F5 redefines application delivery controllers for the AI era

F5 has outlined its vision on how application delivery controllers (ADCs) must transform to meet the demands of modern and AI-powered applications.

“The rise of AI and modern applications demands a fundamental rethinking of application security and delivery. Traditional approaches fall short in managing today’s complex, distributed systems. Organisations need solutions that provide consistency, flexibility, and complete visibility across their IT landscape. F5 has transformed our technology portfolio to meet these challenges head-on, enabling our customers to confidently secure and deliver advanced digital experiences,” said Kunal Anand, Chief Innovation Officer, F5.

According to F5’s State of Application Strategy Report, three quarters of enterprises say they are already deploying AI apps. Despite the rush to implement these new modern digital experiences, enterprises are ill-equipped to secure and deliver AI applications that handle massive amounts of data, require complex traffic patterns, and introduce sophisticated security threats. 

The company explained that AI applications make larger and more frequent requests of enterprise data stores, and AI models often housed in AI factories. This requires advanced high-performance load balancing capable of handling massive amounts of data and complex traffic patterns without creating latency. 

Security has to evolve as well with attackers working to infiltrate and hijack both the AI models and the data used to train them. New cybersecurity threats such as model theft, training data poisoning, and prompt injections have emerged with the growth of generative AI.

According to F5, the underlying tech stack that is still powered by traditional ADCs must change accordingly. A new type of ADC must accommodate today’s hybrid and multicloud infrastructures, converging what are currently point solutions to address critical needs such as high-performance load balancing, full web app and API security, multicloud networking, and AI gateway capabilities.

F5 has introduced a new approach to secure and deliver modern apps with a series of architectures designed for today’s AI use cases. These new resources will help enterprises accelerate AI planning and deployment while tackling the increasing complexity in delivering modern applications. A new, more advanced approach to ADCs, ADC 3.0, converges high-performance load balancing with more powerful web application and API cybersecurity capabilities to deliver modern digital experiences. 

Source: F5 website. A new breed of application delivery controllers are required to manage applications today. Diagrams illustrating the evolution of application delivery controllers from ADC 1.0 to ADC 2.0 and ADC 3.0.
Source: F5 website. A new breed of application delivery controllers are required to manage applications today.

“Apps have become more dynamic and more distributed. This trend is expected to continue as AI becomes more ubiquitous throughout the enterprise. As the nature of applications has changed, the ADC naturally needs to evolve as well. The need for robust load balancing and application delivery techniques combined with robust security features that protect data at the application and API level is critical as we enter the era of AI. 

"F5 has been a proven leader in this space, and the company’s vision appears to meet the stringent delivery and security requirements that will be ever present in the AI era,” said Zeus Kerravala, founder and Principal Analyst, ZK Research.

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