Navigating the Cloud: Challenges and Solutions for Businesses in a Multi-Cloud Era

CXOToday has engaged in exclusive interview with John Dumalac, Global Sales VP of Distributed Cloud Services at F5

1. What challenges do businesses face when it comes to deploying, securing, and operating their applications in a cloud-native environment?

Applications are at the heart of all digital experiences, and when they’re secure, they unlock value and potential. But just as apps have become critical for life online, they’ve also become harder to protect. Today’s apps are built on multiple architectures, distributed over various cloud environments, and connected by an exploding number of APIs. According to Deloitte’s most recent research, SMBs that use the cloud grow 26% quicker and are 21% more lucrative, while businesses praise the cloud’s resilience, agility, flexibility, and scalability. However, cloud security concerns continue to prevent organizations from fully adopting the cloud, resulting in reduced cloud ROI. Below are some of the hybrid and multi-cloud challenges that businesses face:

• Provisioning: When you have more than one cloud, you need to provision more than one environment before you can deploy applications to it. To deploy applications across multiple clouds, Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) tools can streamline provisioning, but compatibility issues may arise. Using a cloud-agnostic solution that abstracts workloads from underlying clouds eliminates the need to provision each cloud separately, overcoming IaC limitations for multi-cloud scenarios.
• Application Deployment: Deploying applications to multiple clouds can be complex due to different deployment processes. Using third-party release automation tools can simplify the process, but adjustments may still be needed. The organizations will be still required to make some manual changes, because you won’t be able to use the exact same configuration to deploy to each cloud

• Load Balancing: Balancing traffic across multiple cloud instances is crucial to avoid performance issues and cost wastage in a multi-cloud setup. Traditional load-balancing solutions are challenging due to vendor-specific limitations. A unified networking and monitoring platform, coupled with an automated Application Delivery Network, addresses these challenges and optimizes multi-cloud benefits.
• Cost Mitigation: Cloud providers charge substantial fees for data egress, incentivizing them to keep workloads and data within their own clouds. A well-designed multi-cloud architecture can mitigate costs by minimizing inter-cloud data movement, and using an Application Delivery Network to store frequently accessed data further reduces egress fees while offering additional security and performance benefits.
• Monitoring: Monitoring multiple clouds is a monumental task, even with Application Performance Monitoring (APM) tools. APM tools designed for multi-cloud environments can offer some assistance but may not pinpoint issues across clouds. Alternatively, abstracting workloads from underlying clouds simplifies monitoring, focusing on one “logical cloud” and deployment tools.

At F5, we understand these challenges and strive to help our customers simplify hybrid and multi-cloud environments. We make it easy to deploy and maintain applications and APIs faster, smarter, and more cost-effectively using automation and advanced deployment techniques such as dynamic security policies and API discovery. We also bring distributed ecosystems into focus with a single SaaS-based management console, robust troubleshooting tools, and insights from application behavior. With F5, customers can maximize app performance and reduce security headaches—everywhere their apps are deployed.

2. What are the benefits of F5 Distributed Cloud Services, and how do they contribute to scalability, flexibility, cost management, data security, and more?

Distributed cloud computing decentralizes resources to improve closeness to data sources, addressing difficulties that centralized models ignore. It offers benefits like data localization, decreased latency, greater performance, cost-effectiveness, and a better user experience. According to SlashData, 55% of global developers are already using the distributed cloud approach in some form for their work.

And to strengthen organizations in this digital world, where organizations are adopting a distributed cloud approach, we brought forth our F5 Distributed Cloud Services. These are SaaS-based security, networking, and application management services that enable customers to deploy, secure, and operate their applications in a cloud-native environment wherever needed–data center, multi-cloud, or the network or enterprise edge.

Through F5’s Distributed Cloud Platform, we provide flexibility as these services are centrally managed but can be deployed anywhere the app needs to be to maximize business impact and deliver a superior customer experience. We also enable our customers to automate application deployment, scaling, security, secrets/keys, and operations, as the control plane removes the overhead of managing individual Kubernetes clusters. In addition, it also provides complete infrastructure management for heterogeneous cloud and edge environments.

3. How is F5’s Distributed Cloud Services, the SaaS-based security, networking, and application management services, helping businesses?

F5 Distributed Cloud Platform provides  SaaS-based security, networking, and application management approach, providing businesses with a lot of advantages. The F5 Distributed Cloud Platform allows businesses to gain scalability and flexibility while lowering infrastructure costs and ensuring global reach for continuous service delivery. Businesses can streamline operations and focus on key skills by automating updates and maintenance, implementing strong security measures, and providing a unified administration interface. Integration capabilities and performance optimization improves the overall effectiveness of managing and safeguarding applications and makes F5 Distributed Cloud Services an attractive option for enterprises looking for a modern, cloud-centric approach to their IT infrastructure requirements.

4. In what ways is India contributing to F5 globally as a market?

India is a significant market for F5, and we have a base of 5000+ customers. Operating for more than two decades in the country, F5 has its largest R&D center in Hyderabad, with people working towards new developments and innovations. In India, we have a robust partner ecosystem consisting of distributors, resellers, and system integrators. Along with this, we also have a dedicated team that manages our channel partner network and drives growth in the region.

Our focus in India has been on application security and cloud-based services, resulting in the expansion of our operations. F5 products and solutions are widely used in various industries such as banking, financial services, insurance, telecom, etc. To cater to the specific needs of the Indian market, we are committed to investing in the region to expand our channel partner network and drive growth. The new excellence center in Bengaluru, an extension of our current R&D center in Hyderabad, supports our ambition to become a global leader in multi-cloud application services. The center will play a critical role in driving research, development and product innovation for F5 as the company expands its portfolio of multi-cloud application security and delivery solutions.

5. What is the potential of India as a market, especially with the ongoing digitization wave in the country?

India is one of the world’s largest and fastest-growing digital consumer marketplaces, according to Nielsen’s India Internet Report 2023, India already had over 700 million active internet users by Dec 2022. As digital capabilities increase and connectivity becomes more widespread, technology is poised to rapidly alter every area of India’s economy. This is anticipated to provide enormous economic value while also changing the nature of labor for Indians. The public and private sectors are driving digital consumption growth. The government has recruited over 1.2 billion Indians in its biometric digital identity program. Aadhaar has brought over 10 million enterprises onto a digital platform through a goods and services tax. Digital applications are expected to proliferate across most sectors of India’s economy. Core digital sectors such as IT and business process management, digital communication services, and electronics manufacturing could double their GDP level to $355 billion to $435 billion by 2025. According to a report by McKinsey Global Institute on ‘Digital India’ Sectors such as agriculture, education, energy, financial services, healthcare, logistics, and retail, as well as government services and labor markets could create $10 billion to $150 billion incremental economic value in 2025.

The coming years will definitely witness the Indian era when it comes to digital growth and we at F5 are working towards being a part of this by helping businesses leverage the digital developments in India.

6. What are the technology trends that businesses must look out for, including AI, Edge Computing, AISecOps, Telemetry, API Testing, and more?

The ever-evolving world of technology has an immense impact on businesses, modifying how they operate, develop, and remain competitive. In recent years significant trends have evolved, influencing multiple facets of the business ecosystem. Businesses are traversing a changing technical terrain that includes the integration of artificial intelligence and edge computing, developments in cybersecurity operations, and the growing relevance of API Security. Telemetry, cloud-native technologies, 5G, and robotic process automation all play an important role in the industry’s pursuit of sustainability, connection, and efficiency. Below are some more technology trends that businesses must look out for:

• AI Trust, Risk and Security Management (AI TRiSM) – Organizations that use AI models managed with TRiSM can enhance bias control in decisions while increasing fairness in AI-driven applications.
• AI-Augmented Development – AI-enabled development tools Integrate with an engineer’s development environment to generate application code, transform legacy code into modern languages, and enable. Improve design-to-code and application testing capabilities.
• Industry Cloud Platforms – Industry cloud platforms (ICPs) are tailored cloud proposals specific to your industry and can further be tailored to your individual organization’s needs.
• Intelligent Applications – Infused with data from transactions and external sources, intelligent applications push insights within apps business users already use, so they won’t need separate business intelligence tools to assess and understand the state of their business.
• Democratized Generative AI – Democratizing access to generative AI across the organization offers the potential to automate a broad range of tasks, boosting productivity, reducing costs and offering new opportunities for growth
• Augmented Connected Workforce – This method accelerates digital skills for all kinds of job. It enables digital technologies to minimize time to competency for new hires.