Five Key Benefits of Centralized Management

“Technology and tools are useful and powerful when they are your servant and not your master." – Stephen Covey

Different deployment models are better suited for certain applications and workloads and can enhance performance—for example, microservices do well in container environments while monolithic and three-tier apps are ideal for an on-premises data center. Similarly, different clouds excel at hosting different application workloads and teams make per-app deployment and hosting decisions based on workload—for instance, AWS is great for web apps and AI, Azure is suited to enterprise applications and Microsoft investments, while Google Cloud makes the most sense for data analytics and machine learning.

In the same vein, different app delivery and security solutions are ideal for different operating environments. That’s why having a platform is so important—it enables you to deploy critical functions where you need them most and allows teams to manage them in ways that work best for them.

These considerations are often a factor for customers when deciding where to deploy and operate apps. That’s why customers everywhere adopt hybrid and multicloud strategies. Respondents to our 2025 State of Application Strategy survey report that their apps are deployed across a median of four public cloud vendors. And the distribution is spread fairly evenly across those clouds.

F5 solutions like F5 BIG-IP, F5 NGINX, or F5 Distributed Cloud Services are fantastic sources of information on application health and security; however, this is a two-way street. For large F5 estates (even as few as four devices), especially when deployed in different environments, getting a single picture of apps, services, and security posture can be challenging if trying to manage deployments individually.

Centralization solves this problem by enabling a single view of your instances, services, server pools, virtual IPs, licenses, key metrics, and more. This unified visibility helps different teams (like NetOps, SecOps, app owners, and PlatformOps) focus on what they care about most, while also providing a holistic view. This unified and role-specific visibility eases the administrative burden of operating application delivery controllers (ADCs) and security services by helping teams identify gaps, vulnerabilities, outages, and lowering mean-time-to-identify (MTTI) and mean-time-to-restore (MTTR).

“The hallmark of excellence, the test of greatness, is consistency." – Jim Tressel

Hybrid and multicloud strategies certainly add to overall complexity, but many feel that the benefits—like meeting business needs, resiliency, and cost—are worth the risk.

With all of the variability in deployment models and cloud vendors for operating applications, it’s not surprising that respondents struggle with security and delivery policy consistency—53% and 47% of those surveyed in our report, respectively. This inconsistency is the price of flexibility and it’s very much the status quo.

But centralized management and visibility help to address this issue. With comprehensive dashboarding, purpose-built workflows, and a “one-to-many” approach to ADC and security administration, policy consistency is easy with central management. Imagine the benefits if, for all environments or even different workloads within a single environment, a WAF policy that meets the needs of the business could be authored once, templatized, provided to different teams to use as needed, and deployed en masse to every firewall with just a few clicks. No more one-offs, orphaned security and delivery policies, or vulnerabilities because someone went rogue.

That’s the power of centralized management.

“I couldn't tell you in any detail how my computer works. I use it with a layer of automation.” – Conrad Wolfram

Automation of networking, security, and application development processes offers a laundry list of benefits—reduced deployment time, lower cost, fewer errors, and more resilient systems, to name a few. Automation also abstracts away a lot of complexity and greatly reduces the subject matter expertise required to leverage F5 solutions.

One of the most popular tools for building automation workflows is Red Hat Ansible.  Ansible is a powerful, open-source tool that simplifies and automates many common tasks and enables infrastructure as code for creating, deploying, and managing F5 application delivery and security services. This is accomplished through playbooks and roles available on Ansible Galaxy.

Another common approach is to use Terraform, which speeds up the time to deploy F5 application delivery and security solutions. Admins can use Terraform to configure the desired state of their F5 instance in a configuration file and then submit that file to Terraform via the command line or user interface. Terraform interprets the configuration and makes the required API calls to your F5 instance to construct the state. These configuration files can then be shared across organizations, making it easier to deploy at scale.

Additionally, F5 BIG-IP Automation Toolchain provides a declarative model to create, provision, and deploy application delivery and security services. NetOps, SecOps, and AppDev can use these tools to templatize app services for quick, programmatic deployment via integration with the latest F5 BIG-IP Application Services 3 Extension (BIG-IP AS3) app templates.

In the case of BIG-IP administration for multiple instances, that means saving a lot of time, effort, and risk. And while it’s possible to take an individualized approach to BIG-IP automation, this may introduce risk into the system—e.g., name space conflicts, policy inconsistency, versioning issues, etc. Centralized management puts guardrails in place for automation to ensure that best practices are followed, making automation safe to deploy at enterprise scale and making it easier and faster to correct any errors made while leveraging automation.

“You cannot defeat your enemies until you know who they are.” – Anthony Horowitz

Many organizations make deployment decisions on a per application basis. This isn’t risky in and of itself. After all, if you keep track of everything well, you can secure every app, API, dataset, and workload with an individualized approach. But that means making some (likely incorrect) assumptions about your organization—especially if you’re operating at enterprise scale—including:

•  Security policies for every app, API, and deployment environment are uniformly applied and followed—a tall order for most.
• There’s no employee turnover ever—and if there is, those departing employees will provide immaculate offboarding documentation that accounts for every application workload.
• Onboarding is perfect and new NetOps and SecOps practitioners are made aware of every workload in every operating environment from dev to prod.
• You’ve eliminated every instance of shadow IT and unauthorized tools and (if your organization supports it) you’ve secured BYOD and endpoints.

If this sounds like you, we only have one thing to say: Must be nice!

For everyone else, getting effective and consistent security at scale is not easy—especially without centralized visibility and management. Central management provides a unified look into security posture, enables teams to author policies that work at scale, drives consistent security services, and helps teams mitigate threats before they cause a problem. In short, centralization and tools with security-specific dashboards and management workflows enable you to secure your application estate more effectively with increased visibility into WAF policies, threat profiles, encrypted traffic, and overall security posture.

“Every company that intends to grow, should directly address the barriers to scaling” – Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.

As operations grow and applications get more users and traffic, performance and security will become concerns. That means it’s time to scale. Don’t get us wrong, this is a good problem to have, but it is a problem that needs to be addressed.

Without centralized visibility and management, you may not know you have an under-performing, or worse, unavailable application until you discover it when “making the rounds,” when users report an issue, or it begins to impact the bottom line—none of which are ideal scenarios.

Central management provides regularly updated telemetry into all your applications, APIs, and delivery and security services—so you can quickly address issues before they become major headaches. In a single tool and management workflow, you can find under-provisioned resources, scale up or scale out, upgrade to new versions of F5 solutions, apply licenses and certificates, address vulnerabilities, and redeploy quickly and easily—all without interrupting service to your users.