In today’s fast-paced, hybrid world, organizations are leveraging a combination of multicloud, on-premises, and edge environments to deliver scalable and dynamic applications. Deploying applications in multiple environments allows organizations to make infrastructure choices that work for them, but this creates a ton of operational complexity. With increased complexity come challenges such as managing operational costs, maintaining security posture, ensuring scalability, and optimizing application performance across distributed environments.
Many of our customers are grappling with these very issues, especially those customers who are considering a hardware refresh. What makes the most sense for their business? Should they go all-in on new F5 hardware, or update existing cloud deployments? With F5 Distributed Cloud Services, they now have a way to leverage SaaS-based flexibility in tandem with the power of F5 BIG-IP hardware, as part of the F5 Application Delivery and Security Platform
Distributed Cloud Services can help reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) while still providing the reliability and security customers expect from F5. Organizations can add new layers of security with centralized control, optimize the performance of F5 hardware by offloading lightweight applications to Distributed Cloud Services, take advantage of a SaaS-based delivery and security model, and simplify hybrid multicloud application management.
With the productivity gains inherent in each of these benefits, customers can see up to a 46% ROI by augmenting BIG-IP with Distributed Cloud Services, according to an F5 analysis. We have seen customers save their teams up to 200 hours per person in the first year, thanks to the flexibility, scalability, and automation built into Distributed Cloud Services.
“"Customers can save their teams up to 200 hours per person, thanks to the flexibility, scalability, and automation built into F5 Distributed Cloud Services operating alongside F5 BIG-IP."”
Benefits of Adding Distributed Cloud Services
Augmenting BIG-IP deployments with Distributed Cloud Services has many benefits:
- Enhanced security with centralized management. One of the key challenges for enterprises operating in hybrid or multicloud environments is the lack of centralized control. Managing disparate systems, tools, and platforms can lead to inefficiencies and higher operational costs. Centralized management across environments through Distributed Cloud Services provides additional layers of protection for customers already using F5 BIG-IP in their on-premises or cloud data centers, saving time and reducing the risk of misconfiguration and emerging threats.
- Optimized performance and reduced infrastructure costs. Application performance is critical to user experience, which directly impacts business revenue. BIG-IP is a powerhouse, delivering applications to users around the world. But not every application needs the performance that BIG-IP can provide. We can work with you to quickly identify workloads whose needs can be met with Distributed Cloud Services, such as public-facing applications that do not rely on complex iRules, and set up the security and delivery services you need to keep them available and protected. This allows you to optimize your hardware for the applications that need the power and granular control that BIG-IP can provide, instead of over-provisioning infrastructure for the applications that will not see the full benefit of BIG-IP.
- Simplified hybrid deployments. For enterprises already using BIG-IP for on-premises or cloud-based traffic management, integrating Distributed Cloud Solutions simplifies hybrid cloud networking. With F5 Distributed Cloud Network Connect, organizations can securely interconnect multicloud environments and on-premises systems without needing additional SD-WAN or VPN solutions. This avoids the upfront costs associated with deploying separate networking appliances while lowering operational expenses through centralized connectivity.
Getting started with Distributed Cloud Services
Once you’ve gone through the process of determining which workloads could benefit from Distributed Cloud Services, the next question is how to get started. There are two key use cases that can serve as great entry points: using F5 Distributed Cloud DNS as a secondary DNS provider, and adding F5 Distributed Cloud WAF to protect public-facing web apps and APIs to further build out defense-in-depth capabilities.
See how Distributed Cloud DNS, Distributed Cloud App Connect, and BIG-IP DNS work together to ensure specific applications are available to specific user groups.
Both Distributed Cloud DNS and Distributed Cloud WAF work seamlessly with their BIG-IP counterparts to provide you with a flexible, scalable solution to help secure and deliver applications that don’t necessarily need the power of BIG-IP. Public applications can get the benefit of up-to-date, SaaS-delivered security services without the management overhead. Meanwhile, your mission-critical internal applications can still benefit from the granular control and robust protection delivered by BIG-IP.
Reducing the management burden on public applications frees time and resources for your teams, optimizes your hardware needs, and provides the flexibility and agility you need to thrive in today’s rapidly changing hybrid multicloud landscape.
Our customers get the best of both worlds with the power of BIG-IP and the flexibility of Distributed Cloud Services. What can it do for you?
Contact us to learn more about F5 Distributed Cloud Services.
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