CISO AFRICA: LIVE

At F5, our mission is based on the fact that businesses depend on apps.

Our long-standing belief that applications are the most valuable assets of any organization in the digital age has been the foundation of our strategy to become the leader in multi-cloud application services. When you combine F5’s and NGINX’s expertise powering more than half of the world’s applications across all types of environments, with Shape’s insight from mitigating one billion application attacks per day, you have a company that knows how to deliver and secure more applications, and more value, than any company in the industry.

This means that F5 is able to deliver and protect applications—revenue-generating, brandanchoring applications—from the point at which they are created through to the point when consumers interact with them. In other words, from “code to customer.” This makes the combined forces of F5, NGINX, and Shape absolutely essential to every digital organization in the world, including the world’s largest enterprises, service providers, financial and educational institutions, government entities, and consumer brands.

 CUSTOMER CHALLENGES

When F5 speaks to customers who are in the midst of a digital transformation journey, they describe their challenges with stunning similarity: Infrastructure lock-in This limits their ability to move applications from one environment to another. Many companies are now far enough along in their adoption of public cloud to realize that they have traded being locked into their on-prem infrastructure to being locked into another infrastructure environment. These companies are hungry for a multi-cloud partner to help them break this cycle of lock-in.

Complex compliance and security requirements

This complexity reduces their speed to market and sometimes impacts the end-customer experience of their applications. Given that 86% of cyber threats target applications or the identity associated with the application, and that the threat surface area is rapidly expanding as applications are disaggregated into composite services and distributed to different environments, protecting applications becomes critical to business success.

Tool sprawl that increases operational complexity and cost

Each new application architecture our customers support introduces dozens of new tools to help develop, deploy, manage, secure, and operate those applications. Stitching together best-ofbreed solutions places a burden on our customers and increases their overall costs.

Lack of visibility into application portfolio

The majority of our customers do not know how many applications they have or the extent of their security postures. In many cases, they don’t know in which environments their applications are running, or if their apps are experiencing performance issues. And in most cases, they are not able to monitor end-to-end application SLAs around availability and response times.

 WHY F5? CODE TO CUSTOMER SECURELY, AT SCALE

End-to-end multi-cloud application services

Bringing together F5’s and NGINX’s application expertise across multi-cloud environments—along with Shape’s anti-fraud capabilities for web, mobile, and APIs—reinforces our “code to customer” promise with a comprehensive, end-to-end application security offer. This has the potential to save customers billions of dollars lost to fraud, reputational damage, and costly disruptions to digital transformations.

Industry-leading application protection

The work F5 has done to protect the world’s largest enterprises, service providers, governments, and consumer brands from application-layer attacks is unparalleled. F5 is trusted by our customers the world over to deliver the most high-performing and secure digital experiences. And, unlike other companies, F5 protects their valuable applications across any environment— not tied to a single cloud, not tied to a single vendor’s stack, and not tied to hardware. Now with

the acquisition of Shape Security, F5 has the most sophisticated AI and cloud-based analytics intellectual property in the business to detect, flag, and mitigate unwanted and malicious online traffic, learn from previous attacks, and prevent the next ones.

Turnkey ecosystem integration and technology alliances

F5 integrates into the major public cloud providers—AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform—as well as private cloud and open source platforms such as VMware, Red Hat, OpenStack, and OpenShift. F5 also integrates into our customers’ automation toolkits for applying their application services into Ansible, Chef, Puppet, or SaltStack to help them provide a declarative interface in the DevOps methodology. For enabling microservices in container environments, F5 integrates with Kubernetes and Mezos to enable the application services in east-west traffic.

Flexible consumption

To keep pace with innovation, many customers need greater budget flexibility. F5 provides application services as hardware or software, and can provide flexible licensing subscriptions or pay-as-you-go options. F5 also provides Applications as a Service if you need an on-demand, self-service model.

 From the start, the Fortinet vision has been to deliver broad, truly integrated, high-performance security across the IT infrastructure.

We provide top-rated network and content security, as well as secure access products that share intelligence and work together to form a cooperative fabric. Our unique security fabric combines Security Processors, an intuitive operating system, and applied threat intelligence to give you proven security, exceptional performance, and better visibility and control--while providing easier administration.

Our flagship enterprise firewall platform, FortiGate, is available in a wide range of sizes and form factors to fit any environment and provides a broad array of next-generation security and networking functions. Complementary products can be deployed with a FortiGate to enable a simplified, end-to-end security infrastructure covering:
• Network security
• Multi-Cloud security
• Web Application Security
• Email security
• Advanced Threat Protection
• Secure Unified Access
• Endpoint security
• Management and Analytics

Our market position and solution effectiveness have been widely validated by industry analysts, independent testing labs, business organizations, and media outlets worldwide. We are proud to count the majority of Fortune 500 companies among our satisfied customers.

Fortinet is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, with offices around the globe. Founded in 2000 by Ken Xie, the visionary founder and former president and CEO of NetScreen, Fortinet is led by a strong management team with deep experience in networking and security.

https://www.fortinet.com/

Mimecast (NASDAQ: MIME) was born in 2003 with a focus on delivering relentless protection. Each day, we take on cyber disruption for our tens of thousands of customers around the globe; always putting them first and tackling their biggest security challenges together. We are the company that built an intentional and scalable design ideology that solves the number one cyberattack vector – email. We continuously invest to thoughtfully integrate brand protection, security awareness training, web security, compliance and other essential capabilities. Mimecast is here to help protect large and small organizations from malicious activity, human error and technology failure.