Sailing to the Digital "Deep Blue Ocean", F5 escorts modern application safety.

The research report of "uncertain Macro-environment-driven Enterprise Digital priority Strategy for Sustainable Investment" recently released by IDC points out that the digital transformation caused by the epidemic has changed from digital adaptation in 2020 to digital acceleration and digital resilience in 2021, and then to digital priority in 2022. The pandemic is the catalyst for enterprises to shift to digital priority strategy.

Chinese companies are more optimistic about IT spending in 2022, with 54 per cent of corporate IT spending higher than in 2021, with an average increase of 3.24 per cent.

Digital priority is becoming the goal of enterprises in the new era.

As an active place of digital innovation, all kinds of applications also rapidly infiltrate into people's production and life.

In 2019, the number of applications in the world reached 1 billion. By 2025, this number is expected to increase fivefold to nearly 5 billion. The world of applications has exploded.

Moving towards the digital "deep water area", digital security and application security have become the necessary conditions and severe challenges for digital innovation.

Embrace Digital Innovation and the New Challenge of Application Security.

The digital "deep blue ocean" not only means that the digital transformation is more in-depth, but also means the infinite opportunities under the current digital blue ocean.

As the only company at the intersection of explosive application growth and digital security explosive growth, F5 has transformed from a company that "supports any application anytime, anywhere in the data center" to a "software-centric" company. From a "mainly hardware-based" company to a "software-based" company, from a single-product family company to a multi-product family company.

Transform from a product company to a company that provides data services in the future.

This transformation trend is embodied in the F5 Multi-Cloud Application Services Technology Summit in 2022.

The theme of this year's summit is "Cloud without Borders, Building the Future". The strategic development direction in China is defined as "actively embracing open source, localization and digital innovation" to provide value and services to Chinese users.

Digital innovation and application explosion make the transformation from traditional application architecture to modern application architecture become an urgent task for many enterprises.

Chen Liang, Technical Director and General Manager of the Finance and Enterprise Division of F5 China, said that in order to meet the big explosion of applications, rapid iteration and launch, there are a lot of infrastructure based on modern application architecture.

Modern applications are mainly reflected in the development of containerization, micro-services and serverless architecture.

At the same time, in the face of decentralized access scenarios, distributed edge computing plays a more and more important role in improving computing efficiency and reducing latency.

These modern application architectures pose new challenges to application security.

In F5's view, the new challenges to application security today include:

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Chen Liang said that the above six challenges make application security a lifeline of the enterprise, while also prompting business leaders and developers to reach a consensus to put security first.

How does the end-to-end full data path become the "multiplier" of security protection.

F5 has focused on application delivery and security since it was founded in 1996. In recent years, F5 has made an in-depth layout around the field of application security, and has successively built unified security capabilities from NGINX modern applications, Shape robot fraud prevention, Volterra distributed edge cloud to Threat Stack big data situational awareness analysis platform through acquisitions. These security capabilities are integrated on the distributed cloud platform to provide customers with unified application security and application delivery in a unified multi-cloud environment.

These capabilities constitute the whole data path from code to application, and truly realize end-to-end secure application, secure delivery, application security.

These security capabilities are specifically reflected in:

The ability to access trusted applications.

Through trusted application access to carry out man-machine identification and fraud prevention identification, as well as credit access, to achieve truly credible, secure, authorized access to background applications.

The ability to enhance infrastructure security.

Application explosion brings a large number of user requests. By redefining the boundary, it no longer takes the entrance of the data center and the cloud as the boundary, but defines the boundary from the application perspective, whether it is north-south traffic or east-west traffic. Can provide border security protection capabilities.

The ability of traffic visualization and fine separation.

In order to link all the security technologies together and give full play to the role of each security product, through the fine separation of SSL traffic and flexible scheduling of visual traffic, all security gateways are deployed and arranged in the form of resource pool or security domain.

Web applications and API security capabilities.

WAAP service combines DDoS defense, Bots protection, API protection and WAF to help customers build four architectures: two-tier heterogeneous, high-performance application security architecture, DevOps agile development, and edge cloud security services, and put the security capabilities of F5 into the location where the application is deployed.

The idea of end-to-end trusted open source.

In the face of five types of open source risks: technology route risk, intellectual property risk, information security risk, technology capability risk and supply chain risk, the NGINX Enterprise Edition (NGINX OSSub) just released by F5 can well avoid the risks faced by users using open source products.

Security insight and AI intelligence capabilities.

All end-to-end access requests, security data, alarm information, etc., are transmitted by telemetry to F5 brain or the customer's self-built big data analysis platform to achieve better security insight. it can also be combined with big data, artificial intelligence and machine learning technology to give full play to the value of these data.

Open source, dividend and risk coexist.

With the continuous improvement of open source ecology, open source is becoming more and more obvious in accelerating the digitization process of the industry.

Countries around the world attach great importance to the importance of open source.

In China, open source is included in the outline of the 14th five-year Plan for the first time.

At the same time, the security problems brought by open source are also beginning to highlight, such as open source security loopholes, intellectual property risks, supply chain security risks and so on.

Open source governance has become an important issue.

As an active advocate and participant of open source, F5 embraced open source a long time ago, and F5 became even more successful through the acquisition of NGINX.