F5 Teams with IBM to Help Enterprises Manage Hybrid Cloud Workloads

F5 to Help Bring Hybrid Cloud Capabilities to Clients in Any Environment

F5 believes that digital business in every industry sector will need a new, distributed platform to manage applications, and to process and analyze data. As a multi-cloud application delivery and security technologies company, F5 sees an opportunity to help enterprises manage their applications across environments with IBM Cloud Satellite. IBM Cloud Satellite, now generally available, enables clients to run IBM Cloud services on any public cloud, on premises, in multi-cloud environments, or at the edge—all delivered as a service. This flexibility will help bring cloud capabilities to where client data resides, in the environment of their choice, while focusing on consistency, user experience, and security.

With its open architecture, IBM Cloud Satellite builds on IBM’s deep industry expertise and can help enterprises across a variety of industries including telecommunications, healthcare, banking, insurance, travel, and transportation transform into digital-first organizations. The need to modernize mission-critical workloads is intensifying. According to a recent IBM Institute for Business Value report, 74% of CEOs interviewed during the COVID-19 pandemic believe cloud computing will most help their organization deliver these results over the next 2-3 years. We see a cornerstone of this transformation in edge computing. The continued proliferation of edge devices is expected to shift the amount of data that resides at the edge compared to within central data centers. As this transition takes place, IBM Cloud Satellite is designed to bring cloud services to where clients’ data already resides—and help them bridge to where they want to go.  

This belief is aligned with F5’s vision of distributing applications anywhere —at the data center, in the public cloud, and at the edge—to help assure a seamless, consistent, and secured user experience. We believe that businesses in every industry will need a new platform to enable the delivery and security of distributed digital services and the right platform is an application-oriented edge distribution platform we call Edge 2.0. This is the reason F5 acquired universal edge-as-service platform, Volterra. We envision IBM Cloud Satellite and the F5 Volterra edge platform will play an essential role to support our joint customers’ need to deliver and consume digital services at global scale with a consistent and seamless user experience. 

F5 and IBM plan to work with joint customers to deliver F5’s DNS, WAF, access control, load balancing, and bot protection services. Enterprise customers can expect to consume IBM CI/CD services, database services, and AI and ML services securely and at scale. With the common goal of supporting our joint customers’ needs, F5 and IBM can deliver integrated solutions designed to delight our customers—and theirs—in the future.

F5 is part of IBM’s ecosystem of partners fueling hybrid cloud environments by helping clients manage and modernize workloads from bare-metal to multi-cloud and everything in between with Red Hat OpenShift, the industry’s leading enterprise Kubernetes platform. IBM Cloud Satellite is engineered to give clients the flexibility to bring their applications to environments where their data resides while leveraging the security of IBM Cloud.¹

¹ Based on IBM Hyper Protect Crypto Service, the only public-cloud enabled FIPS 140-2 Level 4-certified Hardware Security Module (HSM). FIPS 140-2 Security Level 4 provides the highest level of security defined in this standard. At this security level, the physical security mechanisms provide a comprehensive envelope of protection around the cryptographic module with the intent of detecting and responding to all unauthorized attempts at physical access.