Digital transformation is the profound transformation of business and organizational activities, applications have never been more important to a business. As the strategic foundation upon which enterprises build their digital viability, applications have achieved unprecedented growth and attracted more spotlight than ever. At the same time, the methods and techniques used to attack applications continue to evolve with each passing day. As a result, security now is a dominant service area when application-centered enterprises adopt significantly more application services than before. Services such as web-based application firewall, network firewall, SSL encryption, VPN and anti-virus software are all within the scope of security.

A survey by F5 Networks suggests that most enterprises adopt 11-20 application services from 5 different categories: availability, performance, security, identity and mobility. This practice leads to challenges in the enterprise network brought about by the multi-cloud. While more applications are currently delivered via clouds, enterprises encounter higher risks in security and compliance due to insufficient experiences and skills to safely deploy applications on public, private or hybrid clouds. A variety of services may scatter among multiple clouds supported by several providers, making it difficult to manage the services effectively. Moreover, inconsistent security strategies pose considerable compliance risks. Therefore, enterprises have to ensure that all the applications, whichever cloud they are on, can run safely and seamlessly. 

Impact from clouds, containers, micro services, DevOps and digital transformation is the driver behind enterprises to deliver and access all resources more often and quickly. As expansion, security and performance become critical differentiators, application services, applications or APIs are the key to the acceleration of digital transformation. F5 aims at helping enterprises test and deploy all applications to clouds and the data center architecture with ease, and ensure safe delivery of highly valuable data.