Infotech Lead India: Anil Pochiraju, managing director, F5 Networks India & SAARC, said the company will give special focus on creating market awareness on deploying Application Delivery Controller technologies to solve web application security issues.
The company has seen many headlines recently on attacks on renowned brands, all these can be mitigated. With the increasing challenge of users bringing their own devices to work and accessing web applications, accelerated and secured access to all applications can easily be done with ADC technologies too using policies and knowing users.
Excerpts of an online interview:
What are your IT solutions for improving the competence and profitability of sectors such as retail, insurance, aviation, education, government and healthcare?
BFSI
Financial services organizations today face more than tough competition and difficult economic conditions. New security risks, increased regulation, and a rapidly changing array of mobile devices pose unprecedented challenges. In this challenging environment, success can depend on an agile IT infrastructure that can quickly accommodate change to provide outstanding customer experiences. Maintaining a sophisticated IT environment and multiple data centers is costly. In addition, compliance with government regulations and the delivery of new products and technologies, for mobile access and internet banking put further strain on already rigid budgets. Banks can create a simplified, scalable infrastructure that adapts to the ever changing landscape with F5. F5’s Application Delivery Controller (ADC) solutions bring agility to the IT infrastructure, optimizing resources and reducing complexity to deliver fast, secure, and highly available services. We solve business challenges and stand out from the competition with a flexible infrastructure that helps protect sensitive data, adapt to dynamic growth, and streamline the management of regulatory compliance.
Government
Government IT departments face many of the same challenges and mandates as their business counter parts. Just as in the private sector, they need to improve efficiency and drive down costs. High quality service for citizens is just as important as superior customer service is for businesses. With E governance gaining importance in India IT companies need to realise the immense opportunity they have to enable solutions in their own country. F5 offers a unified architecture that meets the multiple challenges of delivering government applications. F5 solutions enable the government vertical to balance web traffic and increase the performance of servers and applications, ensure constant availability of services, speed replication of databases across redundant data centers and to provide automated failover capability for disaster recovery scenarios. We adhere to all six core areas of the Payment Card Industry (PCI) data security standard for accepting online tax payments and license fees, establish comprehensive safeguards against unauthorized access and malicious application attacks, including all common web attacks, provide secure remote access for dispersed workers, manage and control access to data across multiple departments and governmental bodies with overlapping jurisdictions while reducing the number of different solutions in the network, improving network scalability and flexibility.
Telecom
Amid a data explosion, telecommunications service providers are looking at diverse technologies to improve network coverage, efficiency, and performance. The ultimate goal is to improve profitability by driving revenue and reducing infrastructure costs. F5 solutions offer unprecedented scalability, reliability, and performance on a single, carrier-grade, purpose-built platform. Service providers face the depletion of IPv4 address space and the explosion of new IP-enabled devices. A strategy to support both IPv4 and IPv6 devices and content while gradually migrates to an all-IPv6 network is needed. F5 solutions help service providers manage the depletion of IPv4 addresses and migrate to IPv6. Personalized, media-rich applications and mobile devices are putting an enormous strain on the signaling network, which manages subscriber information, network status, and session management. Service providers need a scalable, reliable control plane to satisfy customers. F5 offers a comprehensive control plane solution that optimizes and intelligently scales signaling interfaces such as Diameter, RADIUS, DNS, and SIP.
How IT will transform these businesses?
BFSI
Today we have realised the true potential of the internet and are doing all we can to exploit these options. Internet banking and ecommerce have now become a common concept today. In today’s competitive environment banks like any another industry need to adopt the latest technology solutions to deliver better and faster services. Banks have huge databases with all their customer’s names and details. Banks are synonymous with money and hence securing the network or applications for that matter becomes a critical aspect. F5 security solutions recognize attacks at both the network and application layers and stop them before they reach sensitive data. By enforcing flexible security policies, F5 products prevent unauthorized access while securing remote access for authorized brokers and agents. An F5 application security solution with geolocation and traffic management reduces the risk of data theft, limits financial exposure, and ensures regulatory compliance. The other aspect to consider is customers today are demanding access to applications in real time and banks must ensure safe and fast delivery of the same. F5 solutions optimize, accelerate, and secure access to applications, managing global traffic and maximizing resources to deliver the high availability customers demand. IT will transform BFSI business, enabling them to deliver outstanding customer service while controlling costs with greater agility. F5’s ADN solution ensures accelerated transactions, faster response time of applications, thus ensuring a seamless customer experience. Intelligent traffic management and WAN optimization features reduce potential application crashes and network congestion. Eliminating unauthorized access and malicious attacks at the entry point while ensuring compliance with financial regulation requirements, translates into lesser need to invest in additional security and policy management resources. Finally the ADN solution should be capable to handle application requests from newer business channels such as mobile phones and VoIP with little hassle.
Government
IT will transform the government vertical by delivering fast and available online government services with greater efficiency, improving productivity and disaster recovery. Though most of the projects in India are still in their initial stages we can see that IT will have a huge role in enabling these projects. IT will allow fast and secure access to criminal records, personal information, or any citizen or state related information in real time. F5 helps comply with government security regulations cost effectively—without requiring multiple appliances and with no application changes or rewrites. Securing the network also becomes important again because if sensitive data of criminals or citizens falls into the wrong hands it could lead to terrorism and other such vices. F5 takes the only approach to DNS security (DNSSEC) that enables organizations to deploy DNSSEC quickly and easily into an existing global server load balancing environment. Without IT the projects will be a physical structure. It is only through IT that one can deliver the various initiatives and solutions to the end user. IT also saves greatly on costs by saving up on buying physical hardware. With its ADC solutions a customer can access data from any location at a fast speed thus reducing the need to build multiple data centers around prime locations so that the users get what they require immediately. F5 global traffic management capabilities automate failover to secondary data centers when the primary site becomes overloaded or unavailable, eliminating downtime for users. F5 provides strategic point of control with its ADC’s to ensure that all the data that is required is given in real time. F5 also offers security on the network to keep all the sensitive data safe. Using F5 secure remote access capabilities, users can access applications and data from any device or network. The solution requires only a standard web browser and gives administrators granular policy control, simplifying administration to reduce deployment and management costs.
Telecom
With the advent of 3G and 4G leading industry experts and service providers recognize the need for converged and unified IP solutions across carriers’ control, data, and application planes, which scale, secure, and optimize 3G, 4G/LTE, and IMS traffic. This will result in a dramatic reduction of complexity and costs, making service provider networks more agile. Mobile data traffic is increasing at an enormous rate, driving many mobile operators to switch from a 3G network to all-internet protocol (IP) network, such as LTE, to manage the high volume of traffic and provide a high quality customer experience. IT is transforming the telecommunication space by providing solutions that allow the service providers to converge their services for better revenue streams. F5 technologies promote security, reliability, and availability for all traffic across packet-based networks. IT helps by boosting performance for customer self-service applications, by offloading SSL processing, balancing loads across servers, and caching redundant page element, improves scalability and availability for packet-based services such as VoIP and video-on-demand, eases management and delivery of large multimedia files across multiple storage devices, compresses content for transmission across wireless networks, including customer data sessions, software updates, and ringtones and serves as a translator at the transition point between traditional circuit switched voice networks and converged packet-based networks.
Will cloud play significant role in reducing the Capex and Opex of these sectors?
BFSI:
Investing in the cloud for business agility is an easy and effective process. The pay per use model allows financial institutions to establish its variable costs and adjust its own real needs within its gains, the number of clients, etc. This structure also makes the planning of the different departments in a condition that is more flexible and agile which is another added advantage. Banks can adopt a gradual evolutionary approach towards cloud computing services, evaluating each project based on the type of applications and nature of the data. Lower risk projects may include customer relationship management and enterprise content management. Higher risk projects will involve core business functional systems such as wealth management or core banking. Longer term, banks will have an application portfolio mix of on-premise and cloud-based services delivered across a combination of private, hybrid, and public cloud-based deployment models with the share of cloud services gradually increasing in the service mix. Private clouds are expected to increasingly become the deployment model for cloud services among banks, giving financial institutions full control through ownership and operations of their cloud systems. F5 solutions help financial services ensure manageability across public, private and hybrid environments.
Government:
F5 solutions help businesses deploy their cloud initiatives in a fast, secure and available manner – ensuring applications on the cloud run smoothly across multiple data centres deployed in different states. Cloud computing is a step forward in addressing the really big challenges like budget and deficit crises, increasing greenhouse gas emissions, and a population in need of critical government services. The cloud will also create elasticity and connectivity across the entire nation making it easy for the Central Government to scale and deploy various services. It will also reduce the expenditure significantly which would otherwise be used to build data centers or storage solutions.
Telecom:
The cloud opportunity, combined with telecom networks, is providing a platform for operators to realise new revenues and improve bottom lines. Those that investing in the capability to provide cloud services are opening the doors to holding an elevated position in the Networked Society. Telecom operators also benefit from cloud computing as users by transferring selected business functions to the cloud just as any large enterprise would. For operators building cloud infrastructure, they can become their own customers for cost efficiency and speed to market. More importantly, operators can simultaneously commercialise those cloud-based services, leading to new opportunities in both traditional and emerging segments. F5 provides intelligent, strategic points of control using proxies, polices and services in a unique, modularized delivery infrastructure capable of handling the high-volume of traffic associated with cloud computing.
Will you be giving more focus on Indian market due to the recent reforms announced by PM?
India has always been an important market for us. We will continue to focus on developing solutions for the Indian audience while we maintain our strong association with our partners.
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