F5 Networks’s security and multi-cloud solutions on show at GITEX 2017 – Intelligent Gitex
F5 Networks’s security and multi-cloud solutions on show at GITEX 2017
Taj El Khayat, Gulf, Levant and North Africa Director, F5 Networks.

F5 Networks’s security and multi-cloud solutions on show at GITEX 2017

GITEX Technology Week 2017 will see F5 Networks underscore its growing regional influence in application security and multi-cloud solutions.

“In a digital-driven economy, applications deliver business services for a variety of access points and locations, opening up new risks and attack vectors—particularly as IT teams extend security and encryption capabilities across cloud, data centre, and hybrid environments,” said Taj El Khayat, Gulf, Levant and North Africa Director, F5 Networks.

Among the security solutions on show are F5’s latest additions to the Herculon product family.

Herculon SSL Orchestrator™ provides improved insight for the visibility gaps created by the growing use of encryption for application data. With purpose-built hardware for SSL/TLS, the product provides leading cryptographic capabilities, context-aware dynamic service chaining, and native integrations.

Herculon SSL Orchestrator can significantly increase performance—and decrease infrastructure costs – across the security stack by eliminating the need for redundant encryption and decryption capabilities.

A ‘defence in-depth’ strategy is employed to enhance detection, enforcement, and orchestration with support from a rich ecosystem of security vendors.

Another security highlight is the Herculon DDoS Hybrid Defender™, which gives customers a multilayered defence against volumetric and pervasive DDoS attacks by integrating high-performance hardware with the intelligence of offsite cloud scrubbing via F5 Silverline.

This hybrid approach improves time to mitigation in scenarios where website and application availability are crucial to customer interactions and profitability. The product can be deployed in-line or in out-of-band mode, and provides comprehensive DDoS coverage through behavioural analytics, sub-second attack mitigation, and visibility into sophisticated application layer attacks.

In addition, F5 will put the spotlight on the regional influence of its cloud-based application security-as a-service, Silverline® WAF Express™.

Customers can easily select which applications WAF services are applied to, while F5 manages security policies behind the scenes to protect apps from a wide range of threats including OWASP attacks, parameter tampering, and bots.

Via this model, F5’s Security Operations Center experts engage and maintain policies, including monitoring, app attack mitigation, and analytics for applications hosted in the public or private cloud, as well as the data centre.

F5 Networks’s cloud credentials will be further emphasised by showcasing its recently announced multi-cloud-ready application services for the UAE market.

“F5’s strategy is to ensure we address the complexity of crowd sprawl head on, tackling challenges related to managing application services, inconsistent policies, security, as well as results-driven performance optimisation. We want to give our customers the freedom to deploy any application – anywhere and at any time,” said El Khayat.

F5’s 2017 State of Application Delivery Report[1] recently revealed that customers are increasingly investing in multiple cloud technologies. A total of 86% of the respondents indicated that they are committed to multi-cloud architectures, and 20% stated that they will have over half their applications running in the public and/or private clouds this year.

New F5 cloud services include public cloud solutions that help deploy applications faster in any cloud.

F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition (VE) is now available in the Google Cloud Platform, giving customers greater choices of cloud platforms, with new ‘bring-your-own license’ offers for instances ranging from 25Mbps to 5Gbps. With the inclusion of Google Cloud, F5 services are now available in all major public clouds.

F5 is also revealing cloud solution templates for Amazon Web Services, Azure, and Google that reduce the complexity of deploying F5 services for applications in the public cloud. These new solution-specific templates simplify and automate common public cloud use cases. Cloud solution templates are also available for OpenStack private cloud environments.

Other public cloud offerings include integrated marketplace solutions to provide easily accessible, pre-packaged F5 services such as WAF and Office 365 federated access that are deployable directly from public cloud marketplaces, meaning companies can leverage their trusted F5 services easily for applications in the cloud.

In the private cloud, F5 will demonstrate how organisations can move to the cloud faster and with more confidence. A case in point is its private cloud package, which gets customers up and running quickly with pre-tested, certified, and bundled F5 solutions that simplify and automate OpenStack private cloud deployments.

Allied to this is a broad line of additional solutions, including F5’s Application Connector, which delivers application services from the edge of the cloud by automatically discovering cloud-hosted instances and connecting them to the customer’s data centre or hosted location.

Other new F5 private cloud offerings include the Application Services Proxy (giving customers flexibility in developing, testing, and scaling applications in cloud and container environments), and the Container Connector (providing easy provisioning of services for containerised applications, and simple integration of capabilities from management/orchestration systems including Kubernetes and Mesos/Marathon).

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