How F5 NGINX One Helps SecOps Teams Secure Apps in the F5 Cloud

A significant challenge for SecOps teams is maintaining visibility across all application environments. NGINX One provides a “single pane of glass” to monitor security across all NGINX instances and application delivery components. The NGINX One console (and API) allows security teams to see all the relevant security posture data, including configuration, vulnerabilities, certificate status, and granular, packet-level traffic data.

This unified view enables SecOps teams to:

• Gain real-time insights into security events across different cloud and on-premises environments
• Provide oversight and visibility across both open source and commercial NGINX products
• Monitor and manage NGINX instances in Kubernetes and for novel AI application architectures
• Detect anomalies and potential threats early across all types of NGINX products
• Identify trends and potential vulnerabilities before they become critical issues

Unified visibility ultimately helps SecOps teams move from reactive responses to proactive strategies so they can stay ahead of emerging threats. It also helps them communicate more clearly and easily with platform operations, network operations, and developer operations teams to better enforce security policies and posture. This capability also drives more efficient and effective incident response.

A key challenge for vulnerability management is visibility and prioritization. Real-time tracking and remediation of Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) is becoming more critical as the window between vulnerability publication and attacks in the wild shrinks. NGINX One catalogs CVEs and other active vulnerabilities in clear format, coded by severity with a link to the patch. This allows security teams to focus on the most impactful and risky vulnerabilities.

NGINX One also suggests best-practice configuration changes to improve security posture, providing side-by-side console guidance. This empowers security engineers to confidently make configuration changes even if they are not experts in NGINX. By integrating CVE insights and configuration hardening suggestions directly into the dashboard, NGINX One provides:

• Streamlined prioritization of CVEs based on severity
• Simple access to and application of CVE patches
• Best-practice configuration suggestions to harden NGINX instances
• Easy implementation of configuration suggestions via the side-by-side comparisons

These capabilities enable a more proactive approach to vulnerability and configuration management, helping SecOps teams maintain a robust defense posture without slowing down the application delivery value chain.

NGINX One is designed to facilitate zero trust policies by enforcing consistent security measures across distributed applications. Using NGINX One, security teams can see instances that are out-of-compliance with dated certificates, unpatched severe or critical vulnerabilities, and insecure configurations. The zero trust model, which assumes all traffic is untrusted until verified, has become essential in cloud-native and microservices architectures. With NGINX One, SecOps teams can:

• Enforce consistent security policies across all applications and services, regardless of where they are deployed
• Verify that stringent authentication protocols are followed on a per request or per session basis, leveraging application or API context
• Ensure end-to-end security by enabling secure traffic between all application components

Through zero trust capabilities, NGINX One facilitates verification and trust for every connection, user, and device. This reinforces an always-on security approach across the organization.

Siloed information creates a disconnect among teams like SecOps, Platform Ops, and NetOps, leading to inefficiencies and slower responses to security incidents. When teams work in isolation, essential information often remains confined within specific departments, causing delays in threat detection, uncoordinated responses, and inconsistent security practices across the organization.

Traditionally, SecOps teams have access to security data but may not have access to key operational data, including configuration status, instance location and version, and more. NGINX One puts all information into a SaaS dashboard and enables integration with any dashboarding tool via a single API for all data plane products. This makes it easier for SecOps to break down security siloes. NGINX One encourages cross-functional security collaboration by:

• Sharing threat intelligence and security metrics in real-time, enhancing coordination.
• Integrating workflows so that different teams can respond to incidents collaboratively.
• Improving incident response times by breaking down barriers between departments.

By facilitating collaboration, NGINX One empowers organizations to respond to security incidents faster, minimizing potential damage and helping organizations meet their security goals without compromising agility.

SecOps teams are tasked with safeguarding diverse infrastructure environments and application types against advanced threats, while ensuring security doesn’t slow down application delivery. Dispersed data and departmental silos make it challenging for SecOps professionals to see the full risk landscape, which can delay responses and leave vulnerabilities exposed.

NGINX One’s unified platform allows SecOps to better stay ahead of threats, protecting critical assets without sacrificing operational speed. By integrating visibility, zero trust principles, and cross-team collaboration, NGINX One enables organizations to maintain a resilient security posture that aligns with the demands of modern, fast-paced application delivery.

Download the eBook, “The New Application Delivery Value Chain: A Unified Playbook for Network, Security and Developer Operations Teams” to learn more about how NGINX One can help secure your applications, APIs, and AI.