Enabling the Edge 2.0 Revolution

This is an incredibly exciting time at F5, and I am thrilled to have recently joined the team as the Executive Vice President of Security. One of the reasons I was drawn to F5 is the way I see applications transforming our daily lives and the opportunity to innovate and deliver security for them. They are increasingly the primary way we shop, bank, work, and connect with friends and family. Organizations around the world are rapidly innovating to provide new ways to enhance the experience they deliver to customers, partners, and employees through applications. But for many organizations, this innovation comes with increased technical complexity and an expanded attack surface for security threats.

To address these challenges and enable our customers to deliver rich digital experiences, F5 has agreed to acquire Volterra, an innovator in distributed cloud and edge services. Volterra extends F5’s adaptive applications vision with a universal edge-as-a-service platform to provide our industry-leading application security and delivery solutions across any environment.

With Volterra, F5 will transform how customers deliver digital experiences and address the application security and delivery challenges we’re seeing from existing edge technologies. F5+Volterra creates a new paradigm that unifies security and applications across cloud and edge with global consistency.

Edge 2.0

The edge market is currently complex, vulnerable, and fragile. Today’s digital experiences require a combination of multiple networks, clouds, CDNs, and edges that are manually stitched together. This creates complexity because each platform has a unique set of tools and services and exposes new ways for attackers to exploit vulnerabilities. Current edge solutions do not provide the level of functionality or defense required by today’s digital enterprises.

With F5+Volterra, we are creating the first Edge 2.0 platform built for enterprises and service providers. Edge 2.0 is:

• Security-first. CDN-based “checkbox security” is no longer sufficient. F5’s Edge 2.0 offering will deliver industry-leading application security and fraud solutions used by the world's largest banks, service providers, and government organizations, across any environment, in an easily deployed SaaS-based form factor.
• App-driven. The edge is defined by the needs of the app, rather than the app fitting the constraints of the edge. We will deliver a consistent, consolidated set of security and delivery capabilities with APIs, common tools, and unified policy across environments. This means developers can focus on building great digital experiences instead of spending time manually stitching together processes and policy across different clouds, edge, and data centers.
• Unlimited scalability. F5+Volterra services are software-defined and run in any public cloud, data center or within the Volterra-operated network, workloads can infinitely scale up, or move around. Customers are no longer tied to single platform or CDN. This creates flexibility and accelerates time to market—while improving consumer experience, app reliability, and end-to-end visibility.

We will leverage Volterra’s globally distributed app-to-app network and an infinitely scalable edge capability to deliver a new, purely software-defined edge platform. The combination of Volterra’s unique capabilities with F5’s best-of-breed solutions will unlock an unmatched ability to create unified app security and delivery across environments, without dependence on a CDN architecture with point of presence (POP) infrastructure demands.

As I eagerly step into my new role, I am incredibly excited to help drive F5’s development and execution. I believe that by unifying applications from the edge to the cloud and at data centers, we will create a new way to deliver more adaptive, dynamic experiences for our customers and help solve their most critical application challenges.

Join us as we continue to bring our modern, adaptive apps vision to life!

For additional perspective on today's news, please read this blog from Volterra's Ankur Singla.