic further accelerating this growth. Coupled with users’ tendency to reuse passwords, you’ve got an unfortunately prime environment for credential stuffing attacks. In this article, Renuka Nadkarni from F5’s Office of the CTO highlights best practices that can help both businesses and consumers protect themselves. Visibility: Where Effective App Service Management and Troubleshooting Begin In light of digital transformation initiatives quickly becoming a “checkbox” for modern enterprises, effective management of app services—and the devices that power them—is paramount. It’s also not easy, simple, or straightforward, especially in the multi-cloud world. That's why F5 is so dedicated to delivering end-to-end app visibility and control from code to customer with BIG-IQ 7.1. F5 Delivers 7% Revenue Growth in Second Quarter Fiscal Year 2020 “We saw continued rapid acceptance of our software and subscription-based offerings as enterprises and service provider customers worldwide look to F5 to ensure consistent application access, delivery and security,” said François Locoh-Donou, CEO and President of F5. “In the last month of the quarter, we also saw increased demand for capacity as customers looked to quickly and, in some cases, massively scale remote access capabilities to keep their employees safe and their businesses running.” Partner News: Fortanix Data Security Platform Now Available on Microsoft Azure to Enhance Private Data Protection in the Public Cloud Frank Strobel, Director, Cybersecurity and IoT Alliances at F5: “Customers running BIG-IP and NGINX solutions in Azure now have an additional choice for key management that preserves scalability while providing full control in securing website traffic.” Control versus Execution in the Data Path The rise of cloud and continued adoption of containers points toward dynamic data paths through which apps are delivered. A single, strategic point of control and execution is often no longer operationally—or architecturally—feasible. But that does not mean that a unified point of control is no longer possible, provided that one chooses a proper tool. Taking a ‘Human-First’ Approach as Customers Swiftly Adapt In prioritizing health and well-being, organizations worldwide are finding out how they can work effectively when employees are separated by physical distance. Ian Jones, head of F5’s global Professional Services and Training Services teams, highlights the ways organizations are meeting today’s demands, and surfacing lessons that will apply long after the pandemic ends. F5 and AlgoSec Enable Holistic Network Security Management In today's heterogeneous IT environments, it’s all too easy for the rules and objects associated with the devices that make up the network to proliferate, adding complexity and risk. To help address this, AlgoSec has worked closely with F5 to extend rich visibility and orchestration capabilities across the entire multi-vendor network security fabric. Mika Yamamoto Discusses Removing Friction and Adding Delight in Leading Marketing and Customer Experience Organizations Audio and transcript from the F5 CMCXO’s recent guest appearance, also touching on digital transformation and the significance of “code connects us all.” (Podcast also available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Play, iHeartRadio, among others.) Unintended Consequences of COVID-19: Operational Exposure Extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures. Many people have uttered this phrase in light of COVID-19. One of those extraordinary measures has been a pivot to remote work for many of us. In this context, access to critical apps is often discussed. But rarely do we hear the details about how that access has been enabled. App Servers as Insertion Points An insertion point is an architecturally distinct location in the code to customer data path at which it makes sense to add functionality that is often outside the purview of development or operationally more efficient. Insertion points include the client, infrastructure, and the app itself. So, what we're looking for are app services that are both operationally and cost efficient at the point of insertion; in this case, we're focused on the app server (platform) itself. How Secure is your VPN? Perennially important, virtual private network (VPN) security is now imperative given the current COVID-19 pandemic. Remote working has fast become the new normal and, correspondingly, the demand for VPN capabilities has skyrocketed. Unfortunately—if unsurprisingly—attacks on VPNs have risen sharply alongside. Living through the Pandemic in Asia: A Perspective on Crisis F5's Kunaciilan Nallappan reflects on the early days of 2020, sharing his thoughts on the company's initial response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the continuing importance of putting employees, customers, and communities first as we navigate these times together. Video and Network Optimization for Mobile Service Providers in the Time of COVID-19 For mobile service providers, COVID-19 has been the catalyst recently for dramatic traffic growth as enterprises and consumers follow mandatory stay-at-home guidelines. Fortunately, many OTT providers have throttled their video streams to reduce the strain on the network, but this has also highlighted to service providers the importance of being prepared. From Solutions to Stacks: The Age of Assembly This componentization of IT is like the componentization of the applications it is tasked with securing and delivering. It's estimated that 80 to 90% of modern applications are composed of third-party components, most of which are open source. The benefits to doing so include speed, responsiveness to change (agility), and a reduction in the cost to create the software. After all, if someone else already wrote the code for a wheel, why reinvent it? What Six Years of “State of Application Services” Data Tells Us about Organization Preparedness As organizations rapidly mobilize a global teams to work from home, they are considering the performance, availability, and security of their corporate applications. In recent conversations with customers and partners around the world, we interestingly see a renewed focus on some of the same application services that topped the list in 2015—load balancing, network firewall, anti-virus, and most importantly, identity and access. Engaging Global Teams and Communities during Shifting Tides of COVID-19 As COVID-19 continues to make its impact felt on a worldwide scale, F5’s Chief Human Resources Officer Ana White and Chief Marketing & Customer Experience Officer Mika Yamamoto reflect on implementing response and readiness efforts reaching employees and communities worldwide. F5 Adds Sri Shivananda to its Board of Directors “For his entire career, Sri has been on the forefront of how technology can be leveraged to make financial services and commerce more convenient, affordable, and secure,” said François Locoh-Donou, president and CEO of F5. “His background will be a major asset to F5 as we further expand the ways we connect with our customers through SaaS, cloud, and digital go-to-market efforts.” Gaining Visibility into your Applications Requires Breaking Down Operational Silos F5 EVP Kara Sprague: One of the reasons why application-level visibility remains so elusive is because application data paths are complex. There are generally several operational silos along the data path for a single application, and even more operational silos for each of the application architectures and infrastructure environments used within any multi-cloud architecture. And where there are silos, there is limited visibility. F5 Technical Services: Continuing Business in the Time of Coronavirus The COVID-19 pandemic has created a new work reality almost overnight. Globally, companies like F5 are finding new ways to reinforce flexibility and innovative collaboration as key elements of employee culture. In this article, Jay Kelley takes a closer look at the activities of the Technology Services team at F5 during the course of March 2020 to meet the changing needs of the company and its customers. Optimizing Remote Access to Support WFH during COVID-19 The general dominance of video and SaaS traffic today is, in part, why remote access services are being overwhelmed. In parallel, the rise of telemedicine during this pandemic is increasing and along with it, live video traffic. One way to increase capacity and improve performance for remote users is to update your remote access configuration to reflect the modern makeup of application traffic. DevOps Rising to the Occasion, Filling the Web App Security Gap with F5’s Essential App Protect Service Essential App Protect takes the complexity and guesswork out of safeguarding applications in delivering simple, fast, and scalable cloud-based security for web apps—wherever they’re deployed. The service can be activated within minutes, giving apps out-of-the-box protection against common web exploits, malicious IPs, and coordinated attacks. The Next Journey for Applications: Extracting Value from a Sea of Data F5 Office of the CTO’s Ken Arora examines how the evolution of applications and application services interacts and harmonizes with the larger megatrend of data value extraction (as well as digital transformation), where that symbiosis is today, and finally, where it's headed in the near future. Keeping Networks Running and Protected in a Time of Uncertainty A new reality brings new vulnerabilities. With nearly 100% of staff telecommuting, what becomes the most important link in the connectivity chain? When exponentially more customers rely on the Internet to order products, what part of an organization’s operations suddenly becomes the most critical? Of course, it’s the network. Cloud, COVID-19, and the Elusive Measure of Agility COVID-19 and its rapid spread across the globe have, however unfortunately and unintentionally, altered perceptions around what business agility looks like, particularly in the context of the sudden shift of employees requiring access to applications and data from vastly distributed locations. Maintaining Business Continuity During a Global Crisis Whether you’re struggling to respond to spikes in usage, communicate effectively with a newly remote workforce, or ensure that all employees have access to the apps and systems that allow them to do their jobs, here are some simple tips to help you adapt to the new reality. A Letter from CEO François Locoh-Donou regarding F5’s Response to COVID-19 For additional background and visibility around how the company is responding to COVID-19, a copy of the recent email sent to F5, NGINX, and Shape customers worldwide from our CEO is published here as a blog post. NetDevOps Survey: The Increasingly Automated Life of NetOps The latest NetDevOps survey is in and the results show promise for the state of the enterprise deployment pipeline. A community effort, the NetDevOps survey digs for details not normally found in surveys focusing on "the network." DNS is Not the First Thing that Comes to Mind in a Crisis Spurred by the coronavirus, a mass shift in teleworking has been one of the most notable ways companies like F5 are moving quickly to make sure customers are up and running. But as this shift takes hold industry-wide, complexities emerge in other areas as well. The 2020 State of App Services: The DevOps Divide If you think DevOps is just developers who write scripts and manage CI/CD pipelines, you'd be wrong. If you thought they were just operations who focus on the development pipeline, you'd also be wrong. F5 Keeps Remote Workers Connected and Secure with BIG-IP APM With COVID-19 prompting widespread protection and prevention efforts, how can now house-bound and remote workers stay productive, access applications located anywhere (from any location, over different devices), and keep corporate apps and data secure? Jay Kelley provides some helpful guidance in the context of F5’s access management solution, BIG-IP Access Policy Manager (APM). Responding to Coronavirus: Six Ways to Improve App Availability and Performance for Your End-Users If you’re an IT professional, the impact of COVID-19 presents a host of new business continuity challenges, along with its myriad interpersonal adjustments. You need to respond quickly to unprecedented changes in work schedules, remote access to applications, and spikes in networking and data demands. Any of these can result in sluggish application health and performance due to over-taxed resources—affecting your ability to serve customers as they adapt to new realities. Expectations and Adaptation: Tackling Today’s Most Pervasive Customer Challenges F5 EVP Kara Sprague: Today's organizations are trying to reconcile an extreme pace of change with rising demands—serving users who don’t always know what they want, while facing constant pressure to innovate, compete, and respond to market developments. For many of our customers, these rapidly changing dynamics have become a catalyst to embark on large-scale transformations. Data and Computers Don’t Care about Gender: A Q&A with F5’s Lori MacVittie Aligned with International Women's Day, Lori MacVittie takes a moment to discuss her career to date, tips for women looking to get into tech, and reasons for additional optimism on the horizon (particularly in the cloud computing space) in this Q&A with EMEA's Neil Jaques. The State of the Enterprise App Portfolio When organizations adopt new architectures and develop new apps, they typically don't throw away ones that already exist. While there's always some culling of the portfolio that's taking place over time, it’s generally true that apps put into service years ago using traditional architectures are still in service—providing they continue to offer business value. State of Application Services 2020: App Attitudes When we dig into the State of Application Services each year, we don't just focus on app services. There are a plethora of trends and technologies that impact app services in general, such as new app architectures, automation, and cloud have increasingly had an impact on surrounding topics. It's necessitated a shift from delivering app services as software to software coupled to hardware, from virtual machines to the cloud and, more recently, to containers. Software & High Performance: Why They Don’t Have to Be Mutually Exclusive The benefits of migrating away from hardware-dominated environments to cloud and software-defined architectures are well known—increased scalability, operational agility and economic flexibility, to name just a few. But there is also the common misconception that in order to realize these gains, organizations are forced to make a sacrifice regarding the performance of their apps. Lost and Found: When Clouds Cover Your Apps Lori MacVittie continues a blog series on F5 Beacon and application visibility: Most of us who've worked in an enterprise setting have at least one tale of the inability to locate an app running somewhere on the premises. Whether it's on a long-forgotten server under someone's desk or deep within the data center, long-lived enterprises are bound to have lost an app at one time or another. F5 Expands LGBTQ+ Support in EMEA F5 announced the launch of the UK and Ireland (UKI) branch of its F5 Pride Employee Inclusion Group (EIG) this week. It also hosted the company’s first pan-EMEA F5 Pride: LGBTQ+ @ Work Symposium, highlighting best practices for diversity and inclusion, as well as mapping out plans to further bolster company-wide support for LGBTQ+ staff. F5 Empowers Customers with End-to-End App Security [Press Release] At RSA, F5 introduced its customer-focused approach to Application Protection, bolstered by new offerings and the company’s recent acquisition of Shape Security. Informed by customer use cases, prominent industry attack practices, and threat intelligence from F5 Labs, F5’s extensive portfolio safeguards all applications without impacting the end-user experience or slowing time-to-market. 2020 State of Application Services: Cloud Insights Cloud-native, while still a term with many definitions, can be thought of as a methodology and approach, not a specific technology. And the importance of firmly instilling that into your organization can’t be overstated. The priority for teams and individuals involved in digital transformation is to ensure they agree on and understand the business outcome, using it to inform technical designs/solutions. Celebrating Cloud Security with Microsoft F5 kicked off the RSA week in brilliance and style at Microsoft Security 20/20. This gala event celebrated and honored their top partners within the Microsoft Security ecosystem. It’s extremely gratifying to be recognized for the customer obsession we have at F5 with the Customer Impact Award, given security is a critical initiative and core competency for both F5 and Microsoft. Telemetry: A Different Kind of Data Are we just using telemetry because it sounds sexier than data? Ultimately both data and telemetry are organized bits of information. To use them interchangeably is not a crime. But the reality is that, if you want to be accurate, there is a difference. And that difference will become increasingly important as organizations march into the data economy. AI and the Role of Application Services While we largely have Hollywood and science fiction to thank for our popular understanding of the complex topic, put simply, one can define artificial intelligence as “teaching a computer how to mimic aspects of human intelligence.” To understand how AI and application services will work together in the future, it’s first necessary to examine three distinct types of AI: Strong, Weak, and Assistive. Container-Native App Services A growing number of app services are becoming integral components of cloud-native architectures, and the emerging app services are almost exclusively container-native app services. (These are generally—though not always—deployed as part of the surrounding operating environment required to deliver a cloud-native application.) Lori MacVittie looks at examples of such services, as well as their increasing value to organizations. F5 State of Application Services Research Highlights Key Opportunities to Scale and Accelerate Digital Transformation [Press Release] F5 announced the availability of its 2020 State of Application Services report. This year’s survey showed that many organizations are starting to realize the benefits of increased scale and velocity of application deployment in their businesses. This value, however, can bring significant complexity as organizations maintain legacy infrastructure while increasingly relying on multiple public and private clouds, implement modern application architectures, and face an evolving and sophisticated threat landscape. F5 Labs Research Shows Global Service Providers are Increasingly Under Fire from DDoS Attacks Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against service providers are significantly on the rise, according to recent research. An analysis of global customer security incident data from the past three years—both mobile and landline—also found that brute force attacks, though still prevalent, are on the wane. Other prominent observed threats include compromised devices and web injection attacks. Service Providers on the Edge: Common Automation Frameworks and the End of Speed and Security Compromises Bart Salaets: In the service provider realm’s not-too-distant past, there was a distinct line in the sand. On the one side, networking and security teams spearheaded the evolution to an NFV architecture, with a strong focus on virtualising network and security functions. On the other side, developers enthusiastically embraced cloud platforms, DevOps methodologies, and automation via CI/CD pipelines. The edge is where they come together. The 2020 State of App Services: Apps, Automation, and Architectures [Blog Post] Months of analyzing over 2600 responses to our State of Application Services survey have culminated in a fascinating look at the impact of digital transformation on organizations around the globe. Companies are in progress on a technological transformational journey. Four in five executives told us they are acting on digital transformation initiatives, and that those initiatives are driving adoption of cloud-native architectures and app services—with automation and security also top-of-mind. F5’s Next Generation NGINX Controller Accelerates Delivery of Modern Applications F5 introduces NGINX Controller 3.0, a cloud-native application delivery solution to help organizations increase business agility, mitigate risk, and enhance their customers’ digital experiences. Built to unleash productivity and efficiency, the 3.x series offers the first multi-cloud, self-service platform that removes the friction between DevOps, NetOps, SecOps, and app developers. F5 Friday: Integrating BIG-IP with NSX-T As organizations march steadily on their journey through digital transformation, the issue of integration becomes critical. In addition to the obvious integration challenges arising from the heterogenous app portfolio of most firms, there are similar challenges arising from the heterogenous app services portfolio organizations also maintain. Lori MacVittie points to this F5/VMware integration to highlight how customers can ensure the security, scale, and performance of applications. Lost and Found: Are Your Apps Cost Effective? With applications residing on-premises, you may have an understanding of where they all are or at least how to find them if asked. But with a move to cloud-native apps and migration to cloud deployments, do you know where all your apps are across multi-cloud environments? Jonathan George explores these topics in the context of F5 Beacon, the company's app visibility and analytics SaaS solution. F5 Networks Announces First Quarter Fiscal Year 2020 Results F5 announced financial results for its fiscal first quarter ended December 31, 2019. Revenue of $569.3 million for the first quarter of fiscal year 2020 reflects 5% growth from $543.8 million in the first quarter of fiscal year 2019, driven by software solutions revenue growth of 50%. Dirty Data is a Business Risk The inability to verify the integrity or correctness of data should be of significant concern to those organizations pursuing digital transformation efforts (which rely heavily on data). That data will be used not only to conduct business but it also forms the basis for pattern and behavior recognition. Accordingly, it will power advanced analytics that automatically make operational and business decisions without human intervention. Secure Cloud Architecture: Planning for Business Outcomes F5’s Tim Wagner draws parallels between Secure Cloud Architecture and urban planning in his latest blog, pointing out key considerations, items to account for, and—crucially—questions to ask at the outset that can help bring about desired results. Accelerating Application Delivery from Code to Customer with NGINX François Locoh-Donou, CEO of F5: The new NGINX Controller 3.0 brings enhanced enterprise features that go beyond what both traditional and cloud-native solutions can offer. By giving customers (that span DevOps to NetOps) the ability to automate functions across deployment models and locations, we are opening up a new set of self-service capabilities that will increase agility, mitigate risk and enhance the experiences organizations are able to deliver to their customers. Introducing NGINX Controller 3.0: Accelerate Time-to-Market with App-Centric Delivery Gus Robertson, SVP and GM of NGINX at F5: An app-centric approach empowers developers through self-service, but from a centralized solution that maintains control and compliance for operations teams. The key to balancing AppDev productivity with Ops compliance is shifting the center of gravity from the instance of infrastructure supporting the app to the application itself. With Controller, teams spanning DevOps, NetOps, SecOps, and AppDev can work across the application lifecycle, managing the tasks relevant to their role. F5 Completes Acquisition of Shape Security Together, F5 and Shape represent an end-to-end application security solution, reducing infrastructure complexity while protecting every aspect of the ‘code to customer’ journey against losses from online fraud, reputational damage, and disruptions to critical online services. Shape Officially Joins F5 to Defend Every App from Fraud and Abuse Shape co-founder Derek Smith shares his thoughts on a combined company in this new blog. Tackling the Next Generation of Threats with Shape and F5 What sets Shape and F5 apart is F5’s ability to capture high fidelity data from our position in front of millions of mission-critical customer applications combined with the sophisticated AI-assisted analytics platform from Shape. By integrating Shape and F5, we are executing on our vision to create an advanced set of security capabilities that can handle today’s most sophisticated attacks. In the Future, the A in API will Stand for Automation API stands for Application Programming Interface. Over the years, it has evolved from a tightly coupled imperative specification to a loosely coupled declarative model. Regardless of implementation and the mode of invocation, APIs tend to be associated with app development. But another API economy has been steadily expanding. It lies within operations. And in that domain, the "A" in API stands for automation. DevOps Life Skills: Understanding and Managing the Procurement Process It’s not unusual for DevOps engineers to use cloud-native tools, open source solutions, or other inexpensive (or free) resources that don’t require significant investment or interaction with the procurement team. But what if you need to advocate for a richer IT investment to drive needed efficiencies as well as to ensure better app security and performance? Lost and Found: A Simple Solution to a Difficult Problem Pause for a minute and ask yourself the following questions: Do you know how many apps you have? Do you know how those apps are performing? Do you know what those apps are doing? These questions may seem very basic, but many enterprises are struggling to find answers to them. F5’s Adil Laari explores app visibility in the context of the company’s new SaaS offering, F5 Beacon. F5 Essential App Protect Service Now in Preview Agility is the way of IT these days. We all strive for developers and operations to go faster, to unleash creativity, unhindered by the burdens of provisioning app infrastructure and resources. The trick is balancing our need for app delivery speed with the need to stay secure and compliant (while also incorporating microservices, distributed API-driven architectures, containers, and multi-cloud deployments). OK 2020 Rat, Now What? According to the Chinese zodiac cycle, the year of the (Metal) Rat is upon us. As the first animal in the zodiac, the strong, prosperous Rat brings a year of new beginnings and opportunities. Peter Silva gives his thoughts on the months to come and what they might hold for the industry. Lost and Found: App Proliferation Leads to Lack of Insight Today, there are many enterprise applications that organizations use to conduct business where IT has no visibility. While this type of proliferation invites risk, it is often seen as relatively harmless. That may be because executives and stakeholders aren't aware of real impacts from an inability to steward a growing portfolio of "lost and found" applications. Inserting App Services Into Shifting App Architectures Application architectures have evolved several times since the early days of computing, and it is no longer optimal to rely solely on a single, known data path to insert application services. Furthermore, because many of the emerging data paths are not as suitable for a proxy-based platform, we must look to the other potential points of insertion possible to scale and secure modern applications. Now That You Understand How Important API Security Is… The use of APIs have the potential to be transformative by enabling new business models and revenue streams. Implemented without adequate guardrails, however, APIs also have the potential to disrupt and put businesses at risk. Concluding his two-part blog series, Mark Campbell outlines steps that organizations can take to help address the industry’s present API security gaps. F5 to Acquire Shape Security, Transforming Application Security Shape, a leader in fraud and abuse prevention, adds protection from automated attacks, botnets, and targeted fraud to F5’s world-class portfolio of application services, protecting customers’ digital experiences. The strategic acquisition accelerates F5’s growth momentum and more than doubles F5’s addressable market in security. A Letter to F5 Employees from CEO François Locoh-Donou Announcing Shape Security Acquisition François Locoh-Donou shares a copy of the email sent to global staff announcing F5’s agreement to acquire Shape Security. How Cybersecurity is Becoming (Even) More Relevant Digital transformation has significantly increased the footprint of applications. Modern app architectures are diverse in nature and extend across hybrid and multi-cloud environments, with each app service carrying a potential for compromise and increased exposure. The need to protect each app service has only become more relevant since app layer threats remain the #1 type of attack. API Gateways are the New Strategic Control Points (But Still Lack Security) The transformation from monolithic applications to ecosystems of microservices has made APIs a strategic and critical element of business success. APIs are typically designed to be externally exposed and accessed by business partners, customers, and microservices. Just like web applications, though, APIs can be a doorway for unauthorized access to sensitive data. And as with many technology advances, security considerations often trail behind. Survey Says: Container Security (Still) Cause for Concern Consider this: 54% of containers live fewer than five minutes. Predictably, this leads to security topics. If you’re trying to secure access (and you should be) and trying to protect the app or API running in that container, you've got to make sure your security services are constantly adjusting policies to match the current state of the cluster. That's a lot of change going on, which means a lot of operational overhead. DevOps Life Skills: Working with the Infrastructure Team For app developers, working alongside a large infrastructure-platform team can be a blessing or a curse. When that team provides infrastructure, networking, and security services in a managed, self-service model—thereby relieving developers of the toil of managing infrastructure—it's truly a blessing. But if the infrastructure team’s primary delivery is a week(s)-long backlog with a revolving door of handoffs, developers can feel cursed. The Top 10, Top 10 Predictions for 2020 F5's Peter Silva: As each year comes to a close, tech pundits blow the dust off their crystal balls and share their predictions for the coming year. As someone who has (let's generously say) repurposed others' since 2012 rather than thinking up my own, here's what some of the smart folks I read expect to happen...including some light commentary, perspective, observations, and advice along the way. Why Application Delivery Should Look More Like a Factory (and Less Like an Artisan’s Shop) A good way to think about how digital transformation and DevOps practices are influencing app deployment is to picture an application factory. Instead of handcrafted policies and manual review processes, network and security experts need to define reusable policies for developers to deploy with their applications as part of an automated deployment pipeline. Digital Transformation: 2020 and Beyond Digital transformation is about moving technology from business interactions to processes to new models. At first, it's about apps. But as app portfolios expand, it turns to focus on automation and orchestration. With the increase in data generation, transformation becomes the pivot point for new business opportunities. Addressing the Peter Parker Principle in TLS Inspection “With great power comes great responsibility.” Acknowledging Voltaire and Churchill, the quote is best known from the Spider-Man comics, attributed to Uncle Ben. Of course, part of the line’s cultural prevalence is that it can be applied to any number of situations and topics, including TLS inspection. People of DevOps: If you know one thing about F5, let it be this For many enterprises, new working patterns need to coexist alongside applications, teams, and technologies that have taken root over time and are now firmly embedded into the fabric of IT delivery. Zach Westall takes a closer look at how F5 and BIG-IP help DevOps teams (and the groups they work with) deploy services throughout the application delivery stack in support of CI/CD practices. The Proxy is a Key Component to the Future of Security The future of security rests on telemetry that is more than technical data points picked out of packets. It requires a holistic view of interactions from client to application to behavior. Machine learning requires enormous amounts of data to establish and recognize patterns. This is why programmable proxies are such a critical part of an advanced security approach. F5 Beacon Brings Insights through Visibility into Multi-Cloud App Portfolios F5 Beacon was expressly designed with the purpose of providing visibility into every app, anywhere. Atop that foundational principle, we’ve built a robust open API, intuitive UI, and enabled analytics that provide answers to some of the most common questions asked by IT and business leaders everywhere. Secure Cloud Architecture: Avoiding Technical Debt Principal Cloud Evangelist Tim Wagner describes a typical progression of cloud migration efforts (referencing holiday shopping and the AWS re:Invent conference along the way), as well as some of the all too common pitfalls that can trip up even the most well-meaning of IT and development teams. Customer Experience Depends on Visibility Visibility remains key for organizations to secure, scale, and speed up applications. And as apps are increasingly distributed—across containers, clouds, etc.—the more widely we need to distribute the application services that provide heightened visibility to enhance performance. Build, Migrate, and Secure your Apps – Join us at AWS re:Invent! Tom Atkins emphasizes some of the benefits that F5 and AWS customers realize when building, migrating, and securing their applications. Drawing on multiple examples, this blog also underscores the value that F5/AWS partnership efforts have for organizations deploying all manners of cloud environments. F5, NGINX, and our Commitment to the Kubernetes Community Hitesh Patel & Owen Garrett publish a blog timed with this week's KubeCon, noting that: F5 believes there doesn’t need to be a conflict between community and commercial solutions. A balance can be achieved, but it requires a commitment to work together and constantly refine that balance as new challenges and innovations arrive. How to Deploy NGINX Plus on the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform in 10 Minutes One of the reasons you see NGINX and, by extension, NGINX Plus deployed so broadly is that it has many roles within modern and traditional architectures. In this blog, Lori MacVittie highlights the advantages of NGINX Plus in operating containerized workloads with the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform. Top 3 Takeaways from the Site Reliability Engineering Panel with LinkedIn, Dell, and Gremlin at NGINX Conf 2019 Many organizations are still learning how to define the concept and role of Site Reliability Engineering, as well as incorporate elements of Chaos Engineering. F5’s Keiichiro Nozaki explores these topics in summarizing commentary from a recent panel discussion at NGINX Conf. Shifting Security in DevOps Means Shifting Mindsets Robert Haynes highlights the "2019 State of DevOps Report" from Puppet, drawing on its contents and his professional experience to note: The advantages of shifting security left into the software lifecycle rely on shifting those DevOps behavior principles into the security teams as much as, if not more than, moving security tools into the pipelines. When the Digital Mice Get Smarter So Must the Digital Mousetrap F5's Office of the CTO's Renuka Nadkarni: Some attacks are merely a nuisance, degrading network performance or disrupting availability. Some others may be relatively rare but have far more serious impacts in the form of data breaches. Like the plagues spread by mice that wiped out cities in a bygone era, today’s attacks wipe out brand reputations and business value. The Future of Load Balancing Rests on Data Admittedly, load balancing topics may not be at the top of your priority list today, but Lori MacVittie points to some interesting considerations on where the technology is going (and how it will further benefit customers) in this blog. Delivering End-to-End Application Visibility EVP Kara Sprague: The pressure to transform digitally has become universal. Whatever your strategy is, the trick is to deploy and manage applications in a consistent way across all your different infrastructure silos. The best way to do this—and to get visibility into your code-to-customer pathways for all your applications—is to leverage a consistent set of multi-cloud application services. Edge Computing: A Game Changer for Service Providers? With its distributed nature, edge computing empowers service providers to offer new solutions and services that simultaneously increase revenue streams and reduce network transport costs. In other words, it’s a big deal, and it puts service providers in a unique position to shake up entire industries (including their own). Protecting Business Means Protecting APIs Modern application architectures like microservices increasingly rely on APIs, making them a particularly attractive target for attackers who understand the value of gaining control over these endpoints. Lori MacVittie breaks down some of the preliminary options in securing APIs. The Three Phases of Digital Transformation F5 CTO Geng Lin: Organizations are taking advantage of the proliferation of digital technologies to define new business models or to improve business productivity with existing models. While the pace of digital transformation varies based on the business and the sector it is in, overall, the journey of digital transformation has three stages. F5 Partners with Rakuten Mobile to Support New Cloud-Native Mobile Network, 5G-Ready Service Rollout [Press Release] F5 technologies support Rakuten’s October launch of the world’s first fully virtualized, cloud-native mobile network and its future deployment of 5G. The carrier will leverage F5’s network functions virtualization (NFV) capabilities to optimize its new mobile network and accelerate its path to 5G services in 2020. Speeding Customer Innovation in the Cloud with F5 and AWS Barry Russell, VP of F5’s Global Cloud Business, delivers a Q&A interview that adds color to the Oct. 23 announcement of a Strategic Collaboration Agreement between F5 and AWS, as well as what it means for customers. DevOps Doesn't End with Delivery It doesn’t matter how fast you can deliver if deployment delays release. While NetOps are warming up to automation and orchestration, there are significant challenges facing their efforts to speed up deployment. DevOps is in the best position to help them do that. Azure Strategy Still Coming Together? Here’s Four Ways F5 Can Help All cloud journeys are unique and can be complicated, with very different objectives, strategies, and hurdles. Some organizations are just getting their feet wet and others are charging full steam ahead—expanding into multi-cloud architectures and modernizing applications to embrace automation and native services. F5 Networks Announces Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2019 Results; Delivers Second Consecutive Quarter of 91% Software Revenue Growth The company announces its quarterly results, along with earnings for fiscal year 2019, with software revenue continuing to grow. Phishing Season is Upon Us Peter Silva: Phishing has become the number one attack vector for good reason. And what is the most active time of year for fraudulent online schemes like phishing and fraud? Essentially, right now through the holiday shopping season. (I thought it best to get your attention near the opening bell.) F5 Announces Strategic Collaboration Agreement with Amazon Web Services to Allow Customers to Innovate Faster in the Cloud [Press Release] F5 and AWS move ahead with a multi-year global Strategic Collaboration Agreement (SCA) to better allow customers to use F5 for new cloud-native application workloads and extend their existing F5 investments on AWS. You Can't Protect What You Can't Find Visibility is an often-cited challenge typically referring to the ability to inspect traffic, transactions, and errors that occur during an application's execution. But there's another, perhaps more critical, meaning to visibility at the business layer: a complete inventory of the corporate application portfolio. Industry Trends with Forrester’s Channel Expert Jay McBain [Blog and Video] F5’s Maggie Miller chats with an industry analyst on the trends driving optimism in the channel, how today’s buyers are different, and advice for F5 partners in this ever-changing market. F5 Silverline Managed Services Opens First Regional Point of Presence in Sydney, Australia F5 expands global footprint by deploying points of presence in additional geographic locations, making its Silverline offerings available to customers across Asia Pacific. This enhances customers' options to protect applications and web properties without upfront investments in IT infrastructure and support. Kubernetes is Winning the Multi-Cloud War When you ask customers why they're adopting a multi-cloud approach, one of the top answers is "avoid vendor lock-in." That's been a reason for multi-vendor everything in the enterprise for twenty and more years. It should surprise no one that holds true for public cloud, as well. After all, cloud is a product as surely as a network switch or data center server. A Look Back at the 2019 F5 Girls Who Code Summer Immersion Program For seven weeks in July and August, F5 partnered with Girls Who Code to host 20 high school junior and senior girls in our new downtown Seattle headquarters with two goals: teach them coding skills and prepare them for a potential career in technology. In saluting their accomplishments on the International Day of the Girl, Kara Sprague provides a retrospective blog detailing this effort tied to F5's Global Good Program. F5 and Intel: Accelerating Applications Anywhere We tend to hear 'ecosystem' and think of applications, not those that focus on the transformation of the network. Integration into both these ecosystems is important because application services continue to provide critical functions like acceleration, security, and scale. Underscoring this approach, Intel has named F5 as a 2019 Leaders Board partner in the Intel Network Builders program. Machine Identity Protection Is a Critical Part of Modern App Development Today, "machine" also includes code running independently on devices, APIs, containers, serverless architectures, and of course VMs. Because they are software-defined, these machine types are easily created, changed, and destroyed throughout the day, every day, making software-defined machines an important part of the app development workflow. Frank Strobel explores these topics in the context of F5 and technology partner Venafi. Knowing About Vulnerabilities is only Half the Battle In the journey toward continuous IT, there's a lot of focus on security. And well there should be. Breaches abound. Vulnerabilities are discovered on a daily basis, and the patch gap doesn't seem to be getting any smaller. While one of the often-suggested solutions for more secure code is, predictably, that of scanning source code, scanning only gets you so far. Welcome to National Cybersecurity Awareness Month Peter Silva: While cybersecurity awareness should be a daily adventure, it is still nice to have a full month dedicated to raise awareness about the importance of cybersecurity and to ensure that all people have the information they need to be safer and more secure online. Load Balancing On-Prem or SaaS? F5 has a cloud-based solution called the F5 DNS Load Balancer Cloud Service that leverages the AWS SaaS Enablement Framework and is now available in AWS Marketplace. While load balancing has traditionally been handled on-prem quite successfully, Roger Barlow outlines the many advantages of a SaaS-based approach. Microsoft and F5: A Single Identity and Security Strategy for All Apps With thousands of apps in use daily, hosted in all or any combination of locations, how can organizations ensure secure, appropriate user access without requiring users to login in multiple times? Moreover, how can organizations terminate user access to each application without having to access each app individually? VP John Morgan digs into the details. Choosing Ansible or Terraform for F5 Application Services The open source movement has always focused on freedom. The freedom to choose the solution that works best for you given skills, budgets, architecture, and goals. That principle continues to be a significant factor today when it comes to building repeatable infrastructure for the deployment pipeline. The 2020 State of Application Services Survey is Now Open It's that time of year again when the scent of pumpkin spice is everywhere, and we reach out to solicit your input on the State of Application Services and the trends/technologies that shape them. So take a few minutes to share your perspectives, opinions, and plans—we appreciate it! More Apps. More Accounts. More Risk. Despite education and a constant litany of reminders that security is everyone's responsibility, not only is the corporate-consumer barrier being breached on a regular basis but the most basic of security practices is being completely ignored when it comes to apps and passwords, pointing toward the still-compelling benefits of multi-factor authentication (MFA) and password complexity requirements. Zero Touch Application Delivery with F5, Terraform, and Consul [Guest blog post] To promote app delivery automation, HashiCorp Terraform enables network operations teams to treat the F5 BIG-IP platform ‘as code,’ so the network infrastructure can be provisioned automatically when new services are deployed. Consul’s central service registry and service discovery capabilities track the real-time network location and health status of all backend services. A Sociotechnical Metrics Framework for Network and Security Operations Centers Researchers from the University of Kansas and the Stevens Institute of Technology are focused on developing a new metrics framework for security operation centers (SOCs) that measures and validates SOC performance against enterprise network security. Peter Silva provides more detail on this project and its connection to F5. F5 Launches Unity+ Channel Partner Program F5 announces Unity+, an innovative channel program designed to create long-term profitable partner growth. Unity+ enhances partner opportunities and incentives, captures new revenue streams, and drives tighter collaboration to help customers through technology transformations. Unity+: Here’s what you need to know about F5’s innovative channel program Through Unity+, F5 is collaborating with our partners to better meet their business needs and serve our mutual customers with flexible licensing models, greater deal registration differentiation, and easy-to-consume sales and pre-sales technical learning paths. VP Colleen McMillan provides additional details in this blog. Open Source is for Operations, Too Open source isn't just about code. Operations are—and should be—embracing open source solutions. To fully realize the benefits, however, operations should also actively participate in and contribute to the communities creating the configurations, templates, and best practices around its implementation. F5 Labs Launches Application Protection Research Series, Adds Education Content Following the popular 2018 Application Protection Report, F5 Labs (the company's security threat intelligence research team) is introducing a portal for its Application Protection Research Series to cover longer timeframes and the big-picture threat landscape. The team is also rolling out an Education series centered on foundational concepts in information security, designed for people new to the industry or interested in exploring a particular niche. NGINX Conf 2019, Day 1: Bringing Your Apps to Life, from Code to Customer Gus Robertson summarizes Day 1 of NGINX Conf 2019 with his top three takeaways, explaining how F5 and NGINX together are supporting the move to a world of living apps, helping entrerprises increase the velocity from code to customer, and buidling new capabilities across the entire ecosystem. NGINX Conf 2019 Day 2: Empowering the Full Range of Today’s Architectures This blog summarizes Day 2 of NGINX Conf 2019 with three top takeaways: F5's commitment to the NGINX open source community, a year's worth of NGINX updates and a preview of what's to come, and customer stories about their successes with NGINX. Service Mesh Mania: Choosing Aspen Mesh or NGINX The combined F5 and NGINX portfolio now has two service mesh offerings to scale, secure, and provide visibility into container environments. Both enable management and visualization of Kubernetes clusters. Both offer their solution as an on-premises option, and both provide tracing and metrics that are critical to addressing the issue of visibility. So which one is right for you? F5 Debuts Solutions at its NGINX Conf to Reduce Sprawl and Complexity of Modern Application Delivery At NGINX Conf, F5 Networks (NASDAQ: FFIV) announced several new solutions designed to help DevOps, NetOps, and SecOps teams better collaborate in delivering today's applications. Accelerated NGINX development and new solutions level up customers’ app and API infrastructures. Bridging the Divide with F5 and NGINX Kara Sprague: F5 and NGINX are not just integrating to go to market in the same old way together. The fundamental inspiration behind the acquisition was the fact that there’s a ton of value we can deliver together as a combined portfolio. Jointly, we deliver solutions that span the entire application lifecycle for monolithic, three-tier, and microservices-based apps alike. Data Center Speaks Out: I'm Not Dead Yet! Lori MacVittie takes a humorous look at how predictions or claims that the data center is dead (or at the very least, on its death bed) have persisted since the ascendancy of cloud to the majority industry mindshare. Further, they continue to be incorrect, with one of the reasons for these inaccurate predictions being the purposeful conflation of SaaS with IaaS. Sensors for our Five Senses Peter Silva notes a few of the modern ways that the capabilities of our five primary senses are being recreated using sensors. Today, gadgets (and IoT technologies) are being built that work in conjunction with, enhance, or in some cases replace the traditional functions of the eyes, ears, nose, tongue, and hands. The Definition of Faster in the Age of App Capital One of the impacts of digital transformation is the desire to move at speed. Organizations want to develop and deliver apps faster. They want to adapt to unpredictable changes in business conditions faster. They want to respond to attacks faster. So, how are they going to get there? Where does a WAF fit in the data path? This summer, the F5 Newsroom revisits some of our most popular Web Application Firewall content | Proxy-based WAFs are integral to application protection. They’re also a go-to solution for addressing zero-day vulnerabilities through signature updates or the use of programmatic functions to virtually patch applications. But there’s still the question of location. Polling VMworld Attendees’ Biggest Challenges At VMworld 2019 in San Francisco, F5 polled attendees at its booth to find out what their most formidable challenges were in their jobs. Focused around the functions of NetOps, DevOps, SecOps, and AppDev, this in-the-moment research reveals how various IT teams are thinking about automation, security, digital transformation, and collaboration between the separate groups. Cloud-Native Apps Don’t Require a Cloud Cloud computing has changed the way in which we go about developing, building, and deploying applications. Apps that were born in the public cloud naturally assumed many of the same dependencies and characteristics. Thus, the term “cloud-native” accurately represents the etymology of the architectural style as opposed to a specific cloud requirement. Bolster your API security on AWS with Managed Rules for AWS WAF This summer, the F5 Newsroom revisits some of our most popular Web Application Firewall content | Building on the previously delivered trio of managed rules for AWS’ native WAF, this ruleset focuses solely on protecting your APIs against existing and emerging threats, including XML external entity attacks and server-side request forgery. Automate DevOps/SecOps with CI/CD using F5 BIG-IP, SovLabs, and VMware vRA Deploying applications at the speed of users can paradoxically be something of a slog. IT, DevOps, and SecOps organizations may spend hours/days/months trying to figure out ways to simplify the delivery of applications while providing the safety and security required by today's users. This blog gets into one way that F5 and technology partners are addressing the associated challenges. 5 Reasons You Should Join Me at NGINX Conf As Lori MacVittie puts it, the term community is tossed about a lot these days, but NGINX Conf really is about bringing together two different communities—open source and enterprise users of NGINX. Taking place this September in Seattle, Conf is a great opportunity to share ideas and collaborate on the technical, architectural, and operational approaches customers and the surrounding industry are taking toward application delivery. How Does a WAF Mitigate Vulnerabilities? This summer, the F5 Newsroom revisits some of our most popular Web Application Firewall content | Apps today are the gateway to customer and corporate data, and traditional methods of controlling access at the network layer aren’t enough—with bad actors increasingly targeting identities and applications. So how, exactly, does a WAF mitigate all those vulnerabilities that keep cropping up like weeds in the garden? Securing Apps starts with Securing the Software Development Lifecycle Pipeline Sensitive data should include code, and it should be protected. Code is the heart of a digital business and the delivery pipeline is increasingly considered an attack vector. By putting into place a privileged user access model, you can be more confident that both the credentials—and the user behind them—are legitimate. Announcing BIG-IQ 7.0: A Big Step Forward for Management and Visibility of Your Most Valuable Asset With many organizations deploying dozens to hundreds of applications, their value is constantly growing, but visibility and manageability of all of these apps is no small feat. The latest release of BIG-IQ is a significant leap forward that can help NetOps, SecOps, DevOps, and application owners build, deploy, and manage apps, devices, and services more intelligently. Intentionally Insecure: Poor Security Practices in the Cloud This summer, we revisit some of F5’s most popular WAF-related content | Moving to the cloud enables developers to circumvent traditional enterprise IT roles that are obviously needed, considering the growing number of cloud breaches. It can also enable companies to deploy systems with poorly-configured security features, not because they want to, but because individuals might not understand the consequences (or might assume a breach is unlikely). What Your Pipelines Say about Your Organizational Structure When a pipeline (system) is designed by a team, they are able to take into consideration the pipeline as a whole rather than as its composite pieces. That is, the individual communication channels between IT domains point toward a peer process that better facilitates the design of a system that spans multiple concerns. Customer Story and Video: Talentsoft Simplifies and Optimizes Operations in the Cloud with F5 Europe’s leading cloud-based talent management and learning software provider needed to scale its IT operations to meet ambitious global expansion goals. With an F5 solution implemented across private cloud, data center, and Microsoft Azure environments, it was able to provide 9 million users across 130 countries software access on any device, from any location. Balancing Security and Performance with Web Application Firewalls This summer, the F5 Newsroom revisits some of our most popular WAF content – In this blog, Lori MacVittie navigates the give-and-take between security and performance, the pitfalls of giving up one for the other, and how WAFs can help organizations deploy security strategically to prevent exploitation, detect breaches, and safeguard applications. Container Security Basics: Conclusion F5’s blog series wraps up with a quick summary of covered topics, key lessons, and overarching themes, noting the relevance of techniques you've likely used elsewhere to secure traditional apps and infrastructure. The series closes with a salient parting reminder: Customers expect security. Don’t disappoint them. Customer Story: Shinsegae Internet Duty Free Protects its Online Store from Bot Attacks with F5 With F5, Shinsegae Internet Duty Free enhanced its online retail experience, application performance, and customer data security. Advanced WAF helped shift the focus toward automated threat protection and more proactive security measures, realizing significant benefits over traditional WAF approaches. [DevCentral Lightboard Lesson] The Need For Secure Coding: Tcl Double Substitution The F5 BIG-IP system has a powerful programmability feature called iRules, based on an extended and customized Tool Command Language (Tcl). As is the case with any programming language, developers need to understand the commands and functionality of the language in order to avoid possible vulnerabilities and other problems. This video highlights one such command and discusses the need for secure coding practices. Securing Single Page Applications (SPAs) is a Team Sport It's important that security teams get outside the boxes on typical architectural diagrams to really understand applications. A significant percentage of (successful) attacks are executed at the application layer. The longer we fail to recognize the unique characteristics of various types of applications, the longer those applications remain vulnerable. The Three AWS Web Application Firewall Managed Rules You Need to Deploy Now This summer, the F5 Newsroom revisits some of our most popular WAF content – In this blog, Lori MacVittie calls out three web app security rules that extend AWS WAF functionality to provide protection for any app. They’re managed, which means security experts are maintaining and updating them so you can have confidence that they’re always up to date and defending against the latest threats. Three Scenarios where Policy Consistency is Beneficial The key to simplifying multi-cloud architectures is to standardize elements wherever possible. By employing tools that can be used across environments, much of this complexity is abstracted away as you move from a cloud-specific to a cloud-agnostic service portfolio. Interview: Forbes Leadership Talk with F5's Chief Marketing and Customer Experience Officer Mika Yamamoto "Link arms with your functional counterparts and strive to achieve a common set of goals. That's when you elevate the standing of marketing, the customer experience, and the company's results—which is really what it’s about." What Makes a WAF Advanced? This summer, the F5 Newsroom revisits some of our most popular Web Application Firewall content – In this blog, Brian McHenry covers how modern attacks can bypass virtually all traditional WAF detection mechanisms and explores the capabilities necessary to combat the evolving threats seen in the application security landscape. The Commodification of Operations We're moving from an expert operations economy to a commodified operations economy. Today, the operational aspects of deploying network and application service infrastructure are expected to be accessible to a broader set of roles within the organization. To get there, simplification is necessary. Container Security Basics: Workload Part four of F5’s blog series explains that while ‘workload’ is a fairly recent term that’s often used to describe applications, it can also refer to infrastructure services. That’s important, because there can be a variety of ‘workloads’ running in your container clusters that aren’t necessarily coming from your developers. Container Security Basics: Orchestration The third entry in F5’s container security basics blog series digs into how the orchestration layer of container security focuses on the environment responsible for the day to day operation of containers. (And by the data available today, if you’re using containers, you’re almost certainly taking advantage of Kubernetes as the orchestrator.) F5 Networks Announces Third Quarter Fiscal Year 2019 Results Revenue of $563.4 million for the third quarter of fiscal year 2019 reflects 4% growth from $542.2 million in the third quarter of FY 2018, driven by total software solutions revenue growth of 91%, including a partial quarter contribution from NGINX. It’s 10 p.m.: Do you know where your applications are? F5 EVP Kara Sprague: If we’re going to gain a toehold toward minimizing threats so we can maximize the value of the application ecosystem, organizations need to start investing the same energy and resources into their application capital as they do with physical assets and talent. Infrastructure Architecture: Containers Creating Fourth Plane Traditionally, there are three architectural planes associated with network infrastructure: data, control, and management. But a fourth layer—the orchestration layer—integrates with container environments and makes use of related capabilities to automate the discovery of services and instances. Container Security Basics: Pipeline Security F5’s blog series on container security basics continues. The CI/CD pipeline is a critical component upon which rests the speed and security of the applications it builds and delivers. Accordingly, there are two main elements of pipeline security: first, security of the pipeline itself. Second, security in the pipeline. Announcing New F5 ELA Enhancements F5 is expanding its existing Enterprise Licensing Agreements (ELA) program to increase the value of customers’ physical and virtual infrastructures. Specifically, we’re adding ELA support for both NGINX software—building on the recent acquisition—and BIG-IP software running on F5 appliances. Three Attacks You Can’t Stop with Secure Coding When it comes to breaches involving apps and data exposure, fingers are almost always pointed at developers. But Lori MacVittie discusses why we can't blame all breachers on developers. Is 2019 Half Empty or Half Full? With 2019 crossing the halfway point, Peter Silva looks at some of the year’s notable technology trends for optimists and pessimists alike, particularly where security is concerned. Container Security Basics: Introduction Container adoption continues to accelerate across (almost) all areas of IT. But what does container security really mean? F5's Jordan Zebor and Lori MacVittie offer their take in the first of a blog series focused on the topic. The Divide between Configurability and Operability Lori MacVittie continues our blog series surrounding F5’s acquisition of NGINX, discussing the concept of operational simplicity. The Magecart Mess What is Magecart? Magecart is really a term given to a group of cybercrime units. At least a dozen groups are responsible, and each have their own specialty. F5’s Peter Silva examines how it was also last year’s #1 root cause of retail, tech, and manufacturing breaches. No Room for Silos when it Comes to Security The focus of IT as its moving through its digital transformation should be to modernize ops - from the technology to the teams that use it to innovate and deliver value to the business. Lori MacVittie's blog touches on how silos within an organization can impede successful transformations. Multi-Cloud Consistency is Multi-Layered When it comes to multi-cloud consistency, Lori MacVittie discusses why a failure to recognize the two different types of consistency - functional and operational - and their importance is at the root of the problem with implementation. Improving Time to Value: Process and Parallelization What's this got to time to value and applications? Everything. Because as it turns out, traditional IT is really driving to production in a serial circuit, while modern app developments is burning at all hours on a parallel one. Peering Into and Protecting Against What You Can't See It seems like the whole world is encrypted. That can be a very good thing, as encryption keeps our personal info safe. But, encryption also creates security challenges, such as blind spots where hidden threats like malware and malicious payloads can lurk. Fortunately, F5 and Cisco have a solution. F5 DNS Load Balancer Cloud Service Now in Preview Now in preview, the F5 DNS Load Balancer Cloud Service features DNS-targeted DDoS protection and highly available and responsive global server load balancing (GSLB). Improving Operational Security in the Cloud If you want to keep the costs of operating in the cloud down, take a look at your security practices on the management side of operations. F5 ACI App Bolsters Joint Cisco Deployments with Streamlined Application Services Combined solution provides F5’s industry-leading availability and security services on Cisco’s SDN platform for superior layer 2-7 performance. Bringing ACI and BIG-IP Closer Together – One Step at a Time F5 SVP Calvin Rowland explains how F5 and Cisco are bringing ACI and BIG-IP closer together. Moving Monoliths in with Microservices The reality is that unless you're a green field startup, you have both traditional and modern applications running right now. Which means you need to support both legacy and modern architectures at the same time. We’ll discuss how with the help of containers. TLS 1.3 Adoption in the Enterprise Peter Silva summarizes a recent report on how organizations are moving quickly to adopt the new standard of Transport Layer Security (TLS) 1.3, while addressing both operational and security concerns as a result of the transition. Practicing Safe Containerization With a staggering 60% of users experiencing a container security incident in the past 12 months, if you aren’t already practicing safe containerization, Lori MacVittie shares five steps to consider putting into practice. IoT is Having a Big Impact on Enterprise—and It’s Only Going to Get Bigger Frank Strobel shares his thoughts on how new technologies and solutions are impacting the real world, after spending the week at the Bosch Connected World 2019 - the leading conference on IoT and digital transformation - in Berlin Germany. F5 Expands Presence in India with New Center of Excellence New Center of Excellence in Hyderabad aims to grow and scale F5's software and cloud portfolio, to meet customer needs worldwide. Learn more about the how this office space will allow expanded and enhanced time zone coverage, along with customer service and disaster recovery capacity in support of F5's global business. Application Services Update: A little more everything We look at the trends and changes in application services usage – across security, performance, and identity/access – from the first quarter of 2019. F5 Wins Red Hat Community Partner Award! F5 SVP Calvin Rowland recaps last week’s Red Hat Summit in Boston, highlighting the continued partnership between the two companies that resulted in F5 being honored with a Partner Technology Innovation Award by Red Hat. Optimizing the Other Side of the DX Equation The majority of organizations across the globe and in every industry are currently in process of digital transformation. Lori MacVittie looks at the latest trends surrounding the digital economy and supply chains to better understand how enterprises are changing how they develop apps, when they deploy apps, and with what architectures. NGINX Is Now Officially Part of F5 Read Gus Robertson's blog on the shared vision for the culture, technology, and future, now that the acquisition of NGINX is final. F5 Completes Acquisition of NGINX F5 has completed the acquisition of NGINX, an open source leader in application delivery. For additional background, read the press release and additional perspective from F5 and NGINX leadership. Are People the Problem with InfoSec? Employees are often frustrated with corporate security policies and in general, most people’s primary jobs are not security related. F5 Security's Peter Silva discusses why it's important to devise security policies that work for, rather than against employees. F5 Welcomes New Marketing and Technology Executives Mika Yamamoto joins the company in a new Chief Marketing & Customer Experience Officer position, and Geng Lin will take on the role of Chief Technology Officer. Repositories and Standardization Can Help Address Network Automation Integration Challenges Operations needs integration. Without it, we can't automate processes (which is what orchestration is) because processes necessarily span multiple systems, services, and devices—each of which likely has its own operational domain and toolset. Bridging the Divide: Flexibility and Security Our Bridging the Divide series continues with Robert Haynes addressing the long-standing myth within the networking and security communities; that secure software architectures are inflexible, and agile-delivered software is less secure. Stop Navel Gazing at Encryption We are nearly numb to breaches today because they happen with such alarming frequency. At the same time, we are so enthralled by our own brilliance in cryptography that we forget that most data at rest—tucked away inside databases—is unencrypted. Bridging the Divide: Scale and Reliability Bringing together F5 and NGINX, we will be able to satisfy the requirements for “reliability” no matter the definition. Whether that applies to the reliability of small, developer-driven deployments scaling modern applications or large deployments scaling application services and traditional apps alike, a combined portfolio will offer customers the ability to use the right tool for the right app. F5 Networks Announces Second Quarter Fiscal Year 2019 Results Revenue of $544.9 million for the second quarter of fiscal year 2019 reflects 2% growth from $533.3 million in the second quarter of fiscal year 2018, driven by software solutions revenue growth of 30%. The combination of demand for application security and new software consumption models from F5, including Enterprise Licensing Agreements, helped drive 30% software revenue growth in the quarter. Recipe for Disaster: API-first with Security-last Strategies There is a growing demand for APIs. Whether helping to fuel the digital economy by enabling mobile apps or internally pumping up productivity through automation and orchestration initiatives, APIs are everywhere. F5 Friday: Container Ingress Services Gets K8s Native As the world of container technology matures, so does the integration of the enterprise-class technology required to support it, encouraging traditional offerings to move in the direction of container orchestration environments like Kubernetes. Bridging the Divide: Traditional and Modern Architectures Today, both traditional and modern architectures are valid and necessary for business to succeed in delivering digital capabilities faster and more frequently and, most importantly, in the most efficient way possible to support its most valuable asset: a multi-generational portfolio of applications. Digital Transformation and the App Portfolio Explosion Whether it's an entire library of movies and television shows available at our fingertips or the ability to catch a ride, book a table, or find the nearest gas station, every type of organization is under pressure to address customer needs and add value digitally right now. F5 AS3 and Red Hat Ansible Automation If you have already started automating F5 application services, you are likely familiar with using automation tools such as Ansible. To support more use cases and make application service deployment easier, F5 is releasing Application Services 3 (AS3) as part of the F5 Automation Toolchain. Back Down the Chain: The Link between Listening and Usability Not every customer is at the same place in the journey to automation, so we’ve built F5's Automation Toolchain as a set of components that can be broken apart and used independently, then brought together as a unit when the time is right. Consistent Security in the Cloud Requires Consistency It's somewhat ironic that the number one application service respondents won't deploy an application without is security, and yet digging into the deployment details shows that perhaps that's not entirely true. In the cloud, at least, it seems security is being shoved to the side more often than it should be. Alibaba Cloud Support – Extending F5’s Multi-Cloud Ecosystem With consistent services and policies in the Alibaba Cloud, and across other supported cloud environments, operations teams can comfortably secure and optimize any app while providing developers the architectural flexibility to pick and choose their cloud of choice. Bridging the Divide Between DevOps and NetOps We've seen too many articles that pit DevOps teams and NetOps teams in opposition to each other, almost at the personal level. That’s not helpful, and this isn't one of them. It's Not a Release, It's a Lifecycle F5’s Hitesh Patel: In this environment the bar for success is no longer releasing a new product. It’s continually engaging and listening to all of the product constituents—customers, partners, F5 engineers, support staff—in a constant lifecycle of innovation and improvement. Announcing Availability of Google Cloud’s Anthos with F5 Container Ingress Services With the general availability of GKE On-Prem (a core component of Google Cloud’s Anthos), F5 reveals its integration with this new solution, allowing its users to get one step closer to crafting a truly hybrid cloud architecture. Oil vs. Data – Which is More Valuable? In recent years, there’s been a volley of sorts about data replacing oil as the world’s most valuable resource. And, as you might imagine, there is far from uniform agreement on the topic. How Componentization of Applications Impacts Performance and Security Back in the good old days, business could rely on the use of strategically deployed proxies to improve the performance of applications. That's because traditional applications—monoliths and three-tier architectures—generally employed a single data path between the client and the server. Bridging Divides with Open Source Looking forward, F5 and NGINX can enable enterprises to address one of IT’s most pressing needs: fast, frequent deployments across a varied set of application architectures residing in multiple cloud properties. We believe that doing that successfully depends on NGINX remaining open source and being driven in large part by the community that built it. F5 and NGINX: Bridging the Divide F5 CEO François Locoh-Donou introduces a blog series to explore the divide that has existed between modern, open source applications developed in (and for) the cloud and the traditional, mission-critical applications that are often the last to migrate out of the enterprise data center. DNS is Key to Connected Customers DNS remains one of the least appreciated application services in existence. Its role is so important, that its failure is considered catastrophic. If every DNS system stopped answering queries, it would bring the digital economy to its knees within minutes. F5 Cloud Portfolio Grows with Cloud Services that Deliver Enhanced App Performance and Security Launching on AWS, new SaaS offerings provide optimized, easy-to-consume services for application developers and DevOps teams. F5 Cloud Services Deliver SaaS Solutions, Now Available in AWS Marketplace Venu Aravamudan, SVP & GM, F5 Cloud Services: F5 Cloud Services accelerate application delivery through a frictionless, intuitive multi-cloud platform. These SaaS solutions are optimized for cloud-native applications and microservices. Addressing Cloud-based DNS – It’s Time to Move With the launch of F5 Cloud Services, Principal Product Manager Roger Barlow walks you through the specific advantages of the DNS Cloud Service, offering secondary authoritative DNS. When Ecosystems Collide (In a Good Way) SVP of Business Development Calvin Rowland shares his excitement around F5’s acquisition of NGINX and looks ahead at the promise of combining technology partner ecosystems with open source efforts to benefit customers and deliver end-to-end application services. NGINX and F5: Our Continued Commitment to Open Source Following up on the recent acquisition news, NGINX CEO Gus Robertson elaborates on F5's committment to the NGINX open source technology, developers, and community. Skin in the Game: Why We Developed a Bold, New Service Exclusively for Service Providers VP Trevor Rodriguez discusses his previous experiences working for a Tier 1 telecommunications company, and how they help illustrate the value that the F5 Service Provider Essentials offering provides for SP Operations teams. Business is Moving Faster than Moore’s Law Moore's Law is often expressed in terms of compute power doubling every two years. But by harnessing the power of containers and cloud, and the reliability and speed of modern networks, we don't have to wait two years to increase our ability to process data and make decisions faster. HTTP/3 Will Bring Significant Changes and Challenges Given the slow but steady adoption of HTTP/2 and the security challenges posed by HTTP/3, the latter is likely to face a long, uphill road to adoption for the foreseeable future. The Struggle of DevSecOps: Takeaways from DevSecCon Singapore 2019 Keiichiro Nozaki reflects on DevSecCon Singapore 2019 and the evolving roles of DevOps and Security teams, as well as the benefits of collaboration for both. F5 Acquires NGINX to Bridge NetOps & DevOps and Provide Consistent App Services Across Every Environment “F5’s acquisition of NGINX strengthens our growth trajectory by accelerating our software and multi-cloud transformation,” said François Locoh-Donou, President & CEO of F5. A Letter to F5 Employees from CEO François Locoh-Donou Announcing NGINX Acquisition For additional background on the March 11 announcement, F5’s CEO shares his thoughts related to the company's agreement to acquire NGINX. MTTR is not "Mean Time to Reboot" Fail fast is the mantra of speed today. While the theory of this philosophy is good (for the business and for DevOps), in practice the result is often just more failure. F5 continues to drive application and security innovation with Hewlett Packard Enterprise for Microsoft Azure Stack Partnership between F5, HPE, and Microsoft extends integration announced in September to further enable agility for customer application environments that use Azure Stack. Application Service Deployment Plans Influenced by Team Structure Team structure matters because it helps define your purpose and priorities. That, in turn, determines the metrics by which success is measured. This is significant not just because of the need to encourage a more collaborative culture, but because of the way it impacts decisions and technology choices. Function as a (More Secure) Service Microservices and Function as a Service (FaaS) often facilitate Agile development because a relatively small team can design, develop, and then refine a service much more quickly than they can a large, monolithic application. But there's another interesting benefit of microservices and FaaS that isn't being touted as much as it should: security. Kickstart Your Move to 5G Services without Abandoning 4G Investments Vice President and General Manager, Service Provider, James Feger shares his thoughts on 5G, automation, IoT, and other industry topics that will be in focus during this year’s Mobile World Congress event. State of Application Services 2019: Majority Will Not Deploy without Security For five years we've asked thousands of respondents across every role in IT and around the world a simple question: What one thing would you never deploy an application without? In other words, what's the most important thing you can provide for your applications? F5 Friday: API Security with F5 and 3scale By layering an F5 Advanced WAF in front of a 3scale API gateway, customers benefit from additional security measures that include the use of IP intelligence to identify threats faster and more accurately, the ability to offer a secure API façade internally or externally, and protection against a variety of application layer attacks. F5 Enables 5G Services with New Solutions for Service Providers New tools and services enable telecoms transitioning to 5G to optimize networks, monetize new services today, and secure their networks at every layer. F5 is also introducing a service and support plan designed specifically to meet the complex and evolving needs of service providers. State of Application Services Telecom Edition: Emerging as Leaders As the telecom network evolves to support 5G and a wide variety of use cases across different industry verticals, we note from the 2019 State of Application Services survey that telecom respondents are raising their technology profile as leaders. Application Services Update: Programmability on the Rise While most of the focus of programmability is on operations today, there remains a significant amount of data path programmability that's vital to enabling consumers to interact with applications. Cloud Cron: Using Function as a Service to Control Costs Function as a Service (FaaS) is quickly finding use in a variety of operational and development contexts. And while the rising star of cloud computing is often mentioned in conjunction with APIs and IoT and mobile apps, there is significant use outside development for the technology. Three Key Takeaways for Asia Pacific from the State of Application Services Report Keiichiro Nozaki provides his perspective on the 2019 State of Application Services, noting regional trends and themes to provide deeper visibility into the priorities of today’s organizations, as well as the technology initiatives they are pursuing. F5 Teams with Equinix to Enhance Security for Multi-Cloud Environments F5 announces the availability of a joint solution with Equinix that provides automated HSM (hardware security module) capabilities as-a-service. This integration combines F5 BIG-IP and Equinix SmartKey technologies to simplify encryption key lifecycle management and provide superior security for organizations hesitant to store their ever-increasing number of keys in the public cloud. Did you lose your keys again? F5 can help! SVP Calvin Rowland digs into a joint solution with Equinix that enables high-speed key retrieval, allowing BIG-IP to decrypt and orchestrate SSL traffic for any application regardless of its location—on-premises, private or public cloud—thereby drastically simplifying multi-cloud key management…and giving you one less thing to worry about. OK 2019 Pig, Now What? The Year of the Pig is upon us! Peter Silva offers his thoughts on the coming year and what it might represent for businesses, security, and the larger industry as 2019 unfolds. How much is weaponized automation costing you? We know that just about half of the traffic on the Internet today is generated by bots. Some good, mostly bad. Operational efficiencies from automation and machine learning—usually discussed in a more positive context—are also being weaponized to perform reconnaissance probes and attacks alike. François Locoh-Donou to Join the Capital One Board of Directors Capital One Financial Corporation (NYSE: COF) announced that F5 CEO François Locoh-Donou has been appointed to the company's Board of Directors, effective March 1, 2019. Mr. Locoh-Donou will stand for election by Capital One stockholders in May 2019. > Data Never Sleeps Because Neither Do Applications The strategic importance of data can only be realized through an application. And an application can only fulfil its purpose by interacting with data. This strategic codependency can be clearly seen in this year’s State of Application Services report. > F5 Named One of Fortune’s Most Admired Companies The annual survey is given to top executives, directors, and financial analysts for identifying companies with the strongest reputations within and across industries. This is the second year in a row F5 has made the list. > Containers are Key to Multi-Cloud Container adoption has been a steady course to consume budget for a couple years now. What may be a surprise is the reasons behind that adoption. Spoiler alert: it isn't really about microservices. > F5 Friday: Declarative Onboarding for BIG-IP As DevOps has continued to press its case inside of IT, we've seen the adoption of automation and "as code" methodologies, including growing use of CI/CD tools like GitHub enterprise and Jenkins within the production pipeline. This post from Lori MacVittie and the Office of the CTO takes a closer look at Infrastructure as Code and what F5 is doing to enable and support it. > F5 Networks Announces First Quarter Fiscal Year 2019 Results Revenue of $543.8 million for the first quarter of fiscal year 2019 was up 4% from $523.2 million in the first quarter of fiscal year 2018. Growth compared with the first quarter of fiscal year 2018 was driven by continued momentum in software solutions, which drove year over year product revenue growth for the third consecutive quarter. > APIs as User Experience and Why It Matters APIs are the new CLI. Increasingly, it is through an API that infrastructure and application services are provisioned, configured, and operated. Between automation and integration into deployment pipelines, the API is a critical component that every device—hardware, software, on-premises, or cloud—must have. > State of Application Services 2019: Applications Drive Decisions in a Digital Economy Diving into application services alone is (almost) always interesting. But delving into the applications, environments, trends, and technology that drive organizations to use an average of 16 different applications services gives us a valuable glimpse of what IT and business will look like in the next year. > F5 Survey Shows App Services Critical in a DevOps-Driven Multi-Cloud World Just announced, the 2019 State of Application Services study looks at ways digital transformation is driving strategic decisions around the deployment and management of applications. The annual report reflects input from nearly 2,000 respondents globally across a range of industries, company sizes, and roles. > Zero Trust – Questions to Ask Having a “Zero Trust Strategy” is a lot like having a “Cloud Strategy”; it’s pretty meaningless without the context of what you’re trying to achieve and where you are today. Global solution architect Graham Alderson identifies key topics to consider for organizations pursuing this type of approach to security. > The Evolving Trends in Application Services: A 5-Year Review Five years ago, the industry was questioning the role of traditional IT – today IT organizations are embracing cloud and investing in the skills and toolsets required for automation. Cindy Borovick looks back at the industry’s progression in the context of the just released 2019 State of Application Services report. > F5 Adds Nick Mehta and Marie E. Myers to its Board of Directors F5 welcomes Nick Mehta, CEO of Gainsight, Inc., and Marie E. Myers, CFO of UiPath, Inc., to its Board of Directors. Mehta and Myers bring considerable leadership backgrounds to F5’s Board, along with valuable technology expertise. > The Myth of a Single Pane of Glass Lori MacVittie: For as long as I can remember—which is a long time—the siren call of a single pane of glass through which to view and operate infrastructure has lured IT. Like the Holy Grail, it has never been discovered and a good many IT professionals have become cynics as to its existence. > The State of Application Services 2019: Will Cloud Lose its Crown? Lori MacVittie comments on the role of cloud and application services in the context of F5’s upcoming State of Application Services report. In all its forms—public, on-premises private, and SaaS—cloud has maintained its place of strategic importance, impacting the application services deployed, the tools and technologies used to automate and orchestrate IT, and even in the evolution of team structures inside organizations. Will this year continue the trend? > Three Common Beliefs about Serverless You Can Ignore Serverless is the rising darling of the cloud world, but it's often misunderstood and attributed with almost supernatural powers to reduce costs, speed time to value, and make you breakfast in bed. And if that wasn’t enough, it’s also frequently conflated with Function as a Service (FaaS). > BIG-IP Cloud Edition is Now Available in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace Previously available for AWS and VMware environments, BIG-IP Cloud Edition’s support for Azure gives customers another easy-to-buy, ready-to-use solution for delivering application availability, performance, visibility, and security. > Empower DevOps Pipelines with Container Ingress App Services The growth of container app development incorporated into DevOps pipelines is nearing peak adoption across the app landscape, but some challenges persist. F5 declarative automation and orchestration solutions combined with ecosystem integrations are capable of delivering app services anywhere, including as Ingress into container environments. > F5 Friday: Ingress versus ingress As the worlds of DevOps and NetOps collide and container environments subsume definitions traditionally used in the network, let’s explore the use of the often-confusing term "ingress" in terms of the data path and container environments. > How Hardware Can Improve Application Security Ankita Bhalla revisits the importance of understanding the industry’s use of third-party hardware, highlighting F5’s iHealth and new Remote Attestation for TPM Chain of Custody feature as examples of how F5 helps keep you and your applications protected. > Honoring F5’s Top Partners in North America Regional VP of Channels Lisa Citron congratulates the winners of the 2018 North America Partners of the Year Awards, recognizing the exceptional performance of strategic resellers, service providers, and distributors in providing training, solutions, and support to further extend the value of F5 technologies for customers. > Cloud Isn't Finished Disrupting the Data Center Cloud showed us a better way to onboard, provision, and operate network and application infrastructure—aspects that have been steadily pushing their way into the data centers of organizations worldwide. But the digital transformation that began with cloud is now seeping into on-premises systems to bring about something far more interesting: the breakup of the network. > F5 SSL Orchestrator and Cisco Firepower NGFW: Better Together Coupled with Cisco Firepower series’ threat mitigation and performance capabilities, SSL Orchestrator performs the computationally heavy workload of decrypting traffic before distributing it to other devices in a security stack, so those same security devices are now able to cost-effectively scale. > Customer Story: MAXIMUS Streamlines Operations with F5 in AWS MAXIMUS provides critical health and human services programs to a diverse array of communities. Previously, IT infrastructure and operations weren’t scaling to meet their needs, and application deployment was a convoluted and time-consuming process. The team turned to F5 to help it migrate to AWS and automate its processes to free up resources for other projects. > Application Services for Kubernetes Applications: Same Old New A KubeCon dispatch from F5’s Robert Haynes: One of the enabling technologies behind the adoption of platforms and working practices has been the systems that link intent to action in an automated, integrated way. Application services have to be part of this chain, and this represents a more fundamental shift than simply a change in runtimes. > NetOps Need Advocates not Adversaries It’s important to recognize that it’s not always NetOps teams that get in the way of deploying the latest thing/app/service. Impediments to speed are often due to a failure to adopt all the premises of DevOps as organizations seek to transform IT operations. > Just How Big is the Appetite for Application Development Modernization? Keiichiro Nozaki, regional marketing architect/evangelist, recently attended the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2018 Asia Pacific on the Gold Coast, and asks the question: How many organizations are ready for digital transformation? > Top 10, Top 10 Predictions for 2019 It’s the time of year when crystal balls get a viewing and many pundits put out their annual predictions for the coming year. Peter Silva collects his picks of notable prediction lists making the rounds as 2018 comes to a close, along with brief commentary on each. > Bringing Management and Automation Together This week sees the release of BIG-IQ 6.1, the latest evolution of F5’s management platform. Dan Schrader walks through the benefits of this new version, focusing on declarative technology for automating the delivery of network services, as well as updated security reporting and dashboards. > Leveraging Developers to Accelerate Your Application Capital through Containerization SVP Kara Sprague discusses the increasingly important role of containers amidst developer scarcity in the age of Application Capital, also noting F5’s just released open beta for Aspen Mesh, a fully-supported service mesh built on Istio. > Protecting Machine Identity with Venafi and F5 With “machine identities,” we’re simply talking about how to ensure that an automated process can identify itself, and how other automated systems and processes grant the appropriate level of access to relevant resources. This concept is not new. What is relatively new is the scale at which it needs to be implemented. > Aspen Mesh Beta Now Available for Microservice Infrastructures At KubeCon, Aspen Mesh (an innovation from F5 Networks) announced an open public beta of its fully supported and enterprise-ready service mesh built on Istio to help companies further embrace a model where applications are continuously developed and deployed. > Service Meshes and App Modernization Lori MacVittie: There remains a tendency to equate containers with microservices. And by equate, I mean “use interchangeably.” This is a bad assumption. > Looking Back on Another Year of Innovation for F5 on AWS As the dust from the recent re:Invent conference settles, Tom Atkins reflects and takes a closer look at the most notable advances from what has been another dynamic and productive year for F5 on AWS. > The 12 Days of DevOps Timed to coincide with next week’s KubeCon in Seattle – one of the biggest DevOps-focused conferences of 2018 – we’re highlighting a dozen of our favorite pieces of DevOps-related content from the past year. > How Service Mesh Enables DevOps Shawn Wormke from Aspen Mesh explains how service mesh is a glue that helps unite Development and Operations teams, providing one place in the stack that you can manage microservices at runtime without changes to the application or cluster. > Time for Application Delivery to Think Outside the Box The stability and speed of today’s networks enable application services to act within a scalable system. Instead of a system deployed on a box, application delivery can embrace a modern, stack-based design. It can now be distributed to better take advantage of advances in technology and software, while continuing to benefit from expertise gained in previous years. > What 2018 Can Teach Us About 2019 2018 brought us larger breaches, bigger DDoS attacks, and intensifying challenges for organizations to face when defending their infrastructure from criminals. Applications were notably a primary target, and as 2019 rounds the corner, we need to be prepared for the continuous evolution of both cybercrime and security. > The Strategic Significance of Mainframes Mainframes have a bad rap in IT. They are viewed as dinosaurs, when the reality is that they provide a significant source of computing power for many organizations—computing power that’s growing in use. They also have more to do with DevOps, Agile, and other modern methodologies than you might think. > Building and Enhancing Your Application Capital through Chaotic Innovation Companies developing and deploying applications in the cloud can face inefficient IT operations, scarce developer resources, rising app experience expectations from users, increasing security risks, and cloud migration challenges—just to name a few. SVP Kara Sprague digs into the role chaos plays in spurring IT innovation and how F5 solutions enhance and protect organizations’ most valuable assets: applications. > Thingbots Transforming to Attack Platforms Lori MacVittie highlights F5 Labs research on global attacks against IoT devices from January–June 2018, pointing out the sobering implications. Not only do IoT devices continue to be exploited, but they are being transformed into attack platforms, meaning attackers can better take advantage of what’s emerged as a guaranteed growth market. > F5 Cloud Services Preview Now Available on AWS At AWS re:Invent 2018, we’re announcing the launch of F5’s Early Access Preview Program for the first of our cloud-based application services. Users now have instant trial access to DNS and Global Server Load Balancing (GSLB) services, with additional cloud-native, automated, and self-service solutions to follow. Hear more from SVP and GM of F5 Cloud Services, Venu Aravamudan. > F5 WAF Support for AWS Security Hub – Empowering Centralized Security Reporting Modern security is a multi-vendor proposition. F5’s industry-leading Web Application Firewall solutions (such as Advanced WAF) can now be integrated with AWS Security Hub, allowing predefined alert information from blocked traffic (such as attack type, source, etc.) to be escalated to this central console for further review, alongside inputs from other security products. > Get Straight Down to Business on AWS, with F5’s New Quick Start Before the start of AWS re:Invent, we’re excited to share the new Quick Start integration between F5 and AWS. F5’s Tom Atkins discusses how the service launches, configures, and runs the AWS compute, network, storage, and other services required to deploy your workloads on AWS. > Why You Will Love AWS re:Invent (and How to Keep Loving it When You’re Back at Work) F5’s Robert Haynes looks forward to AWS re:Invent, sharing his perspectives and tips on how to avoid an ‘enthusiasm hangover’ after the conference when returning from a week’s worth of heady discussions around cloud innovation, enhanced features, and new opportunities. > Changing Security Rules in Real Time with Machine Learning A particularly compelling advantage of applying machine learning to application security is that it focuses on constantly learning what is normal and identifying what is not. Lori MacVittie explains how layer 7 Behavioral Denial-of-Service (DoS) protection is like a flu vaccine that's capable of detecting the virus responsible based on its behavior rather than its actual composition. > Practical Cloud Considerations: Security Cryptography is naturally a computationally expensive process, meaning it takes more CPU cycles to encrypt or decrypt a message than to execute business logic. For cloud deployments, these added CPU cycles have been an accepted cost because the point is to shift capital costs to operational expense. But decrypting and encrypting a message multiple times—at a non-zero cost each time—can really add up. > How Declarative Interfaces Democratize Infrastructure In technology, simplification means abstraction, with declarative interfaces serving as a good example of that abstraction. By simplifying the interfaces used to provision, configure, manage, and integrate infrastructure today, declarative interfaces democratize infrastructure and open up opportunities for both NetOps and DevOps. > AWS Partner Network Blog: Simplicity and Security Through Centralized Application Delivery and F5 Networks Whether shifting existing applications or developing cloud-native solutions, there are tremendous benefits in scalability and availability gained from the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud. F5 Solution Architect Greg Coward walks through a typical application deployment utilizing F5’s BIG-IP Cloud Edition to provide a centralized point of control for provisioning, configuring, and managing F5 application delivery controllers. > Application Services Update: In search of visibility It’s time again to dig into the application services organizations are actually using to make apps faster and safer. Of note this quarter again is a continuing rise in use of bot defense services, as well as growth around analytics-related services. > Improving Security by Ignoring Vulnerabilities Generally speaking, “ignore vulnerabilities” is not something you expect to hear from a security company. And you certainly don't see “ignore vulnerabilities” paired with the notion of “improving security.” But now you have. F5’s Lori MacVittie is kind enough to elaborate. > City of Bellevue Delivers Future-Forward Mobility, Security, and Compliance with F5 To serve its diverse needs—including remote employees, citizen site visitors, police and emergency services, maintenance crews, among others—Bellevue turned to F5 for upgraded access, load balancing, and capacity, as well as a solution that would position the city well for future growth. > F5 Networks Appoints Edgar Dias as India Managing Director With over 22 years of experience in the industry, Dias will be responsible for managing and expanding F5’s India operations. Formally joining F5 on November 12, 2018, he will be based in Bangalore and report to Adam Judd, Senior Vice President for F5 in Asia Pacific, China, and Japan. > Standardization is Good for NetOps When approaching your production pipeline “as code,” it’s a certain bet that multiple sets of operators and developers will be responsible for it. This lies at the heart of the push for standardization—especially as NetOps takes the plunge into developing and maintaining systems to automate and orchestrate elements of the network and application service infrastructure. > F5 Networks Announces Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2018 Results F5 reported revenue of $562.7 million for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2018, up from $538.0 million in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2017. Results were driven by continued momentum in software solutions, powering continued year over year product revenue growth. The company also delivered fiscal year revenue up 3.4% with strong operational performance. > F5 Friday: F5 Infrastructure as Code with Terraform Just as it’s true that the application platform—the web or app server or app engine—must be provisioned first, so too must the network and application service platforms be provisioned before they can be configured. Increasingly, and especially in cloud environments, that provisioning and configuration process is driven by systems like HashiCorp's Terraform. > Drive a Successful Digital Transformation with F5 and Rackspace So how does one flesh out a detailed digital transformation plan? First, take a quick look at the relationship between applications and your ambitions around digitalization. Then, work with partners and vendors who have been guiding the application-focused evolution of business processes for years and have delivered tangible results. > The Open Source Shift Speculation continues around why businesses and industries formerly reluctant to officially encourage open source software use have suddenly embraced it. Most often, the legacy culprit is assumed to be a fear of legal liability. But another catalyst is the driving force of digital transformation. > Serverless is Real—and Growing like Gangbusters Serverless means developers don’t need to worry about infrastructure. And the business, too, sees value in its speed and efficiency. Combined with the frictionless nature of deploying code with serverless, you can be out the door with functionality in hours rather than weeks or months. > Supply-Chain Hacks and Hardware’s Role in Security Chief Architect Dave Schmitt and the Office of the CTO reflect on the importance of hardware security expertise in the context of the recent Bloomberg piece on Super Micro. The article also includes questions to ask your vendors to help make sure your systems are protected. > F5 Helps Launch AWS Consulting Partner Private Offers Program F5 is one of an exclusive group of launch partners of AWS’ Consulting Partner Private Offers Program, giving partners extended capabilities in making F5 application services available to customers via the AWS Marketplace. > As-Code: The Continuous IT Stack Infrastructure, Configuration, Pipeline, Operations. Suddenly everything is “as code.” Lori MacVittie attempts to sort through the terminology and identify the different components within a continuous IT stack. > Microservices: Less Micro and More Services Lori MacVittie explores how the industry has found itself with a strange hybrid of Service-Oriented and Microservice architectures that leaves many wondering where one ends and the other begins. > F5 CEO Talks Cashews, Hummingbirds, and the Value of Self-Worth An immigrant from Togo who came to the U.S. via France, François Locoh-Donou offers his perspectives on inclusion and the “business of doing good” at the 2018 Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce Annual Meeting. (GeekWire article with presentation audio) > Watch Calvin Rowland’s Interview from Microsoft Ignite The F5 SVP stops by SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio during the recent Ignite conference to discuss the role of F5 application services in supporting multi-cloud environments, the company’s emphasis on security, and the impact of emerging technologies. > F5 Friday: Pushing F5 Telemetry to Your Pipeline When we recently polled IT ops practitioners on the ‘State of Network Automation,’ we found the market experiencing a number of challenges. Among those cited specifically by NetOps professionals was a lack of integrated tools with which to move forward with automation efforts. > Application Services Must Follow Apps as They Follow Data While the adoption of cloud and containers have disrupted typical network architectures, applications remain tethered to the data for which they are the primary interface. CTO Ryan Kearny explains how a cause-and-effect relationship between apps and data is critical to the future of application delivery, particularly as we find ourselves on the verge of generating more data than we can move. > IT Ops Must go Beyond Scripting to Automation The goal of automation in almost any industry focuses on optimization and eliminating bottlenecks. In the world of IT, that typically means addressing the in-between steps of an operational process. > A Few Best Things About the New F5 Labs Site We take a quick look back at this summer’s enhancements to the F5 Labs site, and how the team is improving your access to application security and threat analysis research. > Day 0 was Day 1 of Development From day one of development through post-deployment, the choices we make regarding the security of the entire application stack play out with far-reaching consequences. > Enhanced Performance and Security in Microsoft Azure Stack with F5 and Hewlett Packard Enterprise For many IT groups, the pressure to migrate to public clouds is immense. An F5 collaboration simplifies applications running across Microsoft Azure Stack regions into a consolidated infrastructure for business operations. > F5 Announced as Member of Seattle’s New Innovation Advisory Council to Address City’s Most Urgent Challenges With support from Mayor Durkan, University of Washington, Amazon, Microsoft, and others, the Innovation Advisory Council will act as an advisor on issues and policies affecting the city around topics such as homelessness, housing, and transportation. > Wanted: Your Perspective on the State of Application Services The evolution of F5’s annual survey now emphasizes the application services you need rather than the platforms you use to deliver them. Learn more and participate in the survey today! > F5 Networks Named A 2019 TAG Cyber Distinguished Vendor F5 is highlighted in this year’s 2019 TAG Cyber Security Annual, designed to provide advisory guidance to security professionals. > Integration an Obstacle to Achieving Continuous Deployment APIs are not integration. They are a means to implement integration. And judging by the challenges seen in the industry, they aren’t enough for IT to get continuous. > Application Services Update: Sensitive Services may be Accessible It’s time again to dig into the application services organizations are actually using to make apps faster and safer. > Containers, APIs, and Security Rule Two Lori MacVittie comments on a recent report from Lacework highlighting the need to reiterate one of the common core security rules: Thou Shalt Not Leave Admin Consoles Open > Why Infrastructure Matters to Developers using Containers Just as previous app architectures have driven responses in the network infrastructure, so are containers and microservices. Only this time the changes aren’t coming in the form of a new box. What’s happening now is the move to integrate the application services developers need into the container environment. > Guest Blog: SDN-Enablement of ISP Threat Sharing During F5’s recent Agility conference in Boston, a group of industry participants from the global service provider community met to discuss and debate topics such as the role of emerging SDN infrastructures, automation, and security. > Why Should DevOps Practitioners Care about Per-App Architectures? For decades, application services have been deployed on shared platforms. But emerging application architectures such as microservices are forcing changes in the production pipeline that better map to modern deployment schedules and operational practices like infrastructure as code. > Watch the CEO’s Keynote on Application Capital from F5’s Global Agility Conference François Locoh-Donou describes the modern application’s role in accelerating value creation, joined by customer speakers from Motorists Insurance Group and MarketAxess. > F5 Friday: Configuration as Code with F5 AS3 From F5’s Office of the CTO, Lori MacVittie draws connection points between DevOps practices and F5’s new declarative interface that decreases reliance on APIs and increases the ability to implement a fully automated, continuous deployment pipeline. > Optimizing Your Application Capital with Application Services SVP Kara Sprague explores the emergence of Application Capital in the context of customer expectations, industry trends, and F5 innovations. > Is there a Minimal Viable Deployment for NetOps? Lori MacVittie explores the potential of achieving an ‘MVD’ for an application by adopting a per-app architecture for its tightly coupled app services. > The IP Address as Identity is Lazy Security The association of a singular identity with an IP address is so tightly ingrained in our heads that we tend to apply it to other areas of technology. Even when it’s utterly ineffective. > F5 Appoints David Helfer as Senior Vice President for EMEA Sales A veteran leader of high-performance global teams with more than 25 years of deep industry knowledge in the technology sector, Helfer to oversee sales across EMEA (Europe, Middle East, and Africa). > F5 Simplifies Network Functions Virtualization for Service Providers New integrated solution combines lifecycle management with F5’s leading VNFs in a capacity-based consumption model. > NetOps (Almost) Meeting DevOps in the Automation Race The data shows that despite the challenges inherent in automation, NetOps aren't nearly as far behind as some posit. > “Props” to our Partners for the Strong Value Prop One of the interesting things about the cyber security industry is the degree to which vendors essentially wind up on the same side. > Leaders and Laggards in Cloud: It’s all about the Application Services Sometimes I love reading commentary from El Reg on IT and technology. Delivered with just the right amount of bite, their bark is often right on target. > Size Matters (But not that Much) in Network Automation So says the data. It would be easy to dismiss the importance of network automation by claiming that the size of your organization... .> Using F5 BIG-IP to Eliminate Tiers When Scaling Apps in Containers Or is that ‘tears’ of frustration? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Perhaps it’s both. There is a relationship between network and application architectures. > BIG-IP Cloud Edition: Making Sure Your App Party is Well Provisioned Zach Westall explains what intelligent traffic management, orchestration, and autoscaling have to do with a good party, wrapping...> Software is Still Eating IT: Its Next Course is Application Services Back in 2015, I noted that Software was Eating IT. That was based on data culled from a variety of industry sources... > SSL/TLS: Visibility Isn’t Enough, You Need Orchestration A full-proxy for both SSL/TLS and HTTP, SSL Orchestrator can make intelligent decisions to steer inbound and... > Availability is a Diversion and We are Falling for It In a more balanced world, application users would have the same level of concern for the security of their data as they do for their access to it... > How to Prepare for Cloud-to-Cloud Migration Oh yes. It’s happening. Consider making it a part of your overarching cloud strategy to make the process less painful. What do the following have in common? Salmon, Canadian... > Protecting the Identity Perimeter What do terms like Identity Perimeter and Zero Trust actually mean for you? Graham Alderson takes a look in the context of F5's new... > New F5 Security Products and Threat Research Enhance App Protection SEATTLE – F5 introduced new offerings that provide advanced access controls and dedicated SSL visibility with... > F5 SSL Orchestrator Further Benefits Customers Thanks to Strong Partnerships Frank Strobel highlights the role of F5's partner ecosystem in strengthening security, increasing scale and... > F5 Networks Announces Third Quarter Fiscal 2018 Results SEATTLE – F5 today announced revenue of $542.2 million for the third quarter of fiscal 2018, up 4.7% from... > F5 Networks Appoints Michel Combes to Board of Directors Sprint CEO is a proven leader with 30 years of experience in telecommunications and technology. > Miners and Minions: Data Breaches aren’t the Only Thing that Cost You Sure, a data breach may cost more (at least right now) and it certainly forces your failure into the limelight (you gotta... > Open Source Spotlight: F5 Eclipse Plugin for NetOps As a developer, my favorite editor for writing code is vim. I know, I know. But it’s fast, I can get around in it, and it isn’t emacs. (Yeah, I went... > Pay-As-You-Go BIG-IP VE and Advanced WAF Now Available for Azure Government Perfect for development and test purposes, these instances provide true cloud-native operational flexibility with no long-term... > What Makes F5 a Leader in WAF? Brian McHenry looks at F5's diversity of WAF services and web application security capabilities in the context of a recent analyst report. > Big data doesn’t lie but the people who enter it might There’s an old business axiom we all know that goes like this: The customer is always right. In this digital economy, it turns out that axiom has to... > F5 Welcomes Mary Gardner as Chief Information Security Officer SEATTLE – F5 Networks (NASDAQ: FFIV) today announced that Mary Gardner has joined the company’s... > The Container Colloquialism Translator for NetOps There are days when the jargon coming out of container land makes your head swim. With each new capability or feature offered by related solutions – service mesh... > Conquer Your Cloud Security Concerns with F5 Advanced WAF on AWS and Azure These virtual editions protect applications and data with complete feature parity across on-premises and multi-cloud... > Application Capital F5 SVP Kara Sprague outlines an evolution of physical and digital capital that has led to the present era of Application Capital as an organization's most valuable asset. > Introducing F5's New FIPS and Turbo SSL Appliances F5 rounds out its appliance portfolio with improved price/performance, along with enhanced security and compliance features. > You Can’t Do Immutable Infrastructure without a Per-App Architecture Back in 2013, we were introduced to the concept of an immutable server. An immutable server is, as the term immutable suggests, static. Its configuration is fixed and cannot (or at least should... > Container Automation Drives Frictionless App Services One of the ways app developers are able to simplify their dev and test is to incorporate containers and microservices for maximum... > F5 Named a WAF Leader by Independent Research Firm SEATTLE ‒ F5 Networks (NASDAQ: FFIV) today announced that it has been named a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Web... > Mainstream Microservices Mania: Challenges Increasing with Adoption Just a few short years ago microservices were a curiosity discussed by developers with a kind of giddy excitement at... > Unblocking Change: Continuous Learning in the DevOps Era For network ops, industry shifts can prove quite disruptive as app teams bypass controls and systems that made perfect sense at one time. > Economic Espionage: How Nation-State-Funded APTs Steal Billions in Secrets F5 Labs’ Ray Pompon explores how intellectual property theft relates to your morning latte...and is also costing the U.S. $600 billion per year. > The Surprising Truth about Digital Transformation: Container Confusion This is the last blog in a series on the challenges arising from digital transformation. The Surprising Truth about Digital Transformation The Surprising Truth about Digital Transformation:... > BIG-IP Cloud Edition: The Security Advantage of Per-App Architectures Apps introduce risk, and the apps that rely on other apps introduce even more risk – Zach Westall continues his blog series on BIG-IP Cloud Edition... > The Surprising Truth about Digital Transformation: Diseconomy of Scale This is the fourth blog in a series on the challenges arising from digital transformation... > The Health of your Apps: Analytics in BIG-IP Cloud Edition and BIG-IQ 6.0 A closer look at how F5 provides an application-centric view of the health, performance, and security of your applications and the... > Advanced Attackers: Stealthy, Patient, Dangerous CISOs recently ranked advanced persistent threats (APTs) as their #1 concern. F5 Labs’ Ray Pompon gives you a look at tips, tools... > F5 Officially Supporting Ansible for Application Services Deployment As part of the robust and expanding Ansible ecosystem, F5 provides a wide variety of Ansible modules to automate the onboarding... > BIG-IP Cloud Edition: What You Need to Know F5’s BIG-IP Cloud Edition is now released and available to order. Since you already may have read the general overview from our press release last month, I will use this blog to drill into more... > Bot Defense Should be a Key Component of a Proactive Security Strategy Usually when we talk about app protection we immediately focus on web application firewalls. Specifically, we tend to focus on the OWASP Top Ten and application layer vulnerabilities that can lead... > A Brief Catch-Up Ahead of the AWS Public Sector Summit Each year, Washington D.C. plays host to one of the largest cloud-oriented public sector gatherings on the planet – AWS’ suitably dubbed... > BIG-IP VE Availability for the U.S. Intelligence Community on AWS AWS C2S, or Commercial Cloud Services as it’s otherwise known, is the name of the government program and contract vehicle that.... > Russia Attacks Global Network Infrastructure Through Vulnerabilities That Extend Far Beyond Targets US-CERT TL18-106A alert underscores how insecure Internet systems really are and that ignoring the problem... > The Surprising Truth about Digital Transformation: Skipping Security It will be no surprise for many IT veterans to hear that when app performance becomes an issue, security is the first service out the door... > More in the Newsroom F5 Blog Features Press Releases Awards Events Press Kit SECURE AND DELIVER EXTRAORDINARY DIGITAL EXPERIENCES F5’s portfolio of automation, security, performance, and insight capabilities empowers our customers to create, secure, and operate adaptive applications that reduce costs, improve operations, and better protect users. 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