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John Maddison on AI security

From John Maddison, F5 & Prerak Mehta, Google Cloud | Google Cloud Partner AI Series · · SiliconANGLE theCUBE

“AI increases the attack surface: not only do you have models and agentic agents, but the attack surface itself has increased and the types of attacks, like prompt injection, will be different.”

John Maddison
Executive VP & Chief Marketing Officer, F5, Inc.
AI securityattack surfaceprompt injection

On , John Maddison, Executive VP & Chief Marketing Officer at F5, Inc., spoke about AI security during John Maddison, F5 & Prerak Mehta, Google Cloud | Google Cloud Partner AI Series on SiliconANGLE theCUBE.

John Maddison, F5 & Prerak Mehta, Google Cloud | Google Cloud Partner AI Series
Watch on YouTube
John Maddison, F5 & Prerak Mehta, Google Cloud | Google Cloud Partner AI Series
SiliconANGLE theCUBE
Watch on YouTube
In this Google Cloud Partner AI Series interview, F5’s John Maddison, chief product officer & corporate marketing officer, and Google Cloud’s Prerak Mehta, director of customer engineering for Strategic AI & ISV North America, join theCUBE’s Rebecca Knight to unpack how the F5–Google Cloud alliance (dating back to 2018) is evolving for the AI and agentic era. Maddison outlines F5’s journey from application delivery and load balancing to expanded capabilities across WAF, cloud services and NGINX – now moving toward cloud-native offerings within Google Cloud’s ecosystem. Mehta explains why the partnership matters to enterprise customers operating across hybrid and multicloud environments, where Google secures traffic inside its perimeter while partners like F5 add differentiated web/API security, performance and policy controls across on-prem and other clouds. The conversation dives into current challenges and near-term priorities: securing AI in production, mitigating a growing attack surface (including prompt injection) and keeping performance high even as encryption and cross-cloud traffic increase. Maddison breaks down four AI conversations he’s having with customers: AI data delivery (using load balancing in front of data stores and RAG pipelines), security for AI (including F5’s Calypso acquisition focused on protecting models), AI for security (assistive capabilities inside products) and the reality that AI expands the threat landscape with models and agents. Mehta highlights joint work such as securing LLM traffic end-to-end (including with NetApp) and notes applicability across sectors like financial services, retail and media. The discussion also touches on Google’s model and infrastructure track – advances in large models, chip progress and an AI platform with a model garden – while acknowledging that enterprises will mix multiple models and need secure, performant, bidirectional data flows between them. Looking ahead, the guests preview upcoming innovations including NGINX as a service integrated natively in Google Cloud for SaaS-based load balancing and continued collaboration on model protections as agentic systems mature. Find more SiliconANGLE news and analysis https://siliconangle.com/ Follow theCUBE's wall-to-wall event coverage https://siliconangle.com/events/ Learn about the latest theCUBE events https://www.thecube.net/ 00:00 - Intro 00:06 - Introduction and Evolution of the F5 and Google Cloud Partnership 02:11 - Importance of F5 Partnership for Google Cloud 04:16 - Navigating Security, Performance, and Complexity in Multi-Cloud AI Operations 09:05 - Advancements in Data Security, Load Balancing, and AI Infrastructure 13:49 - Expanding Horizons: The NGINX Service Launch and Future Collaborations Between F5 and Google #theCUBE #GoogleCloudPartnerAISeries #theCUBEresearch #F5 #GoogleCloud #AIsecurity #Multicloud
John Maddison

About John Maddison

Executive VP & Chief Marketing Officer · F5, Inc.

John Maddison, chief product officer and corporate marketing officer at F5, discussed the company’s evolving role in AI and security during two recent interviews. In a Google Cloud Partner AI Series conversation, he described F5’s shift from application delivery and load balancing toward cloud-native offerings and noted that the F5 data plane, a layer-seven reverse proxy, could function as a “token engine” for AI models. He stated that “AI increases the attack surface” and that “the ability to do AI data delivery” is becoming critical for training and inference. Maddison also said F5 values working with Google Cloud because of its openness to customer choice. In a separate ZKast interview, Maddison outlined F5’s AI strategy, including the introduction of an AI Assistant with “explain” and “generate” capabilities, such as iRules code generation. He said that “AI ops has arrived” and that AI will serve as a new control plane for operations. Maddison added that F5 is embedding AI into its products for security purposes while also developing security for AI, including protecting APIs, managing data ingestion, and using an AI gateway to safeguard models.

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