Improve Public Sector Application Security and Performance with F5 and Azure

Citizens rely upon government-operated applications to perform some of their most important civic duties. For example, over 91% of American tax returns were e-filed for the 2021 tax year. Storing an enormity of potentially lucrative personal and financial citizen data, public sector organizations are one of cybercriminals’ favorite targets. And 81% of the over 2,700 public sector data breach incidents in 2021 were perpetrated by either system intrusion, miscellaneous errors, or basic web application attacks.

Achieving the most security certifications of any cloud provider, Azure powers many public sector applications that process sensitive citizen data. Pairing NGINX’s application agility and performance with F5’s advanced web application firewall (WAF) technology, government organizations can bolster breach-preventative measures by securing their Azure applications with F5 NGINX App Protect.

Federal, state, and local governments rely upon applications to verify eligibility and manage the distribution of essential services. While convenient for citizens, these applications can be susceptible to fraudulent schemes. California officials reported that they recovered over $1.1 billion in unemployment insurance fraud perpetrated during the COVID-19 pandemic. Fraudsters siphon money out of taxpayer-funded programs with a myriad of methods, including identity theft and using bots to overwhelm systems with faulty credentials

Government organizations can use Azure Cosmos DB, a fully managed and serverless distributed database, to develop high-performance applications that securely and accurately distribute vital services such as unemployment insurance and public pensions. Powered by AI, F5 Distributed Cloud Bot Defense can further safeguard Azure applications by thwarting fraud-perpetrating bots while adding zero friction to citizen user experience.

In a recently completed pilot program, the Department of Education, NASA, the National Science Foundation, and the Small Business Administration used Microsoft Teams for cross-agency calendar sharing and real-time chat functionality. Increased agency collaboration could boost public sector work efficiencies and catalyze ground-breaking research.

With federal agencies leveraging a litany of Azure solutions, from Azure Virtual Desktops to Azure Synapse Analytics, departments could glean valuable insights and identify potential process improvements if they had ready access to information from other agencies. Co-developed by F5 and Microsoft, F5 NGINX as a Service for Azure applies the industry-leading load balancer to optimize the performance of government applications to meet any potentially increased traffic demands from enhanced interagency collaboration.