Hall 6, Stand H6-C10: F5 Networks’ GITEX Technology Week 2019 participation will highlight how multi-cloud application services and DevOps methodologies can enable digital transformation and growth across the Middle East. The company will also share insight on its latest solution offerings and news, including the recent acquisition of NGINX.

“The true value of the modern enterprise resides in its applications and data. We call this Application Capital. Given the Middle East’s growing adoption of cloud computing, we believe that application capital is a key driver for differentiation, innovation and value creation in the region,” said Tabrez Surve, Regional Director – Gulf Levant & Turkey, F5 Networks.

“True digital transformation can only occur if organisations fully understand and invest in the concept of Application Capital, particularly in the context of multi-cloud application services and associated infrastructures. For example, it is now possible to attach individual services to applications based on specific needs. It is also possible to achieve consistent quality and security across entire application portfolios. This is critical at a time when much of the user experience is digital, delivered via the cloud, and increasingly built by developer teams outside of the IT organization.”

F5’s key GITEX 2019 focus areas include:

• NGINX: Better Together

GITEX 2019 will be the first major, post-acquisition event in the Middle East attended by both F5 and NGINX. F5 is currently the industry leader in application services, as well as application infrastructure for network and security teams. NGINX is the industry leader in application infrastructure for developer and DevOps teams, built on its open source core. NGINX is currently the most used web server in the world, according to Netcraft’s Web Server Survey.

F5 and NGINX is a powerful combination that will serve NetOps and DevOps customers with enterprise-grade services for both traditional and modern applications – wherever they are built or deployed. Together, F5 and NGINX aim to bridge the divide from applications to infrastructure—and from developers to operations teams—for the first time. Key to the acquisition’s success is F5’s ongoing commitment to open source, which is a core part of its overall multi-cloud strategy and an influential driver for the company’s next phase of innovation.

• Multi-cloud application services

F5’s 2019 State of Application Services report found that almost nine out of ten surveyed global organisations have multi-cloud architectures in place, largely driven by application-first methodologies. The biggest cited challenge is to enforce consistent security and ensure reliable performance when applications are distributed across multiple cloud platforms.

GITEX 2019 will see F5 showcase its recent cloud-native application services portfolio expansion. Delivering optimized, easy-to-consume services for application developers and DevOps teams, F5® Cloud Services aims to provide high-availability, self-service, and fully managed SaaS solutions that are easily provisioned and configured within minutes. As enterprise-grade offerings, F5 Cloud Services are designed to support modern deployment scenarios such as cloud-native applications, microservices, and container-based environments. Consumed as a utility through a pay-as-you-go model in the AWS Marketplace, F5 Cloud Services offer predictable pricing, flexibility, and the ability to auto-scale to meet application workload demands.

Crucially, offering F5 capabilities through a SaaS delivery model provides an extensible framework to deliver additional services as needed over time, and throughout an application’s development and production lifecycle. By introducing F5 Cloud Services to the market in a continuous fashion, F5 is prioritizing a repeatable framework that delivers new SaaS offerings as quickly and seamlessly as possible.

• Security to the fore

Key security solutions in the GITEX 2019 spotlight include F5 Advanced WAF™ , which protects web applications and APIs from attacks like injections, web attacks, and application layer denial of service (DoS). Advanced capabilities include proactive bot defense and protection against credential attacks, including credential stuffing and app-level credential encryption. Meanwhile, integration with vulnerability assessment solutions provides accurate vulnerability scanning and detection for fast vulnerability mitigation. Meanwhile, behavioural analytics leverage machine learning to deploy dynamic signatures and enable auto-thresholding. Hybrid cloud deployments are addressed through on-premises physical or virtual hardware, F5 Silverline cloud services, or cloud marketplaces (BIG-IP ASM, Silverline WAF). Organisations lacking security resources use F5 Advanced WAF cloud solutions, like Silverline WAF, for expertly managed policy creation and L7 attack mitigation. The F5 customer portal provides attack logging, reporting, and analytic insights of SOC-designed policies for easy violation knowledge transfer. In addition, the Anti-Bot Mobile SDK extends F5 Advanced WAF’s comprehensive bot protection to mobile apps through an intuitive web-based portal, without custom coding.

F5® SSL Orchestrator (SSLO) is another solution set to feature prominently. Today’s organisations must protect critical assets from threats originating both inside and outside corporate environments. Although most traffic is encrypted, many existing security controls are unable to perform decryption at the scale required to enable inspection, leaving critical assets vulnerable. F5 SSLO is a purpose-built solution delivering policy-based orchestration and SSL/TLS decryption and encryption for inbound and outbound traffic. It enables visibility across the full security stack for any network topology, device, or application. Crucially, the high-performance decryption and encryption of inbound and outbound SSL/TLS traffic enables security devices to inspect traffic and expose threats while preserving end-to-end encryption, maximizing their security services investment for malware, DLP, and ransomware. It also prevents inbound and outbound threats, including exploitation, call-back, and data exfiltration. In addition, dynamic service chaining and policy-based traffic steering allow organizations to intelligently manage encrypted traffic flows across the entire security chain with optimal availability.

“The understanding and expectation of what is achievable with cloud-driven, application-centric innovation is changing fast in the region, added Surve. “We will work with our customers and partners to realise the benefits of their Application Capital as businesses in the Middle East increasingly look to the cloud and start embracing ambitious digital transformation projects.”

F5 Networks is located in Hall 6-C10