IoT Infrastructure, Empowered by F5’s IoT Solution

In the inevitable era of the Internet of Things (IoT), the waves of opportunities and challenges have surpassed each other as the market remains fragmented. IoT devices mushroom across every industry with exponential growth rate and analysts anticipate it to cross 20 billion devices by 2020.

Independent of consumer IoT vs industrial IoT, security vulnerabilities have become one of the biggest challenges, even threatening a global slowdown in adoption. As the market evolves, implications of these vulnerabilities have become a learning experience in the low end, low cost, consumer IoT sector, whereas the legal implications can be colossal in the industrial IoT sector. Hence, the business-critical requirements of security, reliability, scalability, latency, performance, visibility, and adaptability become mandatory for running a successful business.

Although the security threats are explicit, the obvious implicit threats of network traffic and data management have been taken for granted, with the thought that someone else will take care of them. These IoT devices can run 24x7, producing data every second, which can flood the network, becoming a nightmare to handle.

F5 BIG-IP IoT Intelligence provides unique solutions through industrial-strength security and agile traffic management, independent of market verticals. In addition, these solutions offer the power to control and customize the entire range of data traffic, per business needs. The portfolio of offerings includes IoT subscriber-aware firewall, SSL offload, DDoS protection, identity and access control, protocol analysis, policy enforcement, analytics and visibility, and more. With BIG-IP IoT Intelligence, the IoT traffic can perform OAUTH or JWT as needed, based on traffic patterns. SSL creates secure channels per policy for IoT traffic by device/sensor clients and for applications. The IoT iRules framework enables the creation of granular agile policies for IoT traffic, peek or poke protocol headers, and such. The REST interface allows for integration with third-party applications with ease and at scale. BIG-IP IoT Intelligence integrates seamlessly for end-to-end use case scenarios, by being part of any vendor platform ecosystem. Along with this, the wide array of hardware and software form factors available makes it possible to deploy industrial IoT in the cloud, on-premises, and in hybrid enterprise data centers.

For decades, BIG-IP products have complemented service provider infrastructures by offering technology solutions in a cost-effective way. Smartphones have become the obvious vehicle for IoT sensors, as they already embed over 14 types of sensors. Those sensors can be either “Human-to-Machine Interface,” accommodating infotainment to end users, or “Machine-to-Machine Interface,” leveraging the ecosystem with AI technology to enhance the personal experience. As the variety and volume of network traffic grows, the infrastructure needs to stay ahead of the technology curve. One of the recent enhancements to BIG-IP Session Director enables the subscriber-aware firewall capability for slicing IoT traffic, giving administrators seamless management and control.

BIG-IP IoT Intelligence helps business owners reach their business optimization goals for digital transformation and automation initiatives by providing technology reinforcement to their IoT infrastructure.