F5 Networks: From Load Balancing to Ensuring Security and Availability

Edgar Dias, Regional Vice President, Channels and Partnerships, F5 Networks Asia Pacific elucidates on the USPs of F5 solutions and their benefits for enterprise customers in a post COVID19 world.

How would you analyze the evolution of F5 Networks as a company both in organic and inorganic terms?

F5 Network traditionally is an old class company and a lot of people associate F5 with being the dominant load balancing company in the world. That is how they have mostly associated with F5. But in the technology world there is the concept of a full proxy and that is one of our unique advantages because of the fact that we at F5 have a full proxy. We have a very vivid understanding of the capability and are being able to inspect traffic at a very deep granular level, and be able to take a lot of actions on the traffic. So, earlier the focus was more around load balancing but if you look at it now, a lot of the functionality has expanded to areas of security and experimentation in areas of traffic optimization and service providers.

There are applications today that have a lot of issues in communication and development happens in a very modular fashion. And therefore, in this environment you need something that is no lightweight, but is more API ready. So we acquired this company called Nginix which is the product of choice for customers who are starting to embrace Kubernetics, micro services and containers.

We just recently also acquired a company called Shape Security predominantly in the area of bot detection and fraud prevention. Today if you look at some of the attacks that are happening are starting to become sophisticated. So you have what are called bot farms or click farms, and people who are trying to defraud companies and businesses of millions of dollars, have coupons or rewards. So anything that has got a commercial value can get defrauded and with companies becoming digital everything is coming online. One needs to differentiate between genuine consumers from the bots.

What are therefore the solutions and services available in F5 Network’s portfolio specifically to the Indian market?

Today, F5 has got technologies that spans across application load balancing, application delivery, Business Continuity, access management, as well as application security. One of the other trends that we realized was this massive app modernization that was happening there. The old legacy apps that were the three tier architecture apps are now moving towards what is called as micro services or container based architectures. And these are more API based and so the mission was to get in these applications that are based on the agile approach.

While Nginix offers Kubernetics, micro services and containers, Shape Security offers a unique capability of sophisticated pattern detection to identify malicious traffic and blocking it. It also has got an AI engine that helps you to kind of go back and build this entire logic.

Another offering is in the area of managed services. You can buy F5  as a technology, but you might not have the capability or the people in your company to go and deploy it and manage it. You want to basically consume it as a service so today F5 has got a very comprehensive suite of our own enterprise products which are now consumable in the form of a managed service. So for example from a security standpoint, if you want to protect your applications using a web application firewall or DDoS or Secondary DNS we have got our own cloud services architecture.

How does F5 Networks benefit the customers especially in the post COVID19 scenario?

What is happening right now in India is very interesting. There were three things happening pre COVID-19 and the same thing holds true even post COVID-19. One is this rapid adoption of the cloud. The reality of life is a lot of customers in India are starting to now embrace the cloud especially post COVID19. Now it is no more a question of ‘if’ but only a question of when. And today, it is happening in companies that are cloud native while some companies are migrating or restructuring applications to the cloud.

Now for these customers that are moving to the cloud, they are taking applications that were sitting earlier in the premises. So they need to become secure, available, and you need to be able to do what we call as multi cloud capability. The last one means a customer will not only choose one cloud and if you have got these multi cloud deployments, it is not easy to put these skills together. Having the individual functionality is also a challenge because most of the cloud vendors have their own technology for load balancing or SSL termination, or application security.

A customer today has got some applications in the data centre, some applications in AWS, some in Azure and some in Google. It is hard for this customer to have a consistent policy across all these four. But he wants to have a consistent policy from a security standpoint and from an availability standpoint. It is very hard because each of these vendors have got different strengths and different capabilities. So one of the things the customers like about F5 is the fact that whatever functionality that we have in our hardware, we also have in software. It is the same functionality at the same scale, in terms of performance.

In that light, how would you analyse the unique differentiators of F5 Networks over competitors?

This is indeed a unique USP of F5 Networks. No wonder 50 to 55% of the world uses F5. It is so easy for a customer today if he has got F5 in the data centre, he can just go buy software and put it in the cloud, and have a consistent approach for security and availability. Another advantage is visibility. The CIO needs to see the kind of traffic that is going to his applications and to check whether these applications are getting good traffic or bad traffic. On basis of that he needs to decide to scale up this application or scale it down. The CIO needs the visibility into what is happening in real time and with F5 irrespective of the technology and where the application resides can gain visibility using our analytics and visibility engine. This is very important for customers.

Next there are the advantages around managed services. Suppose a customer wants the same enterprise grade feature richness and capability but does not have the manpower to do it himself. The question is can he get it as a service? The answer is F5’s other brand called Silverline that was recently launched in India. What happens with it is today people want to focus on their business but they want this capability and therefore just go and buy it as a subscription. Earlier customers were working on other POPs globally and so we had POPs in Hong Kong, in Singapore, in Europe and in Americas. But now one of the requirements people have is from a latency perspective and from a variable standpoint to run it in India. So we heard our customer demand and created a POP in India.

What are some of the use cases of managed services?

Today the use case is predominantly around application security. In F5 Silverline, we can do volumetric DDoS. In fact we can do a lot of such functionality today which is available as a managed service. Now, typically when organizations are increasingly going into work from home mode, it is kind of important to analyze the traffic because now the network is heterogeneous and you are not sure about the quality of the traffic. So how would you find a solution? The answer lies here in F5 Silverline.

So coming back to the earlier question, how does F5 benefit customers in the current WFH situation in the post COVID19 era?

Despite the fact that the world has been under so much of turmoil in recent months, our revenue has gone up by 8% in this quarter. And the only reason is because F5 technology is so important and relevant in a post COVID-19 situation. And I will tell you why. Today there are fundamentally three technologies that are important. The first is work from home and when you work from home, you want to do what is called as access management, which means you will have employees who are sitting at home and you want to give them access to applications or resources of the network. You therefore want to be able to identify them if they come from a home device which is a computer not issued by the company and want to do more levels of scrutiny. So today you would want to do very granular access management and F5 has got a product called APM that has the ability to very granular access policy management for people. And you combine that with the VPN capability the same product has got. It can do IPsec VPN and also SSL based VPN. Earlier a lot of our customers had VPN only for 4% of the employees and it was only those people who would go home and after office hours connect as you did not have to have one to ones. Now when COVID-19 came up basically we have to do capacity upgrades for one is to one. So that is one thing that happened.

The second thing that comes up is in the area of application security and availability. It is really hard for customers to even go to their offices because of the lockdown first and now pandemic safety concerns. This is going to accelerate this movement to the cloud, because now people are feel the new normal is going to have lockdowns maybe for the next year or two, till the vaccine comes up. So how to ensure that cloud movement without having the issues of on-premise data centres and failures and management and all of that? Can I can I go on to a cloud based subscription model? The beauty here is the fact that F5 has the capability to have the same technology available in the cloud in the software form factor. In the cloud, you can put hardware and Falcon, our technology can do multiple functions in the same software. That is why F5 finds such a dominant market share because finally you can do multiple functions in the same box or software, and it still would be able to perform very significantly. So, one of the trends that we are seeing is people starting to buy more and more software, because not only the applications are going to the cloud but those applications need to be secureand available and performing well.

The third use case that may seem coming up even more is now when you have people working from home, your customers will come and access your data center. Now, the question is if this is a similar traffic like an on-prem data center. The biggest challenge is all this traffic data that is coming in is all encrypted. Traditional security appliances like firewalls or IPS, when they see a critical traffic have two options. They could decrypt it, but then the performance suffers by 90%, or what they end up doing they say it is Port 443 bypassing. Now, that is a big issue today. You could have a person coming in impersonating as an employee. If you go and inspect the traffic, you could see things like malware and phishing and all that kind of stuff. So, it is important to do what is called as SSL interception and SSL visibility. We have the world’s leading technology called as SSL orchestrator, and which is now one of the hottest products in the world the helps you to decrypt traffic and security appliances. So effectively, if you have malicious users and even if the traffic is encrypted they no longer can bypass security appliances. F5 today is absolutely at the heart of everything in a post COVID-19 world because all the lessons I told you right now is not something that is optional, but something that is mandatory.

What is F5’s GTM model in India and how has it succeeded generally in the Indian market?

We would have close to 100 plus partners in India. These would include regional sales, as well as the regional partners to the CSPs and the MSPs. The quarter ending March was the highest quarter ever in the history of F5 India. And even this AMJ quarter is very good with serious discussions happening with customers who are concerned about availability and security. One of the things that we have done very well is that we have given the customer the choice of how he wants to consume F5. You can buy F5 as a service, you can buy F5 as hardware or you can buy F5 as the software, or even within the software.

Globally in this last quarter, we grew on software 91% Q-o-Q over the previous year. And, and the reason of our software growth is because of the fact that we have changed the entire consumption model. You could buy F5 in the typical software license mode you can buy it as a subscription or you can even contract with F5. And this kind of conjunction model sort of manages the back end. Normally in the Indian context when you buy perpetual software, you have to buy it for capacity. However when you are buying F5 hardware or software you can buy for today.

Because if you buy for today and if your traffic goes up dramatically like what is happening post COVID-19, what you are going to have is a box that is going to hit the high CPU and fail. And when it fails, you will have an outage. So you typically end up sizing a box for three years out of four years on it because you want to capitalize that investment for at least three years. So, in that approach, you start to buy more than what you need for today, because you have to look for the future. If you look at the subscription model, it is what you buy today is what you need for today. This model makes so much sense right now because customers do not want to buy something for the next three years and they want to buy something for today, so as to tide over today. These consumption models really help because it helps you align to the model that you want to build, which is be as conservative as you need to, without compromising on availability and security.

What are the most serious security vulnerabilities today and how can F5 Networks mitigate these vulnerabilities?

There are two types of bots mainly good bots and bad bots. Good bots are like those doing RPA or the chat bots but the bad bots are the ones that are sitting across the Internet. These are the guys who are doing things like scraping, spoofing and all these kinds of automated attacks which say you can pay $150 and have this compute capability. These are the bad bots. So if you look at it what banks or what any Government wants to do is protect yourself against bad bots.

Now if you look at this bots are more application level attacks. And that is why vendors like F5 are so important. Bots today are the ones who are going back and doing a lot of malicious stuff. If you look at the Dark Web today, a lot of people’s credentials are being stolen and sold for 50 cents a credential. The reason why it is being done is because as human beings, today, we have the memory to only be able to remember not more than 10 passwords. You have to make a password so complex and you got to make it a mix of alphanumeric, alphabet character, Caps Lock and others. So how will you remember more than even five passwords and so you will start to reuse your password. Any one of these sites that has your password is called compromised.

Then brute force attackers can just go and start to gain recognition to 10 more sites based on the password and the username and the department, and so on. All of this is real. This is called credential stuffing attacks and vendors like F5 can detect that the same machine with the same MAC or the same browser based on device profiling is trying to do a brute force and then kind of deny that access to that for the application. So there are lots of sophisticated things we do to protect banks, governments and healthcare providers.

Today F5 is at the heart of all of these kinds of attacks that are right now happening. The F5 Labs is doing serious research in some of these. We report on the various attacks that we are seeing on the Internet and gather a lot of intelligence. So F5 is one of the best selling companies that has got a lot of technology that is being used by customers to go and protect and ensure availability of their applications.