According to the 2025 F5 State of Application Strategy Report, 96% of organizations say they’re currently deploying AI models, and today’s models are more likely to directly support line-of-business decisions and employee productivity. Yet while AI promises enormous benefits, it also greatly expands the security and data management challenges that modern organizations already face.
As AI applications become increasingly integral to modern business operations, the unique security, monitoring, and delivery challenges they present cannot be overlooked. These include risks such as unauthorized access and exploitation of AI models and the complexity of protecting, managing, and accelerating dynamic AI applications and large language models (LLMs) across the entire data ecosystem. AI also further accelerates the use of APIs, and securing those APIs is critical to minimizing risk exposure. OWASP now compiles a yearly list of the top 10 security risks to LLMs and generative AI apps to raise awareness of these critical vulnerabilities and their potential impact.
As our Chief Innovation Officer Kunal Anand put it, “LLMs are unlocking new levels of productivity and enhanced user experiences for customers, but they also require oversight, deep inspection at inference time, and defense against new types of threats.”
A joint solution to protect and optimize AI apps
Red Hat and F5 have a long history of technology partnership, and we are extending our collaboration by integrating F5 AI Gateway and Red Hat OpenShift AI to help our customers protect, manage, and scale their AI-powered applications across hybrid, multicloud environments.
“The joint F5 and Red Hat solution provides a robust, unified foundation for securing and managing AI-powered apps no matter where they’re deployed.”
F5 AI Gateway is a containerized solution designed to streamline and secure the deployment of AI-powered applications by managing interactions between applications, APIs, and LLMs to ensure high performance, robust security, and optimal usability of AI apps. Red Hat OpenShift AI is a leading AI application development platform with tools to build, deploy, and manage AI-enabled applications, simplifying the entire AI lifecycle. Red Had OpenShift AI speeds innovation, fosters governance, and encourages collaboration—critical factors for delivering enterprise-grade AI solutions.
Together, the joint F5 and Red Hat solution provides a robust, unified foundation for securing and managing AI-powered apps no matter where they’re deployed, with extensible security that protects both users and providers of AI services and offers both security and operations teams a seamless path to adopting AI services.
Challenges of dynamic AI workflows
AI applications bring unique management challenges that go beyond traditional approaches to securing, monitoring, and app delivery, which are tailored to deterministic workflows, where processes and outcomes are predictable or repeatable, and the format and structure of requests and responses are well understood. In these cases, traditional API security solutions and web application firewalls can be used to detect malicious or sensitive content or monitor unexpected outcomes.
However, dynamic, interactive AI workflows are non-deterministic: During AI inferencing, inbound input and outbound responses can vary greatly and evolve over time, producing different outputs for the same input due to randomness or probabilistic considerations. AI applications can also pull in data from multiple locations, including a mix of public cloud, on-premises, and hybrid deployments.
These fragmented, unstructured, and unpredictable inputs and outputs are fundamental to AI workflows, but due to the unpredictable nature of these inbound and outbound interactions, it is necessary to monitor this non-deterministic AI traffic in both directions. What’s going into the model must be scrutinized because inputs may attempt to manipulate the model’s behavior by injecting malicious prompts or may contain confidential or sensitive data that shouldn’t be processed or stored. Outbound responses must also be monitored because LLMs and generative models can leak sensitive information or produce inappropriate, biased, or harmful content.
F5 AI Gateway complements rather than replaces existing web application and API protection (WAAP) tools. It enables organizations to confidently deploy AI applications and deliver security and compliance policy enforcement by integrating OpenTelemetry support to provide dual-direction protection and observability. AI Gateway inspects inbound prompts and outbound responses in any environment to prevent prompt injections and sensitive information disclosure or critical data leakage.
Trusted vendors for securing and simplifying AI apps
The joint F5 and Red Hat solution delivers a consistent, all-in-one platform to keep AI environments manageable, cost-efficient, and secure, while simplifying the management and monitoring of LLMs and generative AI apps. As organizations explore the potential of AI, they can confidently deploy their AI applications on the secure foundation of AI Gateway and Red Hat OpenShift AI, knowing their apps and investments are protected against evolving cyber threats and capable of meeting the demanding requirements of modern AI workloads.
F5 and Red Hat are part of a growing ecosystem of technology partners that work together to address the challenges our customers face when building, deploying, securing, and managing AI-enabled applications. Your organization can rely on trusted vendors like Red Hat and F5 to make it easier to protect, orchestrate, and scale AI apps no matter where they’re deployed and help you gain the benefits of AI.
For more information, read our previous blog, F5 AI Gateway: Solving the Unique Challenges of AI Security and Delivery. And if you’re planning to attend this year’s Red Hat Summit, please attend an F5 session and visit us in Booth #648.
About the Author
Related Blog Posts
F5 accelerates and secures AI inference at scale with NVIDIA Cloud Partner reference architecture
F5’s inclusion within the NVIDIA Cloud Partner (NCP) reference architecture enables secure, high-performance AI infrastructure that scales efficiently to support advanced AI workloads.
F5 Silverline Mitigates Record-Breaking DDoS Attacks
Malicious attacks are increasing in scale and complexity, threatening to overwhelm and breach the internal resources of businesses globally. Often, these attacks combine high-volume traffic with stealthy, low-and-slow, application-targeted attack techniques, powered by either automated botnets or human-driven tools.
F5 Silverline: Our Data Centers are your Data Centers
Customers count on F5 Silverline Managed Security Services to secure their digital assets, and in order for us to deliver a highly dependable service at global scale we host our infrastructure in the most reliable and well-connected locations in the world. And when F5 needs reliable and well-connected locations, we turn to Equinix, a leading provider of digital infrastructure.
Volterra and the Power of the Distributed Cloud (Video)
How can organizations fully harness the power of multi-cloud and edge computing? VPs Mark Weiner and James Feger join the DevCentral team for a video discussion on how F5 and Volterra can help.
Phishing Attacks Soar 220% During COVID-19 Peak as Cybercriminal Opportunism Intensifies
David Warburton, author of the F5 Labs 2020 Phishing and Fraud Report, describes how fraudsters are adapting to the pandemic and maps out the trends ahead in this video, with summary comments.
The Internet of (Increasingly Scary) Things
There is a lot of FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) that gets attached to any emerging technology trend, particularly when it involves vast legions of consumers eager to participate. And while it’s easy enough to shrug off the paranoia that bots...