F5, the technology company, has announced new security capabilities that provide its customers with a comprehensive solution to manage apps and APIs across on-premises, cloud, and edge locations.
The latest updates include machine learning enhancements that offer advanced API endpoint discovery, telemetry, anomaly detection, and behavioural analysis to F5’s cloud security portfolio. With more transactions and customer engagements occurring through digital channels, organisations require secure solutions to maintain trust and protect their end-users.
APIs are considered the building blocks of modern web and mobile experiences; therefore, safeguarding these assets is essential to secure digital services. F5’s new capabilities allow customers to strengthen their security posture by offering a continuously improving analysis engine and unified policy enforcement, resulting in secure app-to-app communication. These capabilities also enable customers to reduce the time security teams spend correcting false positives, thus accelerating time-to-deployment for new services.
According to F5’s 2023 State of Application Strategy (SOAS) Report, modern organisations prefer hybrid solutions, with 85% of respondents deploying apps and APIs in distributed environments spanning multiple public clouds, as well as on-premises and edge locations. However, security teams often struggle to provide consistent protection and visibility for a rapidly expanding attack surface area. Most contemporary web application and API protection solutions rely on point products or offerings based on CDN vendor technologies that cannot scale beyond cloud-based apps and lack the ability to be deployed on premises, in public clouds, or in other edge locations. F5 offers a full suite of capabilities to provide robust protection for apps and APIs across on-premises, cloud, and edge locations.
F5’s enhanced machine learning capabilities deliver advanced API endpoint discovery, telemetry, anomaly detection, and behavioural analysis. F5’s Distributed Cloud API Security uses machine learning to offer automatic API discovery, threat detection, and schema enforcement. The advanced analysis engine helps detect anomalies and refine API schemas to improve their overall security posture. Additionally, F5 supports token identification to detect anomalous behavior accessing JWT tokens and prevent unauthorized usage. F5 is also introducing AI-driven web application firewall (WAF) capabilities that include unique malicious user detection and mitigation capabilities that create a per-user threat score based on behavioural analysis that determines intent.
Given the challenges in deploying consistent security across increasingly distributed infrastructures and finding available personnel with the required security skillsets, F5 is expanding its managed service offerings. Distributed Cloud WAAP Managed Services enable customers to access the experience and expertise of the F5 SOC to manage WAF, bot defense, and DDoS protection. F5 service provider partners can build and tailor their managed service offerings based on F5’s leading security capabilities using the Distributed Cloud Managed Service Portal.
