Why take a platform approach?

Greg MaudsleySenior Director, Product Marketing | F5

In the modern enterprise, the "application" has transcended its role as a mere tool to become the business itself. From high-frequency trading platforms to global supply chain engines, apps provide mission-critical services that serve as the primary touchpoints for both revenue and reputation. Yet, as these applications are increasingly distributed across multicloud architectures, the infrastructure supporting them has become dangerously fragmented.

For years, organizations have operated under a legacy mindset where application delivery (or ensuring speed and availability) and application security (or protecting against threats) were managed as two distinct silos. This fragmentation is no longer just an operational headache; it is a strategic risk that creates a negative impact on the digital experience.

The most immediate consequence of this siloed approach is the "latency tax" imposed on every user request. In a traditional environment, data must travel through a "daisy chain" of disconnected point products, where a packet might hit a standalone load balancer, move to a separate firewall, and then pass through a third-party bot detection service.

Each place where the data travels introduces latency and a potential point of failure. By transitioning to a converged platform, organizations can collapse these functions into a single logical data plane. This allows the system to inspect traffic once and apply both delivery and security logic simultaneously, ensuring that performance is never sacrificed for the sake of safety.

Obtaining a single source of truth

Beyond raw speed, convergence solves the critical issue of data blindness. When delivery and security are managed separately, telemetry is trapped in silos. A security team might see a spike in malicious traffic while the infrastructure team identifies a performance bottleneck, but neither can see how the two are linked.

A unified platform provides a single source of truth, enabling "app-aware" security that can distinguish between a sudden burst of legitimate users and a sophisticated distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. This shared visibility allows for automated, precise scaling and mitigation, dramatically reducing the mean time to resolution.

Simplifying an increasingly complex application landscape

This shift also brings radical operational simplicity to a landscape often defined by complexity. Managing dozens of disparate certificates, policies, and API versions across various vendors is a factor contributing to human error—the leading cause of modern security breaches.

A converged architecture allows teams to write a security policy once and deploy it consistently across any environment, whether on-premises, in the cloud, or at the edge. By integrating a single API for both delivery and security into CI/CD pipelines, DevOps teams can finally achieve the promise of "security as code," accelerating time-to-market without compromising the integrity of the application.

Treating application speed and security as two sides of the same coin

The path forward for the resilient enterprise lies in an architecture that treats delivery and security as two sides of the same coin. The F5 Application Delivery and Security Platform (ADSP) is designed specifically to bridge this historical gap.

By unifying industry-leading traffic management with advanced security capabilities, F5 ADSP ensures that your most mission-critical applications are not only fast and available but inherently protected against an ever-evolving threat landscape.

To learn more about the benefits of a platform approach, read our eBook.

Also, please sign up for our webinar, “From sprawl to strategy: how a platform approach secures and simplifies IT.”

About the Author

Greg MaudsleySenior Director, Product Marketing | F5

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