F5 delivers application security for the digital economy

BANGALORE, INDIA: In a digital-driven economy, applications deliver business services for a variety of access points and locations, opening up new risks and attack vectors—particularly as IT teams extend security and encryption capabilities across cloud, data center, and hybrid environments. F5 Networks has introduced security solutions that provide visibility, context, and control to overcome today’s evolving threats.

“Business leaders across different sectors are increasingly cognizant of how powerful applications and data assets can be in the journey to achieving agility demanded from the shift to the digital economy,” said Mohan Veloo, CTO, Asia Pacific, F5 Networks. “However, the breakneck pace of innovation and adoption of connected devices, and an insatiable appetite for new technology introduces new problems in the form of increased attack vectors to the broader economy. More than ever, organizations need to rethink traditional security architectures, to focus on areas of greatest vulnerabilities – their applications and users.”

The majority of web/application traffic is now encrypted, meaning any attempts to address application security via traditional methods alone are severely limited. As a result of widespread encryption—including its nefarious use as part of complex, targeted attacks—protecting customers and data now requires deep insight into application traffic and user behavior, sophisticated threat intelligence and response strategies, and practical access controls for applications and data. With these elements in mind, F5 is adding to the company’s comprehensive security solutions.

F5’s new Herculon product family lets security administrators quickly deploy solutions that overcome specific application security obstacles and threats. Herculon products are designed to provide heightened visibility and control around application behavior to solve difficult industry challenges in a straightforward, easy to deploy manner. The first two entries in the Herculon portfolio- Herculon SSL Orchestrator and Herculon DDoS Hybrid Defender are introduced.

While web application firewall (WAF) capabilities are fundamental to an enterprise organization’s digital presence, the industry is short on experts that possess the skills required to effectively initiate, provision, and scale app protection services. In addition, developers rolling out apps across cloud environments show increasing interest in an ‘application security as a service’ approach to attack mitigation. F5 is introducing a pre-configured, self-service offering that takes advantage of its cloud-based Silverline platform. Customers can easily select which applications WAF services are applied to, while F5 manages security policies behind the scenes to protect apps from a wide range of threats including OWASP attacks, parameter tampering, and bots.