F5 Unleashes AI Assistant To Ease Operations Burden For NetOps, SecOps, DevOps

F5’s most recent set of releases focuses on injecting more AI into its flagship application delivery and security platform to simplify operations for all IT teams, including NetOps, SecOps, and DevOps, the company told CRN.

AI Chip technology concept. 3D render

Application delivery and security specialist F5 is taking its all-in-one platform to the next level with the addition of an AI assistant and AI security features, the company revealed this week.

F5 in February introduced its flagship application delivery and security platform (ADSP) that integrates BIG-IP, distributed cloud services, and NGINX technology into a single place for the delivery and security for every application. That’s because the company is focused on operational health and support for its longtime customers and channel partners to ease the burden of their day-to-day workflows, F5’s Chief Innovation Officer Kunal Anand told CRN.

“When you look at our partners, and our [IT] operators today, and [see] how much burden they have and how much work they have on their plate, we need to make their lives easier as much as possible,” he said of the latest additions to the ADSP.

New to the platform is F5’s AI Assistant, announced on Tuesday, which gives users and partners a single natural language interface across its BIG-IP, NGINX One, and Distributed Cloud Services offerings for one experience throughout the ADSP.

The AI Assistant feature, which has been fine-tuned and trained by F5’s own models, unlike many vendors that wrap ChatGPT around their offerings, provides F5 iRules Code Generation for teams at all levels of expertise, Anand said.

iRules are scripts that modify traffic behavior, optimize routing, and solve challenges beyond standard configurations, according to F5.

F5 AI Assistant with iRules Code Generation will help end users boil down configurations, processes, and programmability to elevate some of the burdens of increasingly complicated enterprise application and security management, the company said. The tool can be used by DevOps, SecOps, NetOps and Platform Ops teams, Anand said.

“The fact that these [IT professionals] now can simplify their workflows, we think that incident response teams are going to love it, SOC teams are going to love this as well. Our partners are thrilled to be able to have this capability that they can provide, maybe even as a service offering on top of this, back to customers who are already deploying F5 technology today,” Anand said.

F5 will continue enhancing agentic AI capabilities within the ADSP to empower XOps teams with more autonomous decision-making, enhanced threat intelligence, and security analytics.

F5 AI Assistant with iRules Code Generation is available now to partners and end customers.

ADSP With Enhanced AI Security

The ADSP is getting an additional security boost in the form of an enhanced AI Gateway with new data leakage detection and prevention capabilities, the company announced on Wednesday.

The new AI-powered data leakage detection and prevention feature allows for real-time detection and protection of sensitive data to prevent unauthorized exposure, while ensuring that enterprises remain compliant, Anand said.

Data protection and breeches in a time of increasing AI use is one of the biggest challenges that enterprises are facing today, Anand said.

“If you think about [AI] Assistant being sort of at the application layer, it’s sort of the iceberg effect where that’s above the water, but then what’s below the ice is this massive amount of data stores, applications [and] APIs services … There’s just so much more complexity now in all of these environments,” he said.

Data breaches have been made “10 times worse” with AI, Anand said.

“It’s surprising to hear how much sensitive data is making its way to these large language models that aren’t running inside the boundaries of these organizations,” he added.

Sensitive data is on the move across often unapproved AI tools, which is creating security blind spots that traditional security methods and tools are struggling to handle, said. The new security and data leakage features that will be part of F5’s AI gateway will help businesses detect and stop data leaks in encrypted and AI-driven traffic in real-time, F5 said.

The data leakage detection and prevention feature is powered by technology F5 gained during its March acquisition of LeakSignal. This technology can see AI prompts and responses to spot sensitive data, including personal information, and applies customer-defined policies to redact, block, or log it, F5 said.

“Overall, with our application delivery and security platform, what we believe is that data security should be very much part of that conversation. If we can go back to companies and tell them: ‘You’ve got this much sensitive data that’s coming in and leaving your environment,’ that’s something that they probably don’t have a lot of visibility into today and we can definitely help them with that,” Anand said.

The new data leakage detection and prevention capabilities are slated to be available later this quarter, F5 said.