Articles by Jay Kelley

Here are some ideas to help educate and protect your employees, users, and organization from attacks surrounding Singles’ Day, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, or any other shopping holiday.

Many of us recently experienced difficulties in accessing some of the core applications that both our organizations and we, as individuals, use every day personally or for our jobs. One by one, many had issues accessing the Microsoft Outlook.com web portal, then OneDrive, and finally, Microsoft Azure Portal on successive days early in June.

F5 is pleased to share that leading industry analyst and consulting firm Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) has named F5 as a Visionary in its recently published 2023 Vendor Vision report.

Jay Kelley, Senior Manager and Security Product Marketing Lead at F5, flags some of the top World Cup scams and IT challenges to look out for.

In today’s fast-paced, what-have-you-done-for-me-lately world, changes in business must happen in the blink of an eye or have significant negative impact. For security solutions in particular, rapidly increasing capacity or quickly changing configurations can be driven by the need to add new applications or adapt existing ones, or by an immediate and massive influx of remote workers.

With the level of encrypted traffic today, the need to ensure user and consumer data privacy, and the computationally intensive task of decryption and re-encryption, leveraging a traditional security solution to pull double-duty to deliver security by simply decrypting and re-encrypting traffic can be a very bad idea.

Phishing and spearphishing attacks drastically increased in 2020, driven by the threat of a worldwide pandemic, nations under quarantine or lockdown, work from home mandates, and contemporary political events. Jay Kelley examines modern threats in the context of F5 Labs' recent Phishing and Fraud Report, as well as how organizations can better protect users, applications, and data.

Public cloud solutions offer a lot of well-known benefits, but they also pose the occasional challenge. For example, organizations are used to having precise control over all the network traffic in their data centers, and they count on that level of control to perform critical security checks. As corporate workloads move to the public cloud, IT operators are challenged to ensure that their security measures come along as well.

Jay Kelley: For those unfamiliar, the F5 Edge Client is an SSL VPN client used to provide access to enterprise networks for employees working from home or remote locations. The most exciting new feature of F5 Edge Client 7.2.1 is its ability to deliver single sign-on (SSO) across web and remote access applications.

This fusion of BIG-IP Access Policy Manager and Azure Active Directory means support for identity federation, centralized user access (via single sign-on), and increased application security (via multi-factor authentication) for mission-critical applications as well as cloud-based and SaaS apps. This approach simplifies setup and deployment, reduces management overhead, and enhances the overall administrative experience.

Jay Kelley looks at how organizations are beginning to shift their technology concerns from application access and maintaining user productivity toward application security. The article also notes how cybercriminals are adapting and what you can do about it.

Together, Azure Active Directory and BIG-IP APM offer unified security and user experience between modern and classic applications, providing a single identity control plane and delivering SSO from any device to all applications, whether they are hosted on-premises or in the cloud, and whether or not they support modern authentication and authorization.

With the impacts of COVID-19, organizations need to ensure that their now home-based and remote employees are able to securely and seamlessly access the applications they need to be productive—especially with all the new challenges they’re facing every day. F5 BIG-IP APM and Azure Active Directory simplify the user experience for application access by enabling users to log in once and access all applications they have the right to access in any location.

The COVID-19 pandemic has created a new work reality almost overnight. Globally, companies like F5 are finding new ways to reinforce flexibility and innovative collaboration as key elements of employee culture. In this article, Jay Kelley takes a closer look at the activities of the Technology Services team at F5 during the course of March 2020 to meet the changing needs of the company and its customers.

F5’s BIG-IP APM can help you and your team remain productive and secure while working from home or remotely during the COVID-19 outbreak.

“With great power comes great responsibility.” Acknowledging Voltaire and Churchill, the quote is best known from the Spider-Man comics, attributed to Uncle Ben. Of course, part of the line’s cultural prevalence is that it can be applied to any number of situations and topics, including TLS inspection.

It seems like the whole world is encrypted. That can be a very good thing, as encryption keeps our personal info safe. But, encryption also creates security challenges, such as blind spots where hidden threats like malware and malicious payloads can lurk. Fortunately, F5 and Cisco have a solution.

Coupled with Cisco Firepower series’ threat mitigation and performance capabilities, SSL Orchestrator performs the computationally heavy workload of decrypting traffic before distributing it to other devices in a security stack, so those same security devices are now able to cost-effectively scale.

The latest from F5's Jay Kelley includes a list of considerations when deploying a new identity and access solution for Microsoft Office 365.

A look at one of the most popular business productivity software suites ever, the keys to its longevity, and some of its challenges.

Introducing F5’s BIG-IP 10350v-F platform, a FIPS 140-2 Level 3 supported implementation of the latest generation HSM delivering leading SSL bulk crypto performance, and superior price/performance ratio.

Companies of all sizes are bombarded daily by network attacks and breaches. One of the most basic, yet effective network attacks against organizations and their applications are distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. The onslaught of these enterprise-aimed attacks has even the most security conscious organizations questioning their application defenses.