2915: Securing the Future: How F5 Tackles AI Challenges

[00:00:00] As AI continues to reshape the landscape of modern architecture, how are companies balancing

[00:00:08] the rush to integrate AI with the imperative to manage rising complexities and cyber security

[00:00:15] threats?

[00:00:16] Well, today I'm joined by Cara Sprain, Chief Product Officer and EVP at F5.

[00:00:24] We're going to be delving into these challenges and also explore how F5 is pioneering AI technology

[00:00:29] based distributed cloud services, but not just to enhance, but also secure applications

[00:00:36] and APIs across diverse IT environments.

[00:00:41] And by that I mean from multi-cloud to edge and everything in between.

[00:00:46] So buckle up and hold on tight as I beam your ears all the way to Seattle, where Cara is

[00:00:52] waiting to join me today.

[00:00:55] So a massive warm welcome to the show.

[00:00:58] Can you tell everyone listening a little about who you are and what you do?

[00:01:02] No problem, Neil.

[00:01:03] My name is Cara Sprague and I am the Chief Product Officer at F5.

[00:01:07] F5 is a technology company and we provide technologies that help customers deliver and

[00:01:13] secure their applications.

[00:01:15] So if you are using a mobile phone like most people, pick any one of those major applications

[00:01:20] on your mobile phone and likely between your device and wherever that application is actually

[00:01:26] being hosted, there's F5 technology sitting between making sure that application performs,

[00:01:31] is available and your data is secure.

[00:01:33] And over the last few years, I've had so many people from F5 on.

[00:01:37] And when I was reading about IDC forecasting a major shift in IT spending towards AI initiatives,

[00:01:44] immediately turned to F5.

[00:01:46] So it's a pleasure to have you on the podcast.

[00:01:48] I've got to ask, how are you preparing your clients to integrate AI into their existing

[00:01:54] IT architectures without escalating costs?

[00:01:57] Because there seems to be a whole lot of anxiousness, nervousness and so much more going on out

[00:02:02] there as everyone almost rushes to this AI gold rush of sorts.

[00:02:06] Yeah, certainly.

[00:02:07] And let me just start by talking about what we're seeing in enterprise environments, even

[00:02:11] without the AI trend happening.

[00:02:13] Our take on this, and F5 has been in the industry of application delivery and security for 27

[00:02:18] years.

[00:02:19] We believe that enterprise IT operators are in a state of crisis.

[00:02:23] And I say those words very intentionally.

[00:02:26] What they are seeing with the increasing distribution of their applications across these hybrid

[00:02:32] multi-cloud environments, it used to be even 10 years ago, organizations were delivering

[00:02:37] their applications.

[00:02:38] Those applications were operated and hosted out of an on-premise data center.

[00:02:43] And 10 years ago, or even seven years ago, most organizations thought what would happen

[00:02:47] is, well, I'm just going to migrate those applications out of my on-premise data center

[00:02:51] and move them into a public cloud.

[00:02:54] And everything will be better.

[00:02:55] I'll get more elasticity.

[00:02:56] I'll get more flexibility and agility from the public cloud.

[00:03:00] And my operations will be more simple and agile.

[00:03:03] And the reality that we found ourselves in now in 2024, as you look up, and nine in 10

[00:03:10] enterprises now have their applications spread across a combination of their on-prem environments

[00:03:15] and public cloud.

[00:03:17] And also about nine in 10 organizations are using not one public cloud, but they're using

[00:03:22] multiple public clouds as well as edge environments.

[00:03:25] And when we look at our stats, an astonishing 38% of large organizations that we survey them

[00:03:31] every year, 38% have their applications spread across six or more different kinds of infrastructure

[00:03:38] environments.

[00:03:39] And the implication for that is just an inordinate amount of complexity now that IT operators

[00:03:45] are having to deal with.

[00:03:47] And that complexity comes along with it a bunch of costs because they're maintaining a bunch

[00:03:51] of different operational silos.

[00:03:53] You might have the team that does the applications on AWS, the team that does the applications

[00:03:57] on Azure, another team for GCP.

[00:04:00] Then there's the on-prem team that generally has been underinvested in for many years.

[00:04:04] And there's also a bunch of costs because there's inefficient cloud application traffic routing

[00:04:09] and therefore you're paying a lot of cloud egress costs.

[00:04:13] And then the final issue with this situation of complexity is the risk that's inherent

[00:04:17] in it.

[00:04:18] So again, if you look at what's happened in terms of application architectures in just

[00:04:23] the last decade or so, we've also moved from having monolithic applications and we now

[00:04:27] have much more microservice-based or container native applications.

[00:04:32] And what that means is that the application components are smaller.

[00:04:35] And again, they're distributed across these different environments.

[00:04:39] And generally for these modern apps, they're connected by these things called application

[00:04:43] programming interfaces or APIs.

[00:04:45] And those APIs are now this vast new threat surface area that largely is not protected

[00:04:52] very well.

[00:04:54] And so that's the state of enterprise IT is they're dealing with a ton of complexity, mounting

[00:04:58] costs because of these operational silos and an incredible amount of cyber risk because

[00:05:04] of this expanding threat surface area.

[00:05:06] Now when you start adding AI into the mix, AI is an accelerant for everything I just talked

[00:05:11] about.

[00:05:12] With AI, there will be more applications because there's now more business value that can be

[00:05:17] unlocked through digital efforts.

[00:05:20] With AI, there are going to be more APIs because AI applications are fundamentally a kind of

[00:05:27] modern application and they will be very AI or API driven to connect to the various models

[00:05:33] and the various backend AI services.

[00:05:36] And with AI, there's more cyber risk because the cyber actors are going to be even more

[00:05:41] well-equipped with sophisticated techniques.

[00:05:44] And even the most unsophisticated cyber actors are going to have a lot more capability at

[00:05:48] the touch of their hands.

[00:05:50] And so AI is a massive accelerant to all of these.

[00:05:54] And we believe that that means that we're at a real inflection point here and that enterprise

[00:05:58] organizations are going to have to do something dramatic to wrangle this growing complexity,

[00:06:04] cost and risks that they're seeing.

[00:06:06] So back to your question, Neil, the question of talking about how are clients going to

[00:06:09] integrate AI into their existing architectures without escalating costs?

[00:06:14] Well we see that customers and enterprise clients are going to have to do an architectural

[00:06:20] change to the way that they have been managing their hybrid and multi-cloud environments

[00:06:25] and introducing a purposeful architecture that enables them to have the hybrid and multi-cloud

[00:06:31] flexibility but without the amount of complexity, cost and risk that they are currently facing.

[00:06:38] And within that new architecture, we can use AI for good and use AI to help them actually

[00:06:44] have extra arms and legs in terms of managing their applications and understanding what

[00:06:49] their overall security posture is across these distributed environments.

[00:06:54] And so that's the work that we are taking on at F5 is really taking what is a very messy

[00:07:00] hybrid multi-cloud reality for enterprises today and we're working to make it ridiculously

[00:07:04] easy for them.

[00:07:06] And basically doing that by abstracting and providing a mesh that extends across these

[00:07:11] different IT environments and enables customers to apply consistent application traffic and

[00:07:17] application security policies, enables them to get visibility to their applications and

[00:07:22] APIs across these disparate environments and enables them to apply AI-driven capabilities

[00:07:28] to gain scale and leverage across it.

[00:07:31] Wow, I mean just listening to you there, thinking about everything you've just said and also

[00:07:36] throwing legacy tech building technical debt over time as well and at the same time so

[00:07:42] many businesses are being challenged to do more with less.

[00:07:46] It's an exciting and daunting time at the same time isn't it?

[00:07:50] I think it is really exciting and one of the things that I get really excited about

[00:07:54] is if you look at the history of enterprise tech over the last 80 years or so, it's always

[00:07:59] been about the next new thing, the next new architecture.

[00:08:03] Go from mainframes, go to client server type models, go to and evolve into cloud, now go

[00:08:08] to containers.

[00:08:09] And the reality is when you look at an average organization that's been around for any period

[00:08:13] of time, they have all of these technologies and all of these architectures sitting in their

[00:08:18] environment because we're never actually able to decommission anything.

[00:08:22] And what's really interesting and new is as we're seeing capability now to marry and bridge

[00:08:28] across these traditional or more legacy architectures with the modern and helping customers move

[00:08:33] forward recognizing that they're going to have these mixed environments.

[00:08:37] I think that's a very big paradigm change that we're seeing today.

[00:08:40] It really is and given the rapid evolution of AI technologies and the speed of change,

[00:08:46] what strategies should any business leader, listing or company adopt to efficiently incorporate

[00:08:52] AI into their networks and simultaneously manage that associated security risks with

[00:08:58] it because again, big talking point right now is a lot of people knowing what they need

[00:09:02] to do but being very careful about them.

[00:09:04] Well, I mean much like we've seen over the past decade or so with the evolution of public

[00:09:09] cloud even as AI comes along in fact it's even more true, no single cloud is going to

[00:09:14] be perfect for every application or every AI model.

[00:09:18] And so I expect to see organizations continue to do what they have been doing which is picking

[00:09:23] the right environment for their application based on the application needs.

[00:09:29] And that means even more so today that it's important that these customers think deliberately

[00:09:35] about how do they build a hybrid multi-cloud architecture that they can scale within their

[00:09:41] organization.

[00:09:42] So when you start thinking about I need to take advantage of this kind of coding assistant

[00:09:46] over in this particular cloud, I need access to this other special purpose AI model in

[00:09:52] this other cloud.

[00:09:53] I want access to this particular kind of AI capability that's sitting very close to my

[00:09:58] CRM data in this other SaaS provider.

[00:10:02] That's why we fundamentally believe in a five that AI is going to be accelerating this move

[00:10:07] towards more distributed environments and more hybrid and multi-cloud and which is why

[00:10:12] it's even more imperative today that organizations think carefully about what they do to architect

[00:10:16] their operation around that.

[00:10:18] And this feels like a perfect moment to introduce everyone listening to F5's new AI-based distributed

[00:10:24] cloud services that aim to support and secure AI-based applications across diverse IT environments.

[00:10:32] Can you discuss some of the unique challenges and solutions involved in securing such a

[00:10:38] wide array of deployment scenarios?

[00:10:40] Yeah, I'll touch on a couple.

[00:10:42] So the first one I'll talk about is API security.

[00:10:45] So I talked earlier about how as applications have been refactored and broken down from monoliths

[00:10:51] into more microservice-based applications, that is giving rise to vast array of public

[00:10:58] APIs that are often exposed to the open internet.

[00:11:02] And those APIs present a new threat surface area and in fact are the target for most cyber

[00:11:08] attacks on applications these days.

[00:11:11] Our research from our own distributed cloud services shows that API or API targeted attacks

[00:11:17] are making up 80, sometimes in a month 90% of the attacks that we're seeing flow through

[00:11:22] our systems and that we're protecting our customers from.

[00:11:26] And so API security is incredibly important today.

[00:11:30] And as we venture into this AI-driven world, API security is going to continue to be even

[00:11:35] more and more important.

[00:11:37] And I think it's important for organizations to recognize that API security needs to look

[00:11:41] different from what we've been doing for the past decades with regard to web application

[00:11:46] security.

[00:11:47] APIs have an entirely different set of attack vectors that cyber criminals can exploit,

[00:11:54] and they require companies to understand and get in front of even more so shift left in

[00:11:59] terms of understanding the code base that developers are working on, what are the APIs that they

[00:12:04] have in that code base?

[00:12:05] And so it requires an amount of code testing and code scanning all the way to inline traffic

[00:12:11] discovery, to understand what APIs are actually getting called and what kind of traffic is

[00:12:16] going back and forth between them, as well as enforcement to be able to block the bad

[00:12:21] traffic and the bad calls to those APIs.

[00:12:23] And they also involve deep understanding of the API schema, right?

[00:12:27] Because the traffic itself might not look harmful, but it could be exploiting something

[00:12:33] in the API schema and the actual underlying code logic that actually causes a company

[00:12:39] to have data breached or enable attackers access to functions that you don't want them to have

[00:12:45] access to.

[00:12:46] So the net of it is that API security is more important today than ever.

[00:12:51] It will be even more important as AI becomes more and more adopted by enterprises.

[00:12:59] And API security is fundamentally different from the security required for web app security.

[00:13:05] And so that's a big space and a solution space that we are working on at F5 and an area that

[00:13:10] we encourage all organizations to be really focusing on and prioritizing just given the

[00:13:15] amount of attacks that we're seeing on APIs.

[00:13:17] So that's one.

[00:13:18] And then the second area or solution area that I touch on is this challenge of how do

[00:13:23] you, how do you provide capabilities to customers that span deployment scenarios, everything

[00:13:28] from their on-prem environments where they may or may not need some sort of scale up

[00:13:34] hardware based solution to their public cloud environments, where maybe they want a more

[00:13:38] a solution that they own and manage like a deployable appliance to a deployment model

[00:13:44] of SaaS and managed services.

[00:13:46] Because F5 is truly unique in that we are the only company that spans all of those deployment

[00:13:51] scenarios.

[00:13:52] And so the challenges that we have been working on to overcome in that space is ensuring that

[00:13:57] customers get a consistent set of capability and experiences

[00:14:02] for the key functions that they're looking for across those different deployment scenarios.

[00:14:06] And we've also very much been focused on ensuring that customers have maximum flexibility

[00:14:11] and their consumption models across them.

[00:14:14] So at F5, we've remained committed to providing customers a choice of a perpetual

[00:14:19] licensing model, despite the fact that many other tech vendors have forgone perpetual.

[00:14:24] We recognize it's still an important model that many of our customers need for certain

[00:14:27] applications and situations.

[00:14:29] We support subscription licensing and term licensing, and we also support consumption type

[00:14:34] models. And again, the ethos that we have here is we must be able to bridge

[00:14:39] everything that customers have invested in historically to what we expect them to want

[00:14:43] to embrace going forward, as well as span across all of these different infrastructure

[00:14:49] environments that they are now deploying their applications and their data into, as

[00:14:54] well as accommodate the different business needs and requirements of their applications.

[00:14:58] And so that's really what we've been working on.

[00:15:01] So as organizations increasingly deploy applications across multiple clouds

[00:15:06] and platforms, et cetera, how do you at F5 ensure consistent application

[00:15:11] performance and security in such a fragmented landscape?

[00:15:15] Because I would imagine that's what keeps a lot of business leaders up at night and

[00:15:18] frustrates users on occasions, too.

[00:15:21] Yeah, well, and this is precisely this is what F5 does.

[00:15:24] We are fundamentally a provider of hybrid and multi-cloud application security

[00:15:29] and delivery capabilities.

[00:15:31] So a lot of companies or a lot of organizations might know us originally as the load

[00:15:35] balancing company. Back in the late 90s, we grew up basically

[00:15:40] optimizing the performance for the dotcom companies in the late 90s during the boom.

[00:15:45] And we evolved through the 2000s to have a lot more capability outside of load

[00:15:50] balancing. And so we are also the leader in hardware and software based web app

[00:15:54] firewalls. We have capabilities and ingress controllers, capabilities and distributed

[00:15:59] denial of service protection, anti-bot API security.

[00:16:03] Basically, if you think about the key functions that you would want to see

[00:16:08] in the line of application traffic in the data path, F5 is a

[00:16:12] leader in providing those functions and providing those functions through a set

[00:16:17] of solutions or product families where you can consolidate all within a single

[00:16:21] a single piece of technology.

[00:16:23] And so in terms of ensuring consistent application performance and security in this

[00:16:28] fragmented landscape, for us, what that means is we have

[00:16:32] solutions and product families that deploy into each one of these application

[00:16:36] scenarios. We have our big IP product family, which is for traditional applications

[00:16:41] across on-prem and public cloud environments.

[00:16:44] We have Nginx, which is a application security and delivery

[00:16:48] solution for microservice based or container native applications.

[00:16:52] And that also deploys from on-prem to public cloud to any Kubernetes environment.

[00:16:57] And we also have a distributed cloud services product family, which is

[00:17:01] SaaS and managed services.

[00:17:03] And that also provides application security and delivery solutions for customers

[00:17:08] in a variety of deployment scenarios.

[00:17:10] And across those three product families, each of them are fundamentally hybrid and

[00:17:15] multi-cloud, meaning that customers can get consistent capability,

[00:17:20] consistent policy, consistent operations, regardless of where they are running

[00:17:25] those services. And so it really helps customers simplify their IT operations because

[00:17:29] it means that they no longer need the Azure security team specifically or

[00:17:34] the AWS security team or the on-prem security team.

[00:17:38] If you have one security team, one set of policies, one security posture that you're

[00:17:42] managing across your app environments, it's a dramatic simplification to your

[00:17:46] operations.

[00:17:48] And of course, the transition to AI enhanced networks also introduces

[00:17:52] whole new array of complexities and potential vulnerabilities.

[00:17:56] I'm not sure how much you will be able to share about your secret sauce on how you do

[00:18:00] this, but how do you address these new cybersecurity threats that accompany

[00:18:05] AI integration? We hear a lot about the shiny new AI and the great stuff it brings, but

[00:18:10] not so much about securing it.

[00:18:11] So how do you address this?

[00:18:14] Yeah, this is very interesting because there's two sides to this, right?

[00:18:17] One side is that there's AI powered threats and probably the most

[00:18:22] widely publicized about them today are the bots or sometimes called the

[00:18:26] automation. So like malicious bots, these are the ones that, for example, have prevented

[00:18:29] customers from being able to get their Taylor Swift tickets.

[00:18:32] These are the ones that suck up all of the cool sneakers on the day of the launch.

[00:18:37] And those are those protecting yourself against those requires very specific

[00:18:42] capability. It requires that you're able to discern from the

[00:18:46] way that the traffic comes into your application, whether or not it's

[00:18:51] being accessed by a human or bot and whether or not it's a good thing or a bad

[00:18:55] thing. And that's something that F5 has been doing for years.

[00:18:59] And we have a highly sophisticated anti-bot solution that actually is

[00:19:04] based on incredible signal intelligence from the end user, end user

[00:19:08] devices, or in this case, the it's not really a user at that point would be an end machine

[00:19:12] device so that we are actually able to tell good traffic from bad and human from bots.

[00:19:17] So that's one piece of technology of protecting against AI powered threats.

[00:19:21] Now, the other side of the coin then is how do you protect AI models

[00:19:25] and AI services themselves? And that's another very fascinating domain.

[00:19:30] AI models and AI services also have their own

[00:19:35] unique set of threat vectors that are increasingly being exploited.

[00:19:38] So, for example, model poisoning attacks or prompt injection

[00:19:42] are just to just to name a few.

[00:19:45] And there there's a set of security technologies that have

[00:19:49] worked in the past. And so you can protect against some of these threat vectors using

[00:19:53] some traditional tools and technologies like web app firewalls, like API

[00:19:57] security. But there's also a number of them that are going to require

[00:20:02] new capabilities and new technologies.

[00:20:05] And we are hard at work at F5 developing those new capabilities and technologies so that

[00:20:09] we can enhance our existing inline offerings with that.

[00:20:14] And I think it was Mark Twain that said history doesn't repeat, but it does

[00:20:18] rhyme. So reflecting on some of the past trends where IT leaders may be

[00:20:22] have struggled with cloud spend and network complexity.

[00:20:26] Are there any lessons that you might have learned that are being applied to prevent similar

[00:20:30] challenges with AI adoption? Are there any parallels here?

[00:20:34] I think there are real parallels. And it goes back to what I

[00:20:38] shared earlier, which is a lot of companies have sort of stumbled into

[00:20:42] a hybrid and multi-cloud state.

[00:20:45] They got there incrementally because maybe they started out saying we're going to just

[00:20:49] use this one public cloud provider.

[00:20:51] And then their developer team came and said, no, this other one is more optimal for this

[00:20:55] application. We need an exception.

[00:20:56] But largely by accident, we've ended up with 88

[00:21:01] percent of organizations now deploying applications across hybrid and public cloud

[00:21:05] environments and organizations adopting multiple public clouds.

[00:21:08] So we are here.

[00:21:09] And I think the big question that these organizations now face is, well, are you going to

[00:21:13] stumble along equally into the era of AI

[00:21:18] with a similar approach? And at least F5's perspective and my perspective

[00:21:22] is that is very suboptimal.

[00:21:24] And in fact, I use the word crisis earlier.

[00:21:27] I would even go so far to say that the organizations that do not really

[00:21:31] take a careful step back and really think purposefully about how do you

[00:21:35] architect yourself to be a hybrid and multi-cloud organization are going

[00:21:40] to be the ones that struggle the most in taking advantage of AI.

[00:21:43] And I suspect for many business leaders listening, their applications now

[00:21:47] residing in numerous environments from the edge to the cloud,

[00:21:52] it does get very complex.

[00:21:53] So how do you at F5 use your technology to simplify that management

[00:21:58] and simplify that security of all those applications for IT teams?

[00:22:02] Because this seems to be something that you guys excel at.

[00:22:05] Yeah, it certainly is. And I'll use one example.

[00:22:07] We have a capability within what I talked about, our distributed cloud services.

[00:22:10] So we have a capability in that that is, it plays in the space of network

[00:22:15] connectivity and app to app connectivity.

[00:22:18] And so effectively what it means for organizations is that they are able

[00:22:22] to very seamlessly connect at a network layer, the different infrastructure

[00:22:27] environments that their applications are deployed into,

[00:22:30] and they are able to connect at an application layer.

[00:22:34] So layers four through seven in the ISO stack, they're able to connect those

[00:22:38] applications that reside across and within those infrastructure environments.

[00:22:42] And so the ways that it simplifies their lives is instead of using a management

[00:22:47] console for each of these environments, they're able to access and manage

[00:22:51] these distributed applications from one management console.

[00:22:54] Instead of having four or five different variants of a web app firewall

[00:22:58] policy, they're able to manage one and deploy it very easily to all

[00:23:02] of their environments so that they can have a consistent posture.

[00:23:06] It means that they are very easily to manage IP address overlaps, which for

[00:23:10] any organization that is trying to migrate applications from one environment to

[00:23:14] another, they know that IP address overlaps is just an incredible amount

[00:23:18] of toil for these network teams to have to deal with.

[00:23:22] And the F5 distributed cloud solution basically simplifies that and it gets rid of that toil.

[00:23:27] And so that's one really specific example of how we're making this much more easy for teams.

[00:23:33] Another example I'll use is in our franchise, which is the Big IP franchise,

[00:23:38] which a lot of organizations might know F5 for.

[00:23:41] Big IP is our, I talked before, it's our high performance application security and

[00:23:46] delivery solution more targeted to traditional applications.

[00:23:50] And it can be deployed as a hardware appliance or as a virtual appliance.

[00:23:55] And what we've been doing and investing in heavily in Big IP over the last few years

[00:23:59] is significantly re-architecting the control plane of it so that it is much,

[00:24:05] much more simple for organizations to manage the lifecycle around these deployable assets.

[00:24:11] And to give you a sense of what that means today without this re-architected offering,

[00:24:15] what organizations have to do whenever they want to upgrade or

[00:24:18] patch one of these things is they have to get a change window arranged from,

[00:24:22] call it the dozens of application owners that have applications that are using

[00:24:27] that underlying technology, those change windows are usually on the order of two hours.

[00:24:32] And in that change window, they have to fully take down the entire device and

[00:24:36] basically wipe the entire instance and bring it back up.

[00:24:40] With our re-architected offering, we are able to actually do those upgrades fully

[00:24:45] autonomously, and we're also able to do them in a matter of minutes.

[00:24:49] And that is a huge simplification in the life of a network operator or

[00:24:53] anybody who's responsible for managing their overall ADC infrastructure.

[00:24:57] So I talked about two examples there.

[00:24:59] One is an example of organizations that are trying to tame their hybrid and multi-cloud complexity.

[00:25:04] And then the second example is just for a network operator that is looking to remove toil

[00:25:09] and help with lifecycle management in their own world of ADC, a lot of work we've been focused there.

[00:25:15] Well, as we look ahead, the pace of technological changes continue to go at breathtaking speed.

[00:25:21] I suppose as it continues to evolve, the intersection of AI and network technology

[00:25:27] and so many things happening there.

[00:25:29] Are there any big challenges or opportunities that you see ahead that you're looking at addressing

[00:25:35] at F5 or something that just excites you and you're monitoring closely?

[00:25:39] What are you seeing here?

[00:25:40] Well, look, I personally believe that AI is a generational shift.

[00:25:46] It's going to be bigger than cloud.

[00:25:48] It will be just a tremendous change in the way that all knowledge workers get their work done.

[00:25:54] And it will dramatically change the IT environments and IT, the way that we deliver capabilities

[00:26:00] to humans to digitize various parts of their lives.

[00:26:03] And so we are gearing up at a size incredibly around AI.

[00:26:07] We're embedding it across our business.

[00:26:09] We're embedding it across our products and across our operations because we see this as a tremendous

[00:26:14] opportunity both for F5 as well as for our customers to really accelerate and improve their digital world.

[00:26:21] Well, I absolutely love chatting with you today.

[00:26:24] But before I let you go, I think one other thing that we've not touched on is there's a real pressure

[00:26:29] on everyone, all of us to be in a state of continuous learning, to keep up to speed with the pace of technological change.

[00:26:36] So as somebody right in the heart of all this, where or how do you self-educate?

[00:26:41] Anything you can share around that?

[00:26:43] So I do a few things.

[00:26:44] So I am an avid person who works out.

[00:26:47] I work out five to six days a week, usually for about 45 minutes to an hour.

[00:26:50] And oftentimes when I'm working out, I will be watching some sort of documentary or other type of educational material

[00:26:58] to stay on top of world events and stay on top of deeper topics.

[00:27:02] Another thing is I have a regular set of newsletters that I receive every day that I check.

[00:27:08] So I get my news through a fairly neutral news source every day, as well as tech blogs.

[00:27:15] So I read a lot of the Fortune blogs as well as the Morning Group.

[00:27:19] Love it. Great advice.

[00:27:20] I'll be checking a few of those out.

[00:27:22] And for everyone listening, just wanting to find out a little bit more information about F5,

[00:27:26] explore some of the topics we talked about today or contact you or your team.

[00:27:30] What's the best starting point for everything?

[00:27:32] Yeah. Yeah. Please visit F5.com.

[00:27:35] That's our website.

[00:27:35] You can also follow F5 on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook or Instagram.

[00:27:40] And you can find me on LinkedIn.

[00:27:42] I'm KSprayGo8 on LinkedIn.

[00:27:44] Awesome. Well, I'll add links to everything just so everyone can find you nice and easily.

[00:27:49] And we covered so much today.

[00:27:51] And from the way most organizations deployed and secured their apps used to be relatively simple.

[00:27:57] It is changing.

[00:27:58] But I love how you guys at F5 are simplifying that.

[00:28:01] And I think we could talk about so much of what we mentioned today for another hour at least.

[00:28:07] But just thank you for simplifying it, putting it in a language everyone can understand.

[00:28:11] Really appreciate your time today and simplifying this important message.

[00:28:14] Thank you.

[00:28:15] Thank you, Neil. Appreciate it.

[00:28:17] One of the things I loved about my conversation with Cara today is that intricate dance between AI integration

[00:28:24] and the need for robust security measures all across a hybrid multi-cloud environment.

[00:28:30] And as we navigate this journey, it's clear that understanding the architecture and deploying the right strategies

[00:28:38] are essential for harnessing AI's potential without succumbing to its complexities.

[00:28:43] There is an alternative.

[00:28:45] Quick question, straw poll everyone.

[00:28:47] How prepared do you feel that your organization is to integrate in AI into your IT systems?

[00:28:54] Are you ready to face the new cybersecurity challenges that come with it?

[00:28:58] Please join the discussion, share your experiences as we continue to decode these complexities of AI in the enterprise IT landscape.

[00:29:07] And you can do that by emailing me techblogwriteratoutlook.com, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram at neilchughes.

[00:29:13] Let me know.

[00:29:15] But it's quitting time for me.

[00:29:16] I'll be back bright and early tomorrow morning with another guest.

[00:29:20] But just a big thank you for listening as always.

[00:29:22] And until next time, don't be a stranger.