Business Chief US+CAN Magazine April 2021 | Page 285

F5

GENG LIN EVP AND CTO , F5

Yet that was yesterday ' s state-of-theart for the security battleground , according to Lin . “ Now the attackers are on a different level ,” he says . “ Even assuming all the building blocks fit nicely together without any cracks , attackers can still penetrate the systems . How ? By means of massive automation and computing power to gain the necessary credentials and assume a legitimate identity to mimic a real user . Not only do you need to detect vulnerabilities in the system , but you need to use telemetry information , analytics , and AI techniques to analyze attacker behaviors to distinguish bots from real , legitimate users .”

That need led to the acquisition of Shape by F5 in January 2020 . Shape technology uses data analytics and machine learning to defend against automated bot attacks and fraudulent transactions . Shape technologies are used by three of the top four banks in the U . S . Today , F5 is integrating Shape technologies with the rest of F5 ’ s security offerings to prevent application-layer attacks on its customers , saving them billions of dollars and consolidating its position as a global leader in multi-cloud application security services .

COVID has accelerated the trend towards distributed digital businesses The effectiveness of F5 ' s application delivery and security technologies to scale and protect application workloads depends heavily on location . “ Meeting the workloads where they are is a key factor to effectively and efficiently scaling and protecting the target workloads ,” Lin says . “ There are three locations to place the workloads : at the data center , in the public cloud , and at the edge where the vast majority of users actually experience digital services .”

These first two locations traditionally have been the major deployment environments for application workloads – and are amply addressed by the core F5 technologies we have looked at already .

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