F5 is committed to digitally empower businesses in India

India is a critical market for F5. It stands strong in digitally empowering its customers in line with the government’s aim to transform India into a $1 trillion digital economy. While throwing some light on F5’s new Distributed Cloud services offering, Dhananjay Ganjoo, Managing Director for India, and SAARC - at F5 Inc. shares his views of how he comprehends the present security landscape -

With new business transformation practices come new security and technological challenges. How does F5 look at the entire security landscape today?

The pandemic accelerated the digital transformation journeys of organizations across sectors & sizes. To ensure business continuity, several organizations are now deploying applications with a customized cloud-based architecture, opening doors to a variety of security risks & tech challenges. A study reveals that 86% of the data breaches occur at the app level, making it imperative for organizations to strengthen the application ecosystem for a seamless and secure customer experience. Cyber attackers probe the networks to find vulnerabilities in applications and use a variety of tricks to lure customers into giving up sensitive information and are conducting sophisticated attacks. Implementing cloud web application firewall (WAF) and Web App and API Protection (WAAP) technologies while building the application architecture can help safeguard business transformation and digital experiences for the customers.

How do you see this security landscape slowly changing in the post-Covid world now that the hybrid workforce is becoming a standard?

Organizations continue to adopt the hybrid model as it offers increased workforce productivity and employee satisfaction. With this shift in workplaces, organizations are now exposed to newer security risks, and the need of the hour is for organizations to manage and secure networks across multiple endpoints, round the clock.

Some common vulnerabilities observed in the hybrid work model are unsecured endpoints, lack of VPN protection, and unauthorized access to the app data. Additionally, bad actors conduct sophisticated cyber-attacks using automated botnets to launch terabyte-per-second attacks. Therefore technologies & solutions that can help them defend against bots, recognize legitimate users, and rapidly gain insight into attacks in real-time is essential in today’s changing security landscape.

What kind of business outcomes can a customer expect with F5’s new distributed cloud services offerings?

Due to complexity, security, and visibility constraints, organizations often face challenges while deploying modern apps across multiple locations, cloud providers, and environments. Our newly launched F5 Distributed Cloud WAAP equips our customers with an advanced web application firewall (WAF), bot detection, API protection as a service, and capabilities to protect against distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. F5's Distributed Cloud WAAP is unique in its ability to provide end-to-end observability and real-time visibility across the entire deployment without requiring integration and/or automation tools. Customers can have differentiated digital experiences for their end customers, strengthening customers' trust for increased revenues.

How significant is the India market for F5? Going forward, how do you plan to expand your presence in this market?

India is an important market for us, given its customer base as well as with the government’s aim to become a $1 trillion digital economy in the coming years. With our best-of-breed range of application services, we will continue to enable our customers to transition into multi-cloud environments seamlessly and deliver secured experiences at scale. We stand strong in our commitment to digitally empowering businesses in India. Additionally, we recently invested in growing our Points of Presence (PoP) in the country, helping our clients benefit from increased application performance and lower latency.