F5 has launched a new AI-powered assistant that promises to give users an unprecedented level of visibility into their networks and control over security.
The AI assistant will sit within F5 Distributed Cloud Services, helping SecOps and NetOps teams to monitor network activity, understand attack patterns and implement recommended actions.
Trained on event data from F5’s entire global network, the AI assistant is equipped to help those teams simplify the oversight and security of apps, managing complex tasks quickly and ensuring a robust security posture.
It comes as organisations continue to adapt to managing apps and APIs over increasingly complex and distributed networks. According to F5’s 2024 State of Application Strategy report, 88% of organisations now employ a hybrid model. More than a third (38%) now operate across six different models, up from a fifth in 2023.
“There have never been more apps and APIs to maintain, nor a wider surface area of deployment environments to monitor. More than ever, SecOps and NetOps teams require the right tools to ensure they are on top of threats to their network. Our AI assistant has been built around their needs,” said Pranav Dharwadkar, VP of Product Management, F5.
“The AI assistant can be where human teams cannot, it draws on insight and training data from a wide spectrum of organisations facing the same threats, and it is fully customisable, allowing engineers to draw exactly the reporting and insight they want from it, as well as prompting them with suggested actions.”
Key AI assistant features include:
Suggested queries for teams to interrogate site health and posture across multi-cloud deployment. Queries can also be customised with either simple or complex prompts.
Advanced and instant summaries of security events on demand, ranked according to attack style and risk, drawing on high volumes of data to provide critical insights.
Accelerated response in the event of a zero-day threat, guiding users to identify and analyse malicious traffic patterns.
Actionable recommendations that enable users to swiftly identify threats as they emerge and put in place mitigations such as exclusion rules or blocks on malicious addresses
Automation of ongoing security and networking tasks, designed to improve operational efficiency and allow teams to focus on strategic initiatives.
The AI assistant is powered by the F5 AI Data Fabric and is designed with a natural language interface. Existing users of F5 Distributed Cloud Services can access it directly from the console.
“We recognise how stretched network and security teams currently are and the AI assistant will serve as an intelligent partner for them,” added Dharwadkar.
“This can help to reduce response times from days to minutes, ensuring that critical assets are protected, and breaches are swiftly addressed.
“This is just one part of our commitment to integrate AI with our application security and delivery solutions, helping customers wherever they are in their AI journey. We firmly believe that network and security teams will benefit by making AI a consistent part of their workflow, enabling them to deploy resources efficiently and respond rapidly to the most important threats.”
