F5 redefines ADC for the AI Era

F5 has outlined its vision on how Application Delivery Controllers (ADCs) must transform to meet the extraordinary demands of modern and AI-powered applications. With a platform-based approach that delivers flexibility in form factor, management capabilities, and advanced control over every aspect of application security and delivery, F5 is leading the way and developing this next generation of ADCs.

“The rise of AI and modern applications demands a fundamental rethinking of application security and delivery. Traditional approaches fall short in managing today’s complex, distributed systems. Organizations need solutions that provide consistency, flexibility, and complete visibility across their IT landscape. F5 has transformed our technology portfolio to meet these challenges head-on, enabling our customers to confidently secure and deliver advanced digital experiences,” said Kunal Anand, Chief Innovation Officer, F5.

According to F5’s State of Application Strategy Report, the modern application era driven by AI is upon us. 75% of enterprises state they are already deploying AI apps in some form. Despite the rush to implement these new modern digital experiences, enterprises are ill equipped to secure and deliver AI applications that handle massive amounts of data, require complex traffic patterns, and introduce sophisticated security threats.

A new approach is needed to the underlying tech stack that is still powered by traditional ADCs. The next generation of ADCs must support the reality of today’s hybrid and multicloud infrastructures, converging what are currently point solutions to address critical needs such as high-performance load balancing, full web app and API security, multicloud networking, and AI gateway capabilities.

F5 is leading the industry in this transformation, introducing a new approach to secure and deliver modern apps with a series of architectures designed for today’s most dynamic AI use cases. These new resources will help enterprises accelerate AI planning and deployment while tackling the increasing complexity in delivering modern applications.

ADC 3.0: Redefining ADC for the AI Era

Infrastructure, applications, and security have evolved significantly over the past 25 years—from on-premises data centers and monolithic applications secured by basic rule-based WAF and DoS protection, to public cloud deployed microservices and container-based applications with more comprehensive security that includes API protection and bot defense. As we enter the AI era, hybrid, multicloud environments are now the norm and applications are highly distributed, requiring AI-powered security capabilities that protect against increasingly complex threats.

In an era of unprecedented technological complexity and security challenges, F5’s reimagined vision of what an ADC can and should be is critical for organizations looking to adapt. AI and other modern apps require a new, more advanced approach to ADCs that converges high-performance load balancing with more powerful web application and API cybersecurity capabilities to deliver this new breed of digital experiences. F5 created the ADC category and has been the leader in securing and delivering applications for the world’s largest organizations for nearly 30 years. As F5 enables customers to tackle the complexity challenges inherent in deploying AI applications, the company is once again leading the industry with a new vision for ADC technology.

“Apps have become more dynamic and more distributed. This trend is expected to continue as AI becomes more ubiquitous throughout the enterprise. As the nature of applications has changed, the ADC naturally needs to evolve as well. The need for robust load balancing and application delivery techniques combined with robust security features that protect data at the application and API level is critical as we enter the era of AI. F5 has been a proven leader in this space, and the company’s vision appears to meet the stringent delivery and security requirements that will be ever present in the AI era,” said Zeus Kerravala, founder and Principal Analyst, ZK Research.

Learn more about the next generation of ADC—ADC 3.0—at f5.com and preview exciting news coming later this month at AppWorld, F5’s flagship app security and delivery conference.

Delivering Secure AI Apps for All

The acceleration of AI is creating unprecedented application security and delivery challenges for enterprise IT and security teams already mired in hybrid and multicloud complexity. AI applications make larger and more frequent requests of enterprise data stores and AI models often housed in AI factories. This requires advanced high-performance load balancing capable of handling massive amounts of data and complex traffic patterns without creating latency. And, with new AI-focused cybersecurity threats such as model theft, training data poisoning, and prompt injection emerging with the growth of generative AI, attackers are working to infiltrate and hijack both the AI models and the data used to train them.

To help enterprises tackle these challenges, F5 has introduced a new AI reference architecture designed to organize AI/ML workflows into seven core building blocks, offering guidance and best practices for security, application traffic management, and platform optimization. It also includes critical considerations such as F5’s Application Delivery Top 10 challenges, OWASP’s Top 10 security risks for LLMs, and various deployment models. With this architecture, customers can efficiently align their business and technical requirements for AI projects.