Across the world, modern organisations are striving to meet market demands and manage applications making security a critical aspect of their technology strategy. A new article by F5 examines the challenges organisations face in aligning development, network and security teams and throws light on the role of automation in resolving conflicts. It further shares the significance of tailored tools and solutions to effectively manage and secure distributed cloud environments to ensure end-to-end visibility and support for evolving Edge Computing use cases.
Modern organisations rely heavily on their applications to ensure the smooth running of every aspect of the business environment. With agility and flexibility critical in meeting rapidly changing market demands, there’s a pressing need to find the best way to build, deploy and protect applications.
Today, what users perceive as a single application typically comprises multiple microservices brought to work harmoniously together.
What used to be monolithic pieces of code have been broken down into ever smaller constituents, with development teams building specific services and leveraging APIs to keep them all interconnected. This enables previously unheard-of levels of agility as focused teams work on driving the evolution of each part of the component of the application.
Modern organisations have had to start thinking about how they securely interconnect the different parts of an application across each of these environments which may include private data centres, public cloud, colocation facilities, or even Edge Computing devices.
Effective application management, application security and consistent global security policies are essential components of a modern technology strategy. Ensuring easy and secure access to these applications has become a critical priority for companies.
This needs to be delivered in a way that is easy to manage as increased complexity can harm the agility of the IT environment.
Aligning development, network and security teams
The move to DevOps and agile methodologies have created friction between development teams looking to accelerate the pace of innovation and security teams. This is responsible for protecting the company against outside attacks and ensuring compliance with policies.
This friction can only be resolved by embracing automation. Companies need to integrate automation into tools to enable seamless interaction between network and security operations and DevOps and Dev teams.
The nature of the distributed cloud means that the tools that organisations use to manage and secure this environment need to be delivered in a manner that meets their specific needs.
All application delivery and application security functions need to operate across all environments consistently. This gives organisations the consistency they need, end-to-end visibility to all applications across their distributed cloud environment and more traditionally architected applications.
Supporting a continually evolving world
Because of the specific requirements of modern organisations, any platform that needs to support the modern application environment needs to accommodate a multitude of deployment environments.
The evolution of Edge Computing use cases further complicates the management of application environments. Once you delve into Edge Computing there are many locations, relatively small ones in many instances.
When an application is being consumed as a service and needs to run locally on edge devices, tools managing these environments need to accommodate this use case. This is a need even if it wasn’t initially planned
Traditional SaaS-based application delivery and security functions will always be too far away from the application to be meaningful as they are delivered through centralised POP locations.
In Edge Computing, a more innovative approach is required to deliver application delivery and security functions directly in the Edge environment. This allows us to maintain the advantages of a SaaS-based operational model while ensuring they are applied right in front of the application itself.
The distributed cloud offers the ability to create and consume services from virtually anywhere. Managing these can be challenging unless you’re leveraging platforms and tools that are designed with this use case in mind. Just as companies need to be flexible to seize market opportunities, systems enabling them to embrace distributed cloud services must cater for almost any eventuality.
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