At AppWorld Singapore, F5 announced new capabilities and solutions to help organizations reduce the complexity of operating and securing the explosion of applications and APIs that are becoming the backbone of modern digital experiences. AppWorld Singapore was held in Singapore on March 21, 2024, marking the first AppWorld F5 global event in Asia. The event was attended by more than 500 customers and partners from across the Asia Pacific region, including Korea.
F5 Distributed Cloud Services added API code testing and telemetry analysis capabilities to its offerings. This addition recognizes the growing number of AI-enabled applications and APIs connecting them, positioning F5 Distributed Cloud Services as the most comprehensive and AI-ready API solution in the industry. F5 will also integrate AI with intelligent capabilities across its entire portfolio of solutions. This integration will enable F5 customers to securely manage their multi-cloud application environments with greater ease while remaining protected against sophisticated AI-driven threats.
"Organizations are already contending with a wide variety of complex and rapidly changing threats. The additional pressure to securely deliver AI services is making things even more challenging and is beyond the reach of most security and IT teams," said François Locoh-Donou, President, and CEO of F5. "Delivering solutions that significantly reduce this complexity is a top priority for F5, enabling our customers to focus on the business that matters most to them. By introducing new solutions and capabilities, F5 will ensure that its customers are prepared for the AI era, simplifying the management and security of all their apps and APIs anytime, anywhere," he emphasized.
As AI drives the growth in the volume of apps and APIs, it also creates significant security risks that organizations must address. New AI-driven digital experiences are highly distributed, with various types of data sources, models, and services located across on-premises, cloud, and edge environments, interconnected by an expanding network of APIs. Securing these API connections and the data exchanged through them is a key security challenge that organizations face as they adopt more AI-driven services.
To address these challenges, F5 Distributed Cloud Services offers the industry's most comprehensive AI-ready API security solution. Currently, organizations utilize a variety of tool sets, features, and solutions to secure their APIs both at build time and during runtime. F5's recent acquisition of API security innovator Wib adds capabilities and solutions that enable vulnerability detection and observability during application development, enabling organizations to identify risks and enforce compliance before APIs go live. As the importance and complexity of API security grow, F5 delivers API discovery, testing, posture management, runtime protection, and more through a single platform, fundamentally eliminating the need for F5 customers to purchase and operate disparate API security solutions.
Due to F5 technology being used in the data path of approximately 50% of the world's applications, F5 is uniquely positioned and specialized to deliver AI-powered solutions that leverage unparalleled levels of data. The new F5 AI Data Fabric serves as the foundation for building innovative solutions that assist customers in making smarter decisions and taking action faster. Telemetry from distributed cloud services, BIG-IP, NGINX, and more provides unparalleled insights, enabling real-time reporting, automated actions, enhanced AP agent operations, and more.
Later this year, F5 will introduce an AI assistant. The AI assistant aims to revolutionize how customers interact with and manage F5 solutions through a natural language interface. Powered by the F5 AI Data Fabric, the AI assistant will serve as an intelligent partner, empowering IT and security teams to define their scope easily. It will create data visualizations, identify anomalous activity, queries, and more, generate regulatory configurations, and apply appropriate remediation steps. Additionally, it will act as an embedded customer support manager, allowing customers to ask questions and receive recommendations based on model training against the overall product knowledge base.
