New security enhancements announced for the industry’s first converged application delivery and security platform
F5 highlighted AI’s rapidly growing influence on global enterprises at the first regional EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa) leg of its AppWorld 2025 roadshow recently in Dubai, UAE (29 April), underlining both the opportunities and challenges ahead.
“Modern enterprises face significant challenges when managing the intricate hybrid, multicloud IT landscape where countless applications and APIs are spread across diverse environments. As AI-powered applications become a fundamental part of these distributed systems, complexity is only set to grow,” stated Mohammed Abukhater, Regional VP, Middle East, Türkiye and Africa, F5, speaking at the event.
Report
According to F5’s newly released 2025 State of Application Strategy Report, 96% of organizations are now deploying AI models, which is up from 25% in 2023.
However, for organizations currently deploying AI models, the number one concern is AI model security. And, while AI tools are more autonomous than ever, operational readiness gaps still exist. 60% of organizations feel bogged down by manual workflows, and 54% claim skill shortages are barriers to AI development.
Central to the AppWorld agenda was how the recently announced F5 Application Delivery and Security Platform (F5 ADSP) can help organizations adapt to hybrid, multi-cloud complexities and meet the demands of modern and AI-powered applications.
F5 strengthens security capabilities
F5 ADSP is the industry’s first ADC solution that fully converges high-performance load balancing and traffic management with advanced app and API security capabilities into a single platform.
The product of years of investment and innovation, the platform is API-driven and enables consistent policies for every app, in every environment, across all form factors. It can operate seamlessly across high-performance hardware in on-premises data centers, next-generation software in virtualized and hybrid environments, and SaaS for cloud-native environments.
The platform’s capabilities were further bolstered at today’s AppWorld event, with F5 highlighting a series of broad cybersecurity enhancements, including:
Cloud-native protection with F5 NGINXaaS for Azure with NGINX app protect: NGINX App Protect as an add-on to NGINXaaS (NGINX as a Service) and is now available for Azure deployments. NGINX App Protect is a modern application security solution designed to provide robust protection against an array of threats, including sophisticated attacks, data breaches, and other malicious activities.
Scan LLMs for vulnerabilities: The F5 ADSP now features web app scanning functionality that has been purpose-built to scan for, identify, and assess security vulnerabilities in large language model (LLM) deployments.
Expanded API discovery tools: F5 has expanded its powerful API discovery tools for use across the ADSP platform to include all F5 BIG-IP deployments, enabling organizations to get full API visibility for applications that utilize BIG-IP.
Enhanced client-side defense capabilities for greater compliance: As threat actors search for new attack vectors, client-side browser-based attacks are becoming increasingly prevalent. The latest revision of the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) v4.0 now requires businesses to have client-side protection.
