The start of the 2020s has been marked by massive changes to how businesses operate and conduct day-to-day activities.

Part of that change has seen an emphasis on placing apps into the cloud and this week F5 launched its Distributed Cloud Services, an expansion of its application security and delivery portfolio.

Alongside the changes we’ve seen in a business sense, we’ve seen the world of cybercrime adapt alarmingly fast. The increase in attack surface gave cybercriminals more points of attack than ever before and cloud-based applications make for a prime target.

As such the F5 Distributed Cloud Platform provides cloud-native software-as-a-service based application security. These services can be managed from a single pane of glass and deployed anywhere they are needed.

There are several additional F5 Distributed Cloud Services currently available to customers.

These include the F5 Distributed Cloud Multi-Cloud Transit which enables multi-cloud networking (MCN) functionality with secure and high-performance connectivity between clouds and a network firewall. Also included is the F5 Distributed Cloud Load Balancer and Kubernetes Gateway. This provides an integrated load balancer with Kubernetes and API gateways to easily deploy modern workloads and microservices across distributed clusters, locations, and cloud providers.

“Applications and the digital experiences they power have become a foundation for human connection and achievement, as well as a platform for significant business innovation and market creation,” says F5 president and chief executive officer, François Locoh-Donou.

F5 has also renamed many of its Shape and Volterra services to F5 Distributed Cloud Services. These include F5 Distributed Cloud Bot Defense, F5 Distributed Cloud DDoS Mitigation, F5 Distributed Cloud WAF and F5 Distributed Cloud API Security.

The firm has also launched its F5 Distributed Cloud WAAP which simplifies security and automates processes so that app teams can focus on feature and functionality enhancements.

This solution combines the following F5 application security technologies:

• Application protection from F5 Advanced WAF, which more effectively and efficiently guards against the most prevalent application attacks
• API security from Volterra’s machine learning-based auto-discovery and anomaly detection, which automates the entire process of finding, securing, and monitoring APIs.
• Bot defense based on F5 Shape AI technology.
• Global distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) protection.

These solutions are available from F5 directly right now and will launch in the Azure Marketplace by the end of the month.