Cloud computing enables IT as a Service and the flexibility to scale when needed. Combine cloud solutions to meet growing business needs and get more freedom and complexity. Companies are finding a mix of on—premises, public cloud, private cloud, or SaaS increasingly effective in delivering applications. While a combination of solutions does increase flexibility, it also increases the challenge of managing and securing applications across a growing number of environments—not to mention ensuring a reasonable customer experience and controlling costs. Even when deployment environments and solution stacks change, F5 Networks™ enables consistent services to ensure the availability and security of your applications. F5 Networks™ solutions are highly programmable and API accessible, and can be integrated with your existing automation and delivery systems, allowing you to support fast development and delivery without compromising security or reliability. Security risks are caused by password fatigue and, more importantly, delays in deleting expired accounts. The reduced productivity stems from delays in the creation of new user accounts for new employee or contractor access, as well as the management overhead demanded by numerous IAM systems.

F5 Networks Access Federation™ eliminates these SaaS drawbacks by eliminating the disconnect between internally maintained IAM systems and services external to the enterprise, delivering consistent security everywhere. The F5 Networks™ hybrid cloud offers organizations a way to manage services rather than boxes along with just—in—time provisioning rather than over provisioning, which can be costly. The ability to scale to a hybrid model requires two things; resources (physical or virtual) and a means to distribute load across them. In the world of application delivery, we call the resources “pools” and the means to distribute them an application delivery controller (ADC), previously known as a load balancer. The application delivery tier, where the load balancing service resides topologically in the data center, is responsible not only for distributing load across resources but for being able to mitigate failure without disrupting the application service. It is possible to add and remove resources (intentionally through provisioning processes or unintentionally through failure) from a given pool without disrupting the overall application service. This allows organizations to provision services as they happen rather than needing to over—provision equipment.

Availability Between Hybrid Data Centers

Solve for application availability as you move between cloud environments through core load balancing, DNS, and acceleration services. The path to successful application delivery has been a long and winding road for many companies. Back in the days of Y2K and the dot.com bust, applications were often delivered out of a physical data center. This usually consisted of a dedicated raised floor room at the corporate headquarters or leased collocation space from one of the web hosting vendors or both. Global organizations and e—commerce sites then started to distribute their applications and deploy them at multiple physical data centers to address geo location, redundancy, and disaster recovery (DR) challenges. Users expect apps to be fast, secure, and always available. Anything less is unacceptable. If you’re lucky, you’ll be one of few to hear about it. F5 Networks BIG—IP DNS™ improves the performance and availability of your global applications by sending users to the closest or best performing physical, virtual, or cloud environment. It also secures your DNS infrastructure from DDoS attacks and delivers a DNSSEC solution that protects against hijacking attacks.

Cloud Adoption And Services

When server virtualization emerged and organizations realized that they had the ability to divide resources for different applications, content delivery was no longer tethered 1:1 with a physical device. Content could live anywhere. With virtualization technology as the driving force, cloud computing formed and offered yet another avenue to deliver applications. As cloud adoption grew, along with the software, platforms, and infrastructures enabling it, organizations were able to quickly, easily, and cost effectively distribute their resources around the globe. Many organizations are realizing the benefits of adopting cloud based services rather than deploying and maintaining in—house solutions. Software as a Service (SaaS) providers are able to deliver niche expertise in a cost—effective, multi tenancy environment using a ready to consume, subscription based model. The benefits of the SaaS option, however, often come at the cost of up to the minute access control and reliable security policy enforcement. As with internally managed services, SaaS providers maintain their own identity and access management (IAM) systems for usernames, passwords, and access control enforcement—thus introducing IAM silos and the security management issues that result for organizations using multiple IAM systems void of synchronicity or any form of integration.

Cloud Deployment

Deploy however you want—the right products. The right delivery. The right products can help you deliver your applications more effectively — and the right deployment method can help you manage them in the way that best suits your business. Many F5 Networks™ products are available in hardware, software and virtual editions, and as a service, to suit your application infrastructure requirements and demands. F5 Networks™ integrates with the tools you use in your public, private, hybrid, or collocation cloud solution. Whether your infrastructure is built on open source software or tools from leading vendors, F5 Networks™ technology works within your system and with your process. Get the services you need, anywhere—you work in an application world. Make it fast, available, and secure. The F5 Networks BIG—IP™ platform is a comprehensive evolution of F5 Networks Application Delivery Controller™ (ADC) technology. Solutions built on this platform are load balancers. And they’re full proxies that give visibility into, and the power to control—inspect and encrypt or decrypt—all the traffic that passes through your network.

Features And Benefits

Underlying all F5 Networks BIG—IP™ hardware and software is F5 Networks’™ proprietary operating system, TMOS, which provides unified intelligence, flexibility, and programmability. With its application control plane architecture, TMOS gives you control over the acceleration, security, and availability services your applications require. TMOS establishes a virtual, unified pool of highly scalable, resilient, and reusable services that can dynamically adapt to the changing conditions in data centers and virtual and cloud infrastructures. Identity and access—manage identity and access policies from a single point of control, and federate them across environments. SaaS subscribers have an alternative to adopting and managing the siloed IAM solutions of their SaaS providers. Instead, organizations can implement IAM federation, establishing a trust relationship between the SaaS provider’s service and subscriber—owned and subscriber—managed IAM technology. For such a solution to be a reality, however, it must be achieved without adding architectural or management complexity and without the need to disruptively integrate technologies by building and maintaining a new network between those of the provider and the subscriber.