The strategy remains the same as always: optimizing and securing business applications, especially those in the enterprise world. But, compared to the recent past, there had to be many technological adaptations, given the advance of phenomena such as the IoT and the cloud. The vendor F5, born way back in 1996 with a focus on application load balancing, today it is increasingly focused on digital transformation and on the migration of applications towards the cloudas well as their protection.
As he tells Marco Urciuoli, Country manager of the group in Italy since last October 3rd, “The world of cybersecurity is on the rise, great attention is paid to perimeter security, to the cloud, that is, aspects that are certainly right and important. The next step is to go to applications, therefore it is necessary to secure people and data, shifting the focus to application security”.
A challenge that F5 feels capable of playing, thanks to its 2.7 billion global turnover and an Italian branch that can count on a team of about 20 people. “F5 takes care of making applications performant and secure. So let’s talk about monolithic applications, but also about modern ones, developed with microservices. But also the APIs, which increasingly represent a gateway that must be secured. So today we have the ability to secure any type of application, wherever it resides”, highlights Urciuoli.
A structural change for the application world
A concept that has been reiterated by Paolo Arcagni, Director Solutions Engineer of F5: “The key message of F5 has not changed in these 25 years: it is always about making applications secure, fast and reliable. In the meantime, however, applications have changed, which were previously monolithic and physically resided in the data center. The complexity of management is now significantly increased compared to the past: i microservizi they give the possibility to manage applications in multiple clouds, which in 90% of cases has been adopted by large companies. Clearly increasing the attack surface”.
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Concrete tools, best practices and strategies to secure the corporate cloud
The growing diffusion of the F5 also drives the business’IoT, thanks to solutions that are able to enable edge computing and local data collection and processing.
In this sense, some acquisitions have allowed F5 to maintain a leadership position on the market: in 2018 there was that of Nginx, a reality in the open source world that has allowed F5 to develop modern applications in a multicloud perspective. In 2021 there was then the acquisition of the startup Volterraspecialized in multicloud management andedge computing.
Thanks to these moves, F5 can continue to follow its customers, mostly enterprise-class, with a widespread presence in all vertical markets (including energy, as demonstrated by the Snam case).
The role of the channel
However, the indirect channel, with about fifteen main partners in Italy, plays a fundamental role in the F5 strategy, so much so that it conveys practically all of the turnover: “Our goal is to follow the digital transformation path of our customers. In this sense, the channel has an extremely important role. In fact, F5 is channel-based, working with us across the market. We are aware that in recent years F5 has made an extremely important digital transformation, which has required a considerable internal effort and that we are also asking our partners. We are therefore investing in partner enablement, but we are also looking at recruiting new partners who are ready to face new digital challenges. I am referring to native cloud realities, perhaps less skilled in the legacy part, which are ready to embrace a subscription model different from the product one”.
For the future, F5 pays particular attention to service providers, who are grappling with the implementation of networks 5 G: in this perspective the new Big-IP Next it is designed to help service providers develop their own standalone 5G networks, as well as automate operations and adopt modern architectures.