What Are Application Services?
Application services are software solutions that improve the speed, security, and operability of applications.
The environment in which applications are deployed is always changing. Traffic can suddenly spike as a result of legitimate demand. Bots can impersonate users perpetuating fraud or cause other types of mayhem. Determined cyber criminals can break through previously solid defenses. Server outages can disrupt normal traffic patterns, potentially taking an application offline for some or all users.
Application security and delivery technology—such as traffic management, web application firewalls, load balancing, distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) protection, and API management—interacts with the environment around the application, enabling it to adapt to changing conditions. These and other application services help to ensure the performance, security and operability of the applications they support by shaping and steering traffic in response to the application state, the nature of the traffic itself, and other environmental factors.
As digital transformation reshapes the modern enterprise, applications are becoming an increasingly important source of differentiation. In today’s ever more competitive economy, organizations often need to manage hundreds and even thousands of applications with unprecedented speed, scale, and agility.
As innovation continues to increase, so, too, have concerns about security and delivering a consistent experience across environments. Application services help organizations boost performance, maintain availability, improve network and application security, and gain visibility into the behavior and health of their apps. By incorporating F5 application services into their systems today, enterprises can obtain the foundation they need to improve efficiency, increase their adaptability, and achieve a long-term competitive advantage.
Application services perform critical support functions that keep applications fast, secure, and available. F5 provides many of the highest quality application services on the market in a variety of form factors, including hardware, software, and SaaS, available across cloud providers and on-premises. The company’s application security and delivery technology offers a unified delivery and security architecture that simplifies application delivery while improving overall security and operability.
An increasingly important advantage to deploying F5 application services across applications and environments is consistent telemetry. Such telemetry is useful today and will rapidly grow in value over time.
As the sheer volume of applications grows, more sophisticated solutions are required to manage increasingly complex systems. Fortunately, F5 application services interact with vast amounts of data regarding the application, the environment, and the traffic flowing through both. This data is essential fuel for both current and future systems that solve for the issues arising from complexity and speed.
An AI-powered analytics engine, combined with comprehensive data supplied by F5 application services, will make it possible to further automate essential application security and delivery solutions. This automation ultimately makes possible adaptive applications that grow, shrink, defend, and heal themselves in response to changing conditions.
