Evolving mission modernization needs at public sector agencies call for accelerated application development and innovation. F5 solutions support this effort by integrating performance, security, and compliance into app development and DevOps pipelines, allowing agencies to develop and deploy applications at speed. This equips your agency to:

• Do more with less and modernize your apps to ensure they run faster and more efficiently.
• Reduce total cost of ownership for your apps by reducing the number of legacy apps and the time and resources your IT team devotes to managing and maintaining them.
• Make apps more scalable and easier to update by reducing deployment time from months to minutes.
• Mitigate security risk more easily and effectively.
• Save money by eliminating the need to purchase new hardware every time you need to update your system.
• More easily manage cloud migrations and deployments, and avoid cloud vendor lock- in.

Traditional, or monolith, applications are connected to siloed platforms that block modern development processes. As monoliths grow in size and scope, their code typically becomes tightly coupled, making them extremely difficult to extend or change. The interconnected modules of monolithic systems not only slow development, they’re at high risk of failure every time a new feature is deployed.

To succeed in the future, continuous delivery, constant experimentation, and both civilian and employee feedback are crucial. For many, this means moving away from monolithic architectures towards microservices. If moving to microservices is the right choice, then choosing the right implementation is also critical.

The F5 and NGINX vision is to simplify the journey to microservices. As agencies implement a DevOps approach to application development and delivery, the tools, stack, and interoperability can become highly complex. The F5 and NGINX application platform helps reduce this complexity by consolidating common functions down to far fewer components, making application infrastructure scalable and more manageable. Ultimately, this leads to both low latency and more secure applications.

To help accomplish this, F5 and NGINX uniquely provide several key components to the microservices architecture including containerized applications, load balancing, ingress control, API gateway, API management, security, management of encryption-in-transit, and more.

F5 and NGINX streamline the journey to microservices and enable agencies to:

• Use F5 solutions to protect and optimize containerized applications, without introducing slowdowns or security risks. 
• Leverage a supported platform, reduced complexity, integrated security, advanced capabilities, and increased scale and performance.
• Rely on NGINX as the world’s most widely deployed ingress controller for Kubernetes2 and reduce the complexity of clusters by consolidating traffic routing, security services, authentication, encryption, and API gateway functions. 
• Monitor Kubernetes environments with NGINX Plus Ingress Controller to automatically identify new container applications and make necessary changes to the NGINX configurations dynamically for automated ingress and egress routing for new or changed applications.

Speed cannot come at the expense of security. F5 solutions incorporate security throughout the development process, from beginning to end. Agencies can even address vulnerabilities before deployment, resulting in more secure applications without compromising innovation.

Protect your users, organization, and mission from existing and emerging threats by embedding security into the application development and deployment process and ensuring compliance with public sector security guidelines like NIST and DISA in the U.S. and NIS 2 in Europe.

• Automate security and performance policies into your code pipeline to keep things running smoothly and securely across clouds; consistent policies mean fewer gaps and stronger security. 
• Manage and secure APIs—Securely manage APIs across any data center or cloud using a simple, fast, and scalable multi-cloud architecture. 
• Get app protection in any architecture—safeguards that will stand up to a range of ever-evolving attack types. 
• Virtually eliminate post-deployment security vulnerabilities that increase development and deployment times by baking security into app development.

F5 public sector solutions help agencies accomplish their mission through application modernization efforts. Migration support from legacy applications into modern architectures reduces the total cost of ownership, and increases the speed of application innovation— keeping pace with citizen and employee demands for fast and secure digital experiences.

Public sector agencies are endlessly targeted by malicious attackers. F5 offers the highest protection from both well-known and emerging threats—reducing your agency’s risk, protecting your apps from sophisticated attacks, and securely accelerating application modernization.

F5 solutions offer support for all architectures, form factors, deployment modes, and compliance mandates, providing flexibility to support applications. Ultimately, these solutions promote application portability and provide the agility your mission requires. You’re never locked into the constraints of any single environment, whether it’s cloud-hosted or on-premises infrastructure. Our application modernization solutions are here to help you deliver superior user experiences that are secure, scalable, and always available.

To learn more, explore F5 application modernization solutions or contact your public sector F5 representative.

¹ The Promise (And Perils) Of Customer-Focused Government Technology Transformation, Forrester 2019

² Cloud Native Computing Foundation Survey, CNF 2020