Securing Model Serving in Red Hat OpenShift AI with F5 Distributed Cloud API Security

Enterprises are rapidly embracing generative artificial intelligence (AI) and large language models (LLMs), seeking to revolutionize their business by increasing productivity, gaining a competitive advantage, and ultimately driving faster and more strategic innovation.

However, the brave new world of enterprise AI adoption is complex, and operationalizing AI development and model deployment is not trivial, as it requires a robust, security-enhanced platform optimized for securely delivering enterprise-grade AI solutions.

Red Hat and F5 have a long history of technology partnership, and Red Hat OpenShift AI and F5 Distributed Cloud API Security now extend this trusted relationship into the AI space. Integrating Red Hat OpenShift AI and Distributed Cloud API Security provides a robust and secure foundation to meet the challenges of operationalizing AI development and delivering comprehensive API security to protect AI models and applications. Customers can be confident that joint solutions between Red Hat and F5 can ease technical and organizational complexity while increasing their security posture, allowing them to confidently accelerate AI innovation for their organizations.

Red Hat OpenShift AI is a leading AI application development platform, with tools to build, deploy, and manage AI-enabled applications, simplifying the entire AI lifecycle. It provides a containerized environment with proven, operationally consistent capabilities that enable teams to experiment, serve models, and deliver innovative apps. Development teams can iterate on model training with a choice of tools, distribute deployment workflows, and accelerate time to market—all on a shared, unified platform. Red Hat OpenShift AI speeds innovation, fosters governance, and encourages collaboration—critical factors for delivering enterprise-grade AI solutions.

While Red Hat OpenShift AI provides a robust platform for developing and deploying AI-driven applications, integrating Distributed Cloud API Security can elevate these deployments to new levels of protection and resilience. Distributed Cloud API Security offers comprehensive defenses against a wide range of API-specific threats, ensuring that sensitive data and critical applications are shielded from unauthorized access and cyberattacks.

APIs are the backbone of modern applications, enabling seamless connections and communication among diverse applications and systems, and are essential for AI applications. AI apps are the most modern of applications, and within AI environments, APIs are not just simply connectors: APIs enable and define how AI integrates into manifold digital environments.

Together, Red Hat and F5 provide a robust, unified foundation to meet the challenges of operationalizing AI development and delivering comprehensive API security to AI apps.

APIs in AI environments are prime targets for cyberattacks, exposing the building and serving of AI apps to multiple security concerns. These include unauthorized access and data leakage, which can result when external requests attempt to extract proprietary knowledge or sensitive data from the AI model. Prompt injection and malicious content insertion are other malicious attacks that can trick or manipulate LLMs into producing harmful or confidential outputs. Automated scripts are pervasive in digital networks, and bot attacks—or simply extreme bot activity—can escalate platform costs and degrade model performance by overwhelming inference endpoints.

Other security concerns include exposure of sensitive data or failure to meet compliance requirements, which can result when AI outputs contain personal information or regulated data. In addition, the ever-larger and always evolving threat landscape requires continuous management of security strategies and adaptive threat detection due to the complexity and dynamism of modern AI models and APIs.

Integrating Distributed Cloud API Security into Red Hat OpenShift AI platform delivers a fortified security framework that aligns seamlessly with Red Hat OpenShift’s dynamic containerized environments, providing consistent security policies and enforcement across multiple deployment models, whether on-premises, in the cloud, or in hybrid scenarios. This unified approach not only simplifies security management but also ensures that AI applications remain compliant with industry standards and regulations.

Deploying Distributed Cloud API Security alongside Red Hat OpenShift AI brings multiple benefits to organizations, including the ability to confidently serve multiple LLMs and AI apps at scale, and handle diverse use cases and workloads. A unified platform helps safeguard the process of securely exposing inference endpoints, helping ensure that requests from external sources are validated, sanitized, and protected against prompt injection, unauthorized access, or excessive traffic.

The F5 and Red Hat solution also helps maintain compliance and privacy by redacting sensitive data and logging requests for auditing and reporting purposes. In addition, it continuously adapts to evolving threats by leveraging real-time observability and agile policy management for always-on security improvements.