The ever-growing adoption of cloud computing, advanced infrastructures, and business applications with third-party integrations has dramatically expanded organizations’ attack surfaces. The increased number of application vulnerabilities are juicy targets that malicious actors are quick to exploit. High volumes of applications, assets, and vulnerabilities have made it difficult for organizations to keep up, and 69% of surveyed organizations experienced a cyberattack that originated with an unknown, unmanaged, or poorly managed internet-facing asset.1
The Need for Modern Application Security
To safeguard their business-critical applications, organizations need to modernize their security posture to effectively mitigate application vulnerabilities. Organizations trust the robust security of Google Cloud services to build, deploy, and operate adaptive applications. F5 solutions help to extend and augment Google Cloud security services, enabling organizations to develop and secure applications from threats.
Powerful Application Vulnerability Protection
Together, Google Cloud and F5 can significantly reduce the threat surface, thwarting an extensive amount of known application vulnerabilities. With out-of-the-box web application firewall (WAF) rules, Google Cloud Armor helps organizations protect against OWASP Top 10 threats and common attack tactics such as cross-site scripting (XSS) and SQL injections (SQLi). Google Cloud Armor can enforce layer 7 security policies that protect modern applications wherever they’re deployed.
In addition, organizations can further enhance protection capabilities with F5 BIG-IP Virtual Edition (VE), which applies behavioral analytics and machine learning, backed by threat intelligence, to safeguard applications from known vulnerabilities and OWASP Top 10 threats. By providing organizations with an advanced WAF, BIG-IP VE stops application-layer attacks that potentially evade static security measures based on reputation and manual signatures.
Complete Visibility and Control through a Single Pane of Glass
To adeptly prevent malicious actors from exploiting application vulnerabilities and potentially disrupting operations, SecOps teams require complete visibility into their application environments. However, few organizations have total visibility, as Gartner found that less than 1% of companies have visibility into more than 95% of their assets.2 With Google Cloud and F5, organizations can gain that comprehensive visibility to mitigate application vulnerabilities.
F5 BIG-IQ Centralized Management provides a unified point of visibility and control to analyze the health, performance, and availability of their F5 BIG-IP applications across any environment. By managing all BIG-IP applications with BIG-IQ, organizations can easily extend existing on-premises security configurations and capabilities to the cloud, helping to accelerate cloud adoption and security modernization initiatives. F5 delivers single-pane-of-glass management that helps organizations prevent and detect abuse of Google Cloud resources and identify application misconfigurations and vulnerabilities from a single source.
Empowering IT Ops and DevOps with Simplified, Secure Delivery
Together, Google Cloud and F5 empower IT Ops teams to centrally set and manage policies and monitor application performance and security while providing DevOps teams the flexibility to choose how they consume cloud and security services without adding complexity. Plus, the SaaS-delivered capabilities from F5 are available from the Google Cloud Marketplace, and their easy-to-use integrations and connectors simplify deployment for security and IT teams.
To learn more about how Google Cloud and F5 can modernize your security posture and better protect your applications, visit f5.com/gcp.
Sources:
1 Security Hygiene and Posture Management, ESG, Jon Oltsik, January 2022
2 Innovation Insight for Attack Surface Management, Gartner, March 2022
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