F5 ニュース

In the sixth Q&A installment of the “A Journey to Gender Equity” blog series, F5 EVP Kara Sprague shares how she ended up in cybersecurity and her advice for women and other underrepresented groups building cybersecurity careers.

Code contribution improves protocol compression ratio by 2x and reduces bandwidth costs for high-volume telemetry initiatives and AI-driven projects.

At F5, we envision a better digital world in which customers can focus on delighting their customers and growing their business without getting overwhelmed by security and application performance risks. Telemetry is key to making that happen.

Uncover key risks of generative AI tools in the workplace and how organizations can safeguard and maintain data security.

Explore the role of AI in operations as a force multiplier, debunking myths, exploring ethics, and highlighting its potential to enhance efficiency.

If organizations can’t harness game-changing innovations like generative AI, they will undoubtedly be left behind. Digital maturity indicates whether or not an organization is positioned to take advantage of such technologies.

F5 President and CEO François Locoh-Donou: “Over the last several years, through the combination of organic innovation, acquisitions and technology integration, we have created a converged portfolio uniquely capable of simplifying the complexities our customers face operating today’s hybrid, multi-cloud IT environments.”

In the fourth Q&A installment of F5's “A Journey to Gender Equity” series, Rachael Shah and Jenn Gile, head of product marketing for NGINX, dispel myths about cybersecurity careers and discuss tips and benefits to closing the gender gap in cybersecurity.

F5 announced it is partnering with Visa, the world leader in digital payments, to help merchants securely reduce login friction for customers.

CAPTCHA and MFA defenses often introduce substantial friction to the customer journey, cutting into business revenue and irritating users. As consumers increasingly expect fast, seamless interactions and experiences, e-commerce merchants need a smarter, more personalized approach to allow customers to login safely.

With F5ers in Ukraine and Russia facing the trauma of war, F5 has been extending a lifeline—providing everything from visa and relocation assistance to financial and mental health support.

NGINX Plus enables media group to reliably process 50,000 requests per second without using extensive cloud resources.

F5 President and CEO François Locoh-Donou: “F5’s solutions automate, secure, and manage our customers’ rapidly expanding application footprints and evolving hybrid IT environments, enabling customers to focus fewer resources on managing their IT infrastructure and more resources on running and growing their businesses.”

The First Nations Health Authority works to overcome issues of trust as it improves health outcomes for First Nations communities and citizens across British Columbia while relying on F5 solutions for security, scalability, and responsive support.

As a Best in Class vendor, F5’s approach integrates bot and fraud detection capabilities to secure organizations from a breadth of automated attacks while reducing user friction and allowing for the continued operation of good bots.

Criminals can retool bots within minutes to bypass defenses, utilize millions of valid IP addresses, rapidly solve CAPTCHAs, mimic human behavior, and introduce subtle randomness. Aite-Novarica Group’s report reviews leading bot management offerings, recognizing F5 Distributed Cloud Bot Defense as a Best in Class solution.

Marianne Budnik is an accomplished leader, with extensive marketing and cybersecurity expertise, as well as more than 25 years’ operating experience in the technology sector.

On behalf of F5, YouGov surveyed 500 IT decision makers to get a snapshot of priorities as they balance the need to empower people and organizations today. One key takeaway: All the Metaverse’s potential to fuel growth, innovation, and emerging industries is at risk if we don’t make security foundational to its evolution.

As F5 CEO François Locoh-Donou put it, ransomware is an epidemic the entire world’s facing. Rachael Shah contextualizes how serious a threat ransomware continues to be and why she can’t stop thinking about it.

Today, our digital personas are deliberately curated, highly visible, and tightly managed as we wed ourselves ever closer to the devices in our pocket. So, when accounts get taken over because of credential stuffing and bad actors take advantage, the results can be devastating on a very personal level.

F5 announced that it has been positioned as an Overall Leader in the 2022 KuppingerCole Leadership Compass report for Web Application Firewalls (WAFs). The report compares multiple WAF vendors across criteria such as Security, Functionality, Deployment, Interoperability, and Usability.

In a recent report, KuppingerCole evaluated many vendors' Web Application Firewall offerings. F5 scored high for attributes including API protection, core WAF capabilities, bot management, DDoS protection, and Admin & DevOps support.

As businesses and their brands become indistinguishable from the digital services that represent them, key processes, governance guidelines, organizational structure, and strategy must adapt. A new book from F5 CTO Geng Lin, Principal Technical Evangelist Lori MacVittie, and several members of the Office of the CTO clarifies why companies struggle with digital transformation and what it takes to change IT to become a data-driven, AI-supported digital business.

F5 President and CEO François Locoh-Donou: "Customers depend on F5 to secure and deliver extraordinary digital experiences that drive their businesses and fuel their brands...With our intense business transformation efforts over the last five years, we have built a stronger and more resilient F5, as evidenced by our 72 percent revenue from recurring sources in the quarter."

Dan Woods: When I consider the volume and velocity of automation we’re seeing today, the sophistication of bots that a given set of incentives is likely to attract, and the relative lack of countermeasures I saw in my own research, I can only come to one conclusion. In all likelihood, more than 80% of Twitter accounts are actually bots.

Credit union BlueShore Financial secures its web assets with F5 SaaS-based security that aligns with the company’s “financial wellness” concept and spa-like atmosphere. By deploying F5 Distributed Cloud Web App and API Protection (WAAP), BlueShore protects both its clients and its employees.

Solutions architects for the F5 Service Provider team Kostas Skenderidis and Mark Rosche share how to improve functionality for telcos using F5’s BIG-IP VE Load Balancer to optimize CNFs in an Amazon EKS environment. This AWS Partner Network blog highlights new Layer 4 capabilities for a successful container deployment, especially when deployed at an edge site on AWS Outposts.

Edge computing is under pressure to simultaneously evolve with each wave of the internet. As we ride the third wave, this next evolution demands the creation of a platform to support new capabilities within the edge ecosystem. A platform that cannot simply be bolted together, but requires a new approach with design considerations at the architectural level.

Cloud’s introduction of differentiated services (load balancing, security, acceleration, identity, etc.) was the first indication that cloud was entering a stage of standardization, as the value was no longer in the compute, but in the app security and delivery services one could access with ease. Now we see the industry shifting toward those same services offered as competing products delivered via cloud-based platforms. The hype cycle for a new iteration of cloud—XaaS—is on the rise.

As one of the world’s largest technology communication providers, Vodafone serves hundreds of millions of users around the globe. Seeking to improve the speed, efficiency, and visibility of WAF management and address slow application onboarding, Vodafone Digital made swift progress with help from F5 Automation Toolchain for the F5 BIG-IP platform.

Q2’s financial experience platform supports more than 1,200 financial institutions and over 22 million account holders worldwide. With the growth in mobile and digital banking, and the increasing volume and sophistication of cyber attacks on financial institutions and their account holders, Q2 needed a way to provide stronger security without disrupting the customer experience. F5 Distributed Cloud Bot Defense was the answer.

F5 announces its 2022 Tech for Good grant recipients. As part of our commitment to global good, F5 annually awards these grants to nonprofits that serve majority Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) or underrepresented communities. These grants are designed to help nonprofits accelerate their digital transformation efforts so they can increase their social impact.

F5 solutions adopted by SoftBank will enable enterprise customers to move more of their business-critical applications to multiple edge locations and enjoy the benefits of reduced latency, enhanced security, and flexible application deployment.

F5 Distributed Cloud Services provide a platform-driven approach to secure the essential elements of connected experiences through a comprehensive set of web, mobile app, and API protections. New capabilities extend the reach of Distributed Cloud Services for easy to deploy SaaS-based security.

New F5 NGINX SaaS offering provides a native experience that is tightly integrated with Microsoft Azure for application delivery, helping customers deliver modern applications on Azure with just a few clicks.

Christine Puccio looks at market and industry trends that point to the value F5 creates in broadening the ways customers can leverage popular commercial marketplaces to procure, consume, and expand the use of solutions from the company’s growing software and SaaS portfolio.

CEO François Locoh-Donou highlights F5 volunteer activities: "When we first established our Global Good program, we felt it was critical for employees to drive our efforts. It moves me to see our people investing so rewardingly in the lives of others, and it amazes me to witness the resilience and transformation these efforts are fostering in communities around the globe."

Performance reigns supreme, so much so that businesses would exchange security to see its improvement. In addition, performance presents a significant obstacle to realizing the benefits of multi-cloud strategies and is definitively driving businesses to extend to the edge.

F5 introduces its 2022 State of Application Strategy Report, highlighting the ways organizations are evolving their IT infrastructures by deploying AI and SRE solutions, balancing modernization with security, and repatriating applications.

EVP Kara Sprague: While organizations are racing down the road of digital transformation, many find that significant additional progress requires adopting new approaches for managing telemetry, data, and application security and delivery technologies across today’s distributed architectures.

Accelerated digital transformation initiatives coupled with a ferocious desire to drive competitive differentiation has placed increasing pressure on application teams to deliver apps to market faster than ever. However, IT organizations are also being hampered by lengthening component lead times brought about by a global semiconductor shortage—much to the frustration of developers.

It's become clear that to continue the momentum of their digital transformation journey, organizations need to renew their focus on business functions. While customer-facing experiences are still priority, enabling business functions such as legal, HR, and finance to digitize is necessary. This means CIOs are taking the driver's seat as digital transformation transitions from modernizing aps to modernizing ops.

Rakuten Symphony and F5 announced they will bring F5’s new BIG-IP Next Cloud-Native Network Functions (CNFs) to a global customer base through Rakuten Symphony’s Symworld marketplace. Representing the evolution of a longstanding relationship that began with F5 providing security functions to Rakuten Mobile, this collaboration aims to simplify the deployment of fully cloud-native security and networking functions for telecom operators.

Sue Bohn, Microsoft Vice President of Program Management for Identity and Network Access, offers a Q&A with F5 security experts Jay Kelley, Erin Verna, and Namita Signh discussing topics like Zero Trust and the ways joint customers benefit in using F5 BIG-IP Access Policy Manager (APM) and Microsoft Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) together.

EVP Kara Sprague articulates F5's approach to adaptive applications, noting that 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.

Just when we all thought it was safe to dive back into application development after the pain and churn caused by the Log4j vulnerability and the Log4Shell attacks, here comes yet another beast of a vulnerability to take a chunk out of security and devour valuable resources.

Dirty Pipe, a vulnerability that takes place in the Linux kernel, allows for overwriting data in arbitrary read-only files, which can lead to privilege escalation by injecting code into root processes. This means that Dirty Pipe can focus on the infrastructure level, but with a comprehensive view of the full environment, F5's Chris Ford discusses how Threat Stack helps customers stay protected.

F5 Silverline Web Application Firewall helps Asian Paints protect its web applications and data hosted on-premises and in the cloud through a centralized platform.

Building a strong and robust cybersecurity posture should include availability, i.e., one can still use critical applications if they are under attack. Achieving security with resiliency and undisrupted availability are the benchmarks of proactive cybersecurity, with the understanding that threats (and mitigations) will never stop evolving.

AI is quickly being recognized as integral to the success of digital business with adoption across business, operations, and security. An area not as extensively discussed is the benefits of incorporating AI into development for pattern recognition and modeling.

F5 announced a major expansion of its application security and delivery portfolio, providing services on a new SaaS platform that expands the company’s security solutions with simplified management and security for all applications in all locations.

From EVP Haiyan Song: The modern application landscape continues to evolve into a world of multi-cloud, microservices, and APIs coexisting with legacy, data center-based apps. Security practices are far more challenging because of process complications and increased time pressures on app development. Organizations need to simplify their approach, with F5 Distributed Cloud Services poised to help.

The launch of F5 Distributed Cloud Web Application and API Protection (WAAP) represents significant opportunities for our partner ecosystem and joint customers. This new SaaS offering marks the latest evolution in application security and extends our commitment to securing your enterprise apps—including instances where you work with our partners to maximize security and value.

F5 Distributed Cloud Web Application and API Protection secures web apps and APIs deployed in multi-cloud and distributed environments, bringing together four key components critical to securing the digital experience for today’s modern enterprises: Web Application Firewall, API Security, Bot Defense, and DDoS Mitigation.

F5 President and CEO François Locoh-Donou: “Our customers’ need to grow and evolve the applications that support and drive their businesses led to strong demand for F5’s application security and delivery solutions...Customers increasingly see F5 as an innovator uniquely equipped to help them build and scale both their traditional and modern application environments with our software- and systems-based solutions."

Digital business functions are just as critical to supporting customer experience and other areas such as legal, finance, and HR are starting to get the much-needed attention they deserve. Organizations far along their digital transformation journey are taking a step back to phase one, addressing functions that have remained manual through recent rapid digitization.

In a digital as default world, operations is still too reliant on manual methods and needs to evolve to enable adaptive applications. This evolution requires significant change across all of IT. It needs AI-enabled adaptability that will maintain availability, optimize performance, and ensure security.

James Phillips, President, Digital Transformation Platform Group at Microsoft, has been appointed to F5's board of directors. Phillips joins F5’s board effective January 5, 2022, and will sit on F5’s Nominating and Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) Committee.

Security and fraud protection have become increasingly intertwined in the current threat landscape. At the same time, industries are continuously extending their services with applications, APIs, and tools touching multiple organizations. F5's new security offerings bridge security and fraud team operations that help customers block automated and human-driven malicious activity, shield valuable user details, and stop fraud.

The Department for Work and Pensions is the United Kingdom government department responsible for welfare, pensions, and child maintenance policy. When the department needed to provide its IT teams with a secure and reliable way to access backend tools for monitoring and managing its platforms and technologies it turned to NGINX Plus.

Data governance can negatively impact consumer experiences. See how DBS Bank scaled data governance with automation to address security risks.

As the digital economy grows, so does the processing of payments through financial services institutions, and malicious actors have taken notice. The digital payment ecosystem relies on APIs to facilitate digital financial transactions, and the number of API security incidents continues to rise annually. Digital firms, especially those in financial services, are increasing focus on APIs to better protect their customers (and their business).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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’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.

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 underwent a multi-year transformation to become a “digital companion” for its customers and turned to NGINX Plus to help meet its particular needs.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.

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.

[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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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'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.”

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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 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.

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.

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.

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’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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

“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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

“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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

[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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

[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.

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.

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.

[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 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.

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.

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 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%.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

François Locoh-Donou shares a copy of the email sent to global staff announcing F5’s agreement to acquire Shape Security. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

“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.

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 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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.