F5 expands security portfolio with App Infrastructure Protection

F5 on Thursday announced the launch of F5 Distributed Cloud Services App Infrastructure Protection (AIP), expanding its SaaS-based security portfolio. The new release is a cloud workload protection solution that will provide application observability and protection to cloud-native infrastructures. 

AIP is built using technology acquired with Threat Stack and will be a part of the F5 Distributed Cloud Services portfolio, launched earlier this year. 

AIP will complement F5’s API Security

F5 already has a service called API Security, which helps organizations discover and map APIs, block unwanted connections, and prevent data leakage. AIP goes one step further and provides telemetry collection and intrusion detection for cloud-native workloads. 

“Organizations are drowning in complexity, and end users are demanding good digital experiences that require modernized back-end infrastructure,” said Chris Ford, RVP for product and engineering at F5. “F5 Distributed Cloud launched this year in order to address these problems and help customers secure their modern apps. The addition of F5 Distributed Cloud App Infrastructure Protection (AIP) furthers this mission and gives security leaders more observability throughout their modern environments.” 

AIP collects 120 billion events per day and runs them through a rules and machine learning-based detection filter to alert on threats in real time across the entire infrastructure stack—cloud provider APIs, virtual machine instances, containers, and Kubernetes.  

With behavioral-based detection, Distributed Cloud AIP can identify insider threats, external threats, and data exposure risks for modern applications.

Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP)—such as F5 Distributed Cloud AIP—are defined as workload-centric security products that protect server workloads in hybrid, multicloud data center environments, according to Gartner. CWPPs provide consistent visibility and control for physical machines, virtual machines, containers and serverless workloads, regardless of location. 

AIP will protect, remediate and coach

F5 said its new AIP solution will use behavioral-based protection to identify insider threats, external threats, and data loss risks for the applications. The detection and alert of anomalous behavior impacting workloads will help the organizations to analyze whether to block or to take any remediation action. AIP will complement the existing signature-based security level that is being widely used, F5 said. 

F5 Distributed Cloud AIP is delivered as SaaS and supports a consumption-based model so businesses can pay for what they use. In addition, customers will have the option to add on a managed service that can become an extension of the security team. 

“Once deployed, AIP will begin collecting telemetry on all events occurring in cloud workloads. Customers will be able to access insightful analytics, gain assured compliance and increase their threat detection capabilities to improve their security posture,” said Ford.