Senior Vice President of Sales for Asia Pacific, China & Japan, F5, Inc.
Future Identity of F5 (by Adam Judd)
The number of applications is blooming. With the explosive growth of applications, presents incredible opportunities and challenges. Digital experiences are comprised of legacy and modern apps, with multiple app sources spanning on-premises to the edge. Behind these digital experiences, there is a rigid system vulnerable to massive security breaches. It’s our mission at F5 to secure, deliver, and optimize every app and API, anywhere.
About Adam Judd
In a February 2023 presentation titled "Future Identity of F5," Adam Judd, Senior Vice President of Sales for Asia Pacific, China & Japan at F5, discussed the company's strategic direction. Judd described the current landscape as one of explosive application growth, presenting both opportunities and challenges. He noted that digital experiences now rely on a mix of legacy and modern applications spanning on-premises to edge environments, and characterized the underlying systems as rigid and vulnerable to security breaches. Judd stated that F5's mission is to secure, deliver, and optimize every application and API, regardless of location. He emphasized that the company's future identity involves providing protection across all applications customers use, not just a single one. Judd also outlined F5's approach of consolidating separate components into a unified architecture, and mentioned that recent acquisitions such as Shape and Volterra are being integrated into SaaS-based solutions for multi-cloud networking environments.
Transcript (31 segments)
A
Adam Judd0:27
Hello everyone, thank you for coming to the F5 event. I'm very pleased to see you all. Today, I want to explain where F5 is heading. Before I talk about the direction we're going, let's first look at our past.
We started the company quite a long time ago in 1996. At that time, we began as a load balancer that solved scalability problems for dot-com company websites.
After the dot-com bubble burst, we launched services to properly serve mission-critical applications in data centers. This led to the birth of our ADC product line.
Then what's next? In 2017, after our new CEO François Locoh-Donou came in, we began our third transformation into a new generation. This is what I want to talk about today: our future identity.
As everyone here can agree, applications have now become the most important part of our lives.
One very well-known example is Zoom, which I think everyone here probably used during the pandemic.
I'd like to let you know that before the pandemic, there were only about 10 million Zoom deployments worldwide. When the pandemic started, this number grew to nearly 400 million. Also, our F5 NGINX engine is deployed worldwide with over 100 million instances protecting the Zoom application.
Apps are growing at a very fast rate. Around 2019, there were about 1 billion apps, but in just a few years, that number has grown to nearly 50 billion. Another interesting fact is that Korea is the third-largest mobile app market in the world. Koreans spend an average of more than 5 hours a day using mobile phones and apps.
The pandemic can be seen as one reason for this. The pandemic accelerated digitalization. While there were good aspects, there were also bad aspects and challenges.
This digitalization provides great benefits in many ways. For example, it greatly improves user experience, allows your business to differentiate from competitors, and accelerates your business's digital growth.
In Korea, we can see that a large number of applications were targeted by malware or DDoS attacks last year.
As many of you may have heard, vulnerabilities like Log4j and the SolarWinds hacking incident caused significant damage. Most of these incidents were related to credential stuffing.
I personally meet many customers in Asia, and I tell them that just 3 or 4 years ago, app and app security were only concerns for CIOs and CISOs. Now, because app security is directly linked to a company's business, it has become a major concern for CEOs and board members as well.
As applications modernize, problems arise. For example, with traditional monolithic applications, there was only north-south traffic coming into the data center from the outside. But with modern application architecture, much more complex problems can occur.
Let me give you an example. Let's assume a retail app, like a grocery shopping app, is widely used here in Korea.
Let's assume you're buying something on a retail app. The images of vegetables or fruits you see are likely cached on a CDN close to the user. But if you add something to your shopping cart, that's probably managed in a public cloud app. Your personal information is very important, so it's likely managed in a private data center. Finally, for delivery, you'd contract with an external provider, and that delivery information might reside on an edge device.
Bringing all these separate components together in a microservices architecture to run as a single app is not easy and is a complex task.
Looking inside the app, it's even more complex. Even to run one app, components are distributed across multiple locations. Each might have its own API gateway or load balancer, running separately. Because all these components must be installed and run to operate a single app, the overall complexity increases significantly.
When a problem occurs, tracing it becomes even more complex. For example, if a problem arises, it's very difficult to track whether it's an infrastructure issue, a security issue, or an issue from a newly installed component.
Looking at the current threats, the threat landscape has changed and increased significantly compared to before. Each independent component has its own vulnerabilities and security threats, so when they come together to run an app, the threats can become much greater.
So, what is F5's future identity? We will no longer just protect mission-critical applications. Instead, we will provide protection for all apps used by all our customers.
In a modern environment, all connections happen through APIs. So, providing protection for APIs and building an ecosystem with other companies and solutions to securely exchange and protect information through APIs are all included.
Finally, our products are positioned in the middle where data flows between users and apps. This allows us to see a vast amount of information, including security-related data. We can also trace the root cause of any problems that arise.
To solve these problems, what I want to talk about today is the F5 Distributed Cloud Services platform. Distributed Cloud is a software stack that can provide these services in any environment, whether it's on-premises, a data center, or the cloud.
To prevent complexity from increasing, we provide excellent integration with existing ecosystems. For example, we integrate with public cloud vendors like AWS and Azure, or companies like Red Hat and VMware, building an ecosystem through APIs to help with operations.
For this reason, we designed and announced Adaptive Applications. Adaptive applications are not static; they can self-diagnose and recover when problems arise, and they are closely tied to automation, allowing them to be delivered in a very flexible environment.
So how do we provide this? First, for F5 BIG-IP, many of you here are already customers using it. We will continue to provide services and support for BIG-IP.
NGINX, which we acquired three years ago, can be thought of as a modern ADC. It's used in modern environments for various use cases like ingress control.
Korea has the largest NGINX open-source community in Asia. We will continue to support this open-source community. For customers who need to use NGINX for mission-critical apps due to compliance or security issues, we also offer a paid version, NGINX Plus.
Today, you will see various solutions. Recently acquired companies like Volterra and Stacklet are all part of F5 Distributed Cloud Services. These services are currently available to customers in a SaaS format.
To summarize, the direction we are heading is to efficiently provide security and application services in a multi-cloud networking environment.