Articles by Kara Sprague

Discover the major trends of F5's 2022 State of Application Strategy Report to see how businesses adapt app modernization, security, and delivery for the future.

Digital acceleration punctuates each set of opportunities and challenges that organizations face. Business leaders seek to improve customer experience, transform the business, and differentiate through application portfolios. At the same time, IT operators wrestle with ever-growing security threats, legacy applications and infrastructures, and crushing complexity.

F5 is making a change in how we handle the public communication of security issues in our software products. We're moving to a predictable quarterly cadence when we have CVEs or exposures to disclose. These new Quarterly Security Notifications will align the public communication of vulnerabilities and security exposures across all F5 products to one pre-announced date each quarter so customers can plan for possible maintenance activities to ensure they are protected.

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.

On any journey, knowing where you are is just as important as knowing where you’re going. But for many companies on their digital transformation journeys, the past year was so full of on-ramps, express lanes, forks, and detours that they can no longer locate where they are on the carefully planned roadmap they started out with. In addition, their destination may well be different today from what it was 12 months ago.

F5 remains fully committed to equipping our customers and the cybersecurity community at large with information about vulnerabilities to strengthen our collective defenses against cyberattacks.

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 7th annual 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.

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.

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.

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.

Automatically grow, shrink, defend, and heal your modern adaptive applications. Learn how F5 helps you scale and secure your apps for an extraordinary customer experience.

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.

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.

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 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.

The pressure to transform digitally has become universal. Whatever your strategy is, the trick is to figure out how 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 of your applications—is to leverage a consistent set of multi-cloud application services.

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 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.

To manage application capital effectively, companies need to start by establishing a companywide application strategy that sets policy and establishes a basis for compliance. The application strategy should address how applications in the enterprise portfolio are built, acquired, deployed, managed, secured, and retired.

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.

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.

SVP Kara Sprague explores the emergence of Application Capital in the context of customer expectations, industry trends, and F5 innovations.