"F5 understands the need to enable customers to power and protect apps from code to customer while maintaining the flexibility and agility provided by open source offerings"

Dhananjay Ganjoo, Managing Director, India & SAARC, F5

Open Source: A disruptive technology

Today every organization is focusing on establishing its digital foundation and strategies to ensure business resiliency and enhanced customer engagement. As open source technologies become more prevalent, there is a flywheel effect leading to increased confidence in using open source at scale. In fact, according to the 2020 State of Enterprise Open Source report a survey of 950 IT leaders indicated that open source is a critical consideration in the enter-prise:-95% of respondents indicated that open source is important to the business.

However, for users of open source, it can be a challenge to stay apprised of what vulnerabilities have been identified and how to remediate those vulnerabilities. Cybercriminals have access to the same websites that researchers do, and they are also increasingly turning their attention to open-source malware tools to use for criminal activities. As Open source software (OSS)’s advantages can be exploited as disadvantages, and its strengths can be exploited as weaknesses. While the community approach benefits (OSS), it also provides an attack surface to exploit hitherto unknown vulnerabilities. The end consumer of the (OSS) is now responsible for end-to-end security which cannot be overlooked. As a provider of an open source web server that powers more than 400 million websites, F5 understands the need to enable customers to power and protect apps from code to customer while maintaining the flexibility and agility provided by open source offerings. With F5 and NGINX, we have been able to help enterprises with an end-to-end, consistent set of application services to address one of IT’s most pressing needs- fast, frequent deployments across a varied set of application architectures residing in multiple cloud properties while enabling the community to enjoy the benefits of open source.