As generative AI takes hold, virtually every senior IT leader is being asked to determine where AI can fit into their company’s strategic plans.
A recent F5 report shows that 75% of organizations are making AI a core business focus, compared to just 17% four years ago. In addition, AI investments are increasing with 18% of IT budgets to be spent on AI initiatives during 2024.
As companies determine how they can leverage AI to enhance efficiency and improve decision-making, they’re challenged with securing and delivering workloads across diverse environments.
Today, 9 of 10 organizations store their data in a hybrid, multicloud environment, and AI is positioned to increase this complexity as businesses leverage that data for AI model training and inferencing. Moreover, thanks to AI workloads, the data landscape, traffic flows, and security threats are all becoming more difficult to manage.
- The data landscape is unique. AI relies on vast amounts of data, and many organizations grapple with effectively connecting workloads and data for optimal model training and inference.
- The traffic is different. Modern AI workloads significantly increase network traffic straining resources and preventing the retrieval, processing, or delivery of meaningful results.
- The threats are evolving. As cyberattacks become more sophisticated and widespread, safeguarding AI models and the APIs they depend on is more critical than ever.
F5 is working with Microsoft to empower enterprises to overcome common AI challenges in a hybrid and multicloud world. Together, we’re working to help customers simplify their AI deployments, improve training and inference, and safeguard AI models and APIs.
Simplify AI deployments
F5 application delivery and acceleration solutions empower businesses to optimize workload performance and accelerate their journey to the cloud. Our strong partnership with Microsoft enhances these capabilities, enabling seamless integration with key Azure services such as Microsoft Sentinel, Microsoft Entra ID, Azure Virtual WAN, and Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS).
Now, with our latest innovation—F5 NGINX as a Service (NGINXaaS) for Azure—we’re simplifying AI workload management. This solution helps organizations break down data silos, connect disparate data sources, and effortlessly provision, manage, and integrate ISV solutions.
NGINXaaS works with Azure management tools and services to create, update, and delete deployments.
Improve training and inference
Whether leveraging proprietary models or third-party solutions, successful AI implementations rely on effective model training and inference. F5 and Microsoft are partnering to help organizations scale their data stores for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) while enhancing both application and network performance.
With F5’s unified application delivery and security platform plus Microsoft Azure, businesses can efficiently manage traffic to collect, assemble, and distribute diverse data to models in real time. This capability ensures reliable and secure inference and allows organizations to seamlessly connect and optimize models in data centers, in the cloud, or at the edge—empowering AI to learn and execute from anywhere.
F5 secures AI apps while managing downstream traffic to enterprise data stores and AI factories.
Safeguard AI and APIs
F5 and Microsoft prevent malicious attacks on AI and machine learning (ML) models inside Azure, outside Azure, and across the entire attack surface. By combining F5 advanced protections with Azure’s native controls, IT and security teams can strengthen their security posture while enforcing consistent, uniform defenses against zero-day, OWASP Top 10, and automated cyber threats. This includes critical API layers, which remain the glue for the entire AI ecosystem, binding models, data, applications, and services together.
With these robust safeguards in place, businesses can secure AI apps and their underlying infrastructure, prevent oversharing, and better manage downstream traffic to AI factories—where model development, deployment, and interactions take place.
Ready to learn more? Join us at the 2024 Microsoft Ignite conference, happening November 18–22 at McCormick Place in Chicago, where we’ll showcase how F5 and Microsoft are partnering to transform the future of AI.
Visit booth #205 to talk with our experts, discuss real-life use cases, and experience a hands-on demo of F5 solutions. Also, tune into my online presentation and learn how F5 solutions on Azure enhance the security and performance of AI applications.
About the Author
Related Blog Posts
F5 accelerates and secures AI inference at scale with NVIDIA Cloud Partner reference architecture
F5’s inclusion within the NVIDIA Cloud Partner (NCP) reference architecture enables secure, high-performance AI infrastructure that scales efficiently to support advanced AI workloads.
F5 Silverline Mitigates Record-Breaking DDoS Attacks
Malicious attacks are increasing in scale and complexity, threatening to overwhelm and breach the internal resources of businesses globally. Often, these attacks combine high-volume traffic with stealthy, low-and-slow, application-targeted attack techniques, powered by either automated botnets or human-driven tools.
F5 Silverline: Our Data Centers are your Data Centers
Customers count on F5 Silverline Managed Security Services to secure their digital assets, and in order for us to deliver a highly dependable service at global scale we host our infrastructure in the most reliable and well-connected locations in the world. And when F5 needs reliable and well-connected locations, we turn to Equinix, a leading provider of digital infrastructure.
Volterra and the Power of the Distributed Cloud (Video)
How can organizations fully harness the power of multi-cloud and edge computing? VPs Mark Weiner and James Feger join the DevCentral team for a video discussion on how F5 and Volterra can help.
Phishing Attacks Soar 220% During COVID-19 Peak as Cybercriminal Opportunism Intensifies
David Warburton, author of the F5 Labs 2020 Phishing and Fraud Report, describes how fraudsters are adapting to the pandemic and maps out the trends ahead in this video, with summary comments.
The Internet of (Increasingly Scary) Things
There is a lot of FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) that gets attached to any emerging technology trend, particularly when it involves vast legions of consumers eager to participate. And while it’s easy enough to shrug off the paranoia that bots...