Software Defined Application Services (SDAS) are going hybrid. .
Organizations are turning to cloud not just as an option for applications but also for the network and application services that deliver applications to anyone, anywhere at any time. And not just "in" the cloud marketplace, available for immediate provisioning and deployment, but as part of the cloud itself; as a service.
One of the questions we asked of respondents in our survey this summer focused on the preferred deployment model across the breadth of application services. Security, I'm sure unsurprisingly, wound up with a significant number of services which organizations prefer to consume "as a service". Of those security services, the top three were SPAM filtering, DDoS protection and anti-fraud services.
The distinction between "cloud" as in marketplace and "cloud" as in a service is necessary for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that adoption of both can force organizations to deliver services across multiple architectures (with a variety of different management systems) if they want to preserve seamless application experiences for users.
For example, you might be able to subscribe to a DNS as a service (and many small and even medium businesses do), but it's management interface – whether API or service portal – are disconnected from everything else. Organizations might also choose to deploy apps in AWS or VMware vCloud Air and then choose to deploy application services to enhance security and improve performance from their respective marketplaces. But those, too, are likely to end up operationally disjoint from other, similar, services that may be delivered as a service or on-premise.
That disjointed operational state is double plus ungood. It inhibits visibility into the overall state of the business (applications) and the services upon which those applications rely. It can impede deployment, too, by introducing stops and starts in processes that might otherwise be orchestrated to improve time to market, because the tools and techniques used to provision and manage these other services are not well integrated with the rest of the IT toolbox.
That's why we continue to expand the ability of F5 Synthesis to deliver SDAS and have introduced yet another option for organizations seeking to ensure the security, performance and availability of applications across a growing portfolio of environments, architectures and business models.
F5 Synthesis: As a Service
F5's vision for application delivery is to enable organizations to take advantage of cloud and support a hybrid data center model without sacrificing the services applications need to stay secure, fast and available. That means not only expanding customer choices with respect to cloud environments and marketplaces, but making those application services available as a service and manageable as part of comprehensive, hybrid application service model spanning cloud, as a service and on-premise environments.
That's where F5 Silverline comes into play, extending F5 Synthesis ability to deliver SDAS on-premise and in the cloud with cloud-based services delivery platform. F5 Silverline will support enterprises by eliminating traditional constraints requiring an either on-premise or in-the-cloud deployment model for application services.
With an as-a-Service option to deliver F5 SDAS, customers gain the ability to shift the deployment of applications and adjacent services closer to the users and apps that benefit from them.
As a first step, building on our acquisition of Defense.Net, we've added a new security service option with F5 Silverline DDoS Protection. This new, hybrid offering combines on-premise DDoS protection capabilities with a high-capacity, cloud-based service that enables organizations to mitigate a complete spectrum of DDoS attacks. New data centers in Frankfurt and Singapore expand the global availability of this service.
F5 Silverline DDoS Protection
F5 Silverline DDoS Protection is a cloud-based traffic scrubbing service providing real-time, automated DDoS mitigation of volumetric attacks. Organizations benefit from cloud-based DDoS protection precisely because it's in the cloud, meaning attacks are scrubbed (stopped) before they ever get near the corporate network. That's important because the growing scale and volume of these attacks can overwhelm many organization's Internet links. While such attacks target services such as DNS and applications, simply oversubscribing the target's links has the same effect: the denial of service.
Scrubbing traffic external to those links, "in the cloud", provides ample reduction in traffic and effectively prevents services from becoming overwhelmed in the first place.
F5 Silverline DDoS protection offers three subscription models:
- Always On
This offering is a first line of defense, continuously evaluating traffic to identify and eliminate bad traffic - Always Available
A first line of defense available on demand, this subscription enables organizations to turn on the service "on demand". This allows organizations to primarily rely on on-premise DDoS protection services but immediately react in the event of an attack. - Ready Defense
This is a "stand by", secondary protection option for organizations who are planning ahead and desire extra protection, just in case.