How F5 NGINX One Helps Network Operations Teams Manage Increasing Complexity

Network operations teams are essential for ensuring secure, high-performance connectivity in modern IT environments. They go beyond infrastructure maintenance, playing a strategic role in enabling innovation while maintaining reliability and security. Their responsibilities include automation, observability, and incident response, ensuring seamless network performance across cloud, hybrid, and multicloud environments. They establish guardrails and best-practices for security, traffic management, and performance monitoring, collaborating with security and application teams to support modern development needs. As networks grow more complex, these teams play a critical role in reducing risk, improving ROI, and enabling digital transformation.

Today, NetOps teams must collaborate with platform operations, security operations, and developer operations teams to ensure that requirements are accommodated by networking capabilities and infrastructure. As organizations stretch deployments across a wider array of environments—cloud and multicloud, Kubernetes, edge, and on premises—NetOps must also stretch to manage this growing portfolio. While global north-south network throughput, performance, and security remain primary concerns, the distributed nature of modern infrastructure required to run modern applications, APIs, and AI increasingly requires NetOps expertise for optimizing application delivery. The rise of Kubernetes, with its differentiated approach to networking, requires expertise at the container layer and new networking constructs for ingress and network security. For AI workloads, extremely high network performance is required to ensure machine learning operations teams extract maximum value from their expensive GPU fleets.

Working alongside F5 BIG-IP and other larger networking systems, F5 NGINX helps networking teams provide more granular observability, tighter security, and global coverage for digital experience and digital service delivery. F5 NGINX One is a unified application delivery platform that incorporates all of the NGINX products used for secure application delivery in any environment. It includes a centralized, SaaS-based console that provides comprehensive visibility and control over all NGINX instances, whether deployed on-premises, in the cloud, or across multiple cloud providers.

NGINX One also offers an in-line AI tool that delivers best-practice advice and specific recommendations for security, configuration and operational changes to improve network resilience, safety, trust, and performance. The NGINX One AI is trained across all documentation and templates generated by NGINX, offering a simple chat interface that quickly supplies specific guidance and solutions to complex NGINX set-up challenges. The SaaS console offers automated discovery of NGINX instances. Once instances are linked to NGINX One, the console and the NGINX One API can aggregate all instance information into a single system of record, which can be consumed either in the F5 Distributed Cloud Services console or within third-party tools for observability.

Benefits of NGINX One for network operations teams include:

• Centralized performance dashboards and alerting: NetOps teams can view at-a-glance survey performance and capacity of all NGINX instances, essential for maintaining 360-degree visibility into network performance.
• Putting NetOps, SecOps, DevOps and platform teams on the same canvas: NGINX One allows cross-functional teams to see the same picture, allowing them to collaborate more efficiently for troubleshooting, security, and optimization tasks.
• Simplified configuration management across environments: Configurations can be centrally managed, making it easy to track changes and maintain consistency.
• Automated network and security policy enforcement: Organizational policies for networking—including security, performance, and resource utilization—are defined and automatically enforced.
• Support for zero trust implementations: Built-in capabilities for implementing zero trust architecture, including certificate management and authentication controls.
• Identification of bottlenecks and optimization opportunities: Advanced analytics help pinpoint performance issues and suggest optimization strategies.
• Integration with existing network management and dashboard stacks: The NGINX One API allows NetOps teams to bring all information and metrics over into their monitoring and management tools of choice.

By deploying NGINX One, platform operations teams can improve business value. Key benefits include:

• Reduced operational overhead: Automation of discovery, configuration, and policy enforcement minimizes repetitive manual tasks, allowing teams to focus on strategic objectives like improving application performance and scaling infrastructure efficiently.
• Faster troubleshooting: Unified visibility across the application delivery stack enables faster identification and resolution of application tier networking issues, reducing downtime and improving user satisfaction.
• Accelerated time to market: By standardizing configurations and streamlining deployments of critical elements required to transit enterprise networks, NetOps teams can help AppDev and DevOps teams build and deploy applications with greater speed.
• Strengthened security posture: Integrated security features, such as rate-limiting, white-listing, automated policy enforcement, and robust encryption proactively address vulnerabilities and ensure compliance with regulatory standards.
• Optimized costs: Advanced insights into resource utilization enable organizations to eliminate waste, right-size infrastructure, and make informed decisions about scaling—particularly in environments where costs may be harder to calculate.