Technology Reseller - v19 2019

01732 759725 INTERVIEW 48 Technology Reseller (TR): Please can you tell our readers a little about F5 Networks and how it helps address the needs of businesses today. Colleen McMillan (CM): F5 started as a load balancer in the late 1990s, helping dotcoms to scale their websites. Then, in early 2000, it evolved into an ADC (Application Delivery Controller) company and it became all about security, about balancing complex traffic, about compliancy. Now, with multi-cloud, customers are looking, first, to manage their applications – which are only growing – and, second, to move some of those applications off premise into cloud, be that Amazon, Google or Microsoft. Customers want to be able to rely on the same performance, load-balancing, security, compliance, whether applications are in-house, on- premise or in multi-cloud, and F5 is now transitioning and working with customers to achieve that. The other big trend is the incredible explosion of applications. I think it was Forrester that said there are approximately 215 million apps today but by 2021 there will be 1.3 billion. You can’t go a day without using some form of application, whether an Uber or a Facebook or a Starbucks. Everyone is relying on these applications, so not only have they increased in number, but also in importance. We call this application capital. What’s interesting is that companies Investing for success always know where their outlets are, where their offices are, how many employees they have. If it’s a trucking management company, they know how many trucks they have. Yet they can’t get a handle on where their applications are, how many they have or how to protect them. So, we have growth in the number of applications and in their importance and we have customers who want the ultimate flexibility of choosing between on-premise and off-premise. With that comes increased worry about how they can protect and secure applications and deliver the same performance that they were able to do when everything was managed on-site and there were only a few of them. It’s a perfect storm. TR: What size of customer do you have? CM: We have customers of all sizes, and that’s what’s interesting about the new products and solutions we are coming out with (see below). Because customers are moving to applications through the cloud, every customer out there needs help in In December, Colleen McMillan joined F5 Networks, a provider of cloud and security application services, as their Vice President of Worldwide Channel Sales, after nearly 25 years in the IT industry, including spells at Gemalto, Qlik, Citrix, Dell and VMware. On a quick visit to the UK to attend F5 Forum 2019, she took the opportunity to talk to Technology Reseller about her plans for the channel F5 Networks is increasing its cloud portfolio with new, enterprise- grade, high availability, self-service and fully managed SaaS services designed to help cloud-first organisations and developers secure their applications. Easily provisioned and configured within minutes on AWS, F5 Cloud Services are designed to support modern deployment scenarios, such as cloud-native applications, microservices and container-based environments. They are consumed as a utility through a pay-as-you-go model in the AWS Marketplace, offering predictable pricing, flexibility, the ability to auto-scale to meet application workload demands and real-time visibility and analytics on usage, consumption, performance and billing through detailed reporting and visualisation tools. Venu Aravamudan, SVP and General Manager of F5 Cloud Services, said: “Customers are increasingly looking for easy-to-consume, advanced SaaS-based application services for security and application delivery. F5’s advanced application delivery and security capabilities will now be delivered as modern, DevOps-centric SaaS solutions aligned with AWS best practices.” By introducing F5 Cloud Services to the market in a continuous fashion, F5 is prioritising a repeatable framework that delivers new SaaS offerings as quickly and seamlessly as possible, providing customers with a standard set of services to ensure that applications are protected at each stage of development and into the production pipeline. Its first solutions on the AWS Marketplace include secondary DNS Cloud Services; a global server load balancing offer in preview; and new security capabilities, including web application security protections designed to defend against existing and emerging application threats. Commenting on F5’s new offering, Joshua Becigneul, ADC Engineer at Secure-24, said: “As an early adopter of cloud-based DNS services, we’re already seeing the benefits of deploying secondary authoritative DNS solutions in the cloud. It simplifies DNS management, allowing us to move faster without sacrificing performance or security. We had secondary DNS up and running with F5 Cloud Services in just a few clicks and are looking forward to its predictable pay-as-you-go pricing.” F5 launches SaaS services for cloud-first customers