Digital transformation is in full swing in the country. The threat of cyber security is also appearing from all the corners. The life of CIOs / CISOs is not a cake walk. They need right cyber security partners to help them grow. Here is the interview of the Director- Channels & Alliances, F5 – Munish Bhasin, who speaks about F5’s value proposition for the CIOs / CISOs.
“F5 plays a vital role in the journey of a CIO by enabling them to provide exceptional, secure digital experiences for their customers and internal users and continuously stay ahead of threats.”
Munish Bhasin, Director- Channels & Alliances, F5
What is the current state of digital transformation in India?
India is currently in the midst of a digital journey that is rapidly changing the country’s social, economic, and technological landscape. With growing population and new initiatives by the government, India has become one of the world’s largest digital markets, with significant investments being made in digital infrastructure, skills development, and innovation.
Where does F5 fit in the entire journey of the CIOs?
In this digital transformation era, CIOs are expected to improve organizations’ efficiency and competitiveness and address emerging security threats posed by cloud-based applications and the Internet of Things (IoTs) in real-time. F5 helps CIOs to deliver faster, more reliable, and more secure applications to customers and employees while simplifying and streamlining application delivery and security.
F5 plays a vital role in the journey of a CIO by enabling them to provide exceptional, secure digital experiences for their customers and internal users and continuously stay ahead of threats.
What are the major CIO challenges that F5 is mitigating?
The ongoing digital transformation requires CIOs to adapt to new technologies, such as cloud computing, artificial intelligence, metaverse, and edge computing. These emerging technologies increase the surface for cyber threats, forcing CIOs to keep up with the latest trends to ensure that they are equipped to handle the digital shift. F5 with its advanced security solutions such as, WAAP, WAF (Web Application Firewalls), DDoS protection, Bot protection, and SSL encryption, helps organizations to protect their critical assets and data from cyberattacks.
Today companies have adopted multi-cloud strategy including public, on-prem and on edge, how F5 is addressing the challenges?
In recent years, there has been a noticeable increase in enterprises adopting multi- cloud as well as Hybrid cloud solutions. This involves the use of public cloud, on-premises infrastructure, and edge computing, which has led to several challenges including inconsistent application performance and security across various cloud environments, automation and orchestration and edge computing. To help address the challenges that come with such environments, F5 has developed a range of solutions that offers a unified platform to manage and deploy applications across different clouds, and environments to ensure application delivery, and edge computing capabilities that help organizations deliver applications with low latency and high performance.
Overall, F5 provides enterprises with the confidence to adopt a multi-cloud strategy, knowing that their applications and data are secure, reliable, and accessible across different cloud environments.
How are you different from companies like Citrix and other modern-day companies? What is your competitive advantage?
Every company in the cybersecurity landscape is working towards the common goal of application delivery and security. The products and solutions offered by different brands are very similar but F5 offers advanced features that make it unique from its competitors. The fundamental feature that makes it distinctive is that it primarily focuses on application delivery and application security. F5 is committed to bringing a better digital world to life by securing and optimizing the applications, APIs, and infrastructure that businesses rely on – on premises, in the cloud, and at the edge.
Key consideration of CIOs is to have robust after sale, better pricing, commitment to support, how does F5 fit into the scheme of things?
The best partner strategy is to have robust after-sale services that nourish the seller-buyer relationship. F5 is committed to improving services and creating close customer relationships. With its worldwide customer support, F5 has achieved voluntary ISO certification and provides the best customer experience possible. The company’s support services are designed to remotely assist customers with specific break-fix issues regarding ongoing maintenance of the F5 products.
Therefore, F5 fits well into the scheme of after-sale which is critical for CIOs while considering a solution provider.
How many customers you have so far and what are the major verticals that F5 deployment is happening?
Today we are happy to share that F5 products are trusted by 85% of Fortune 500. Our solutions cater to businesses across verticals and are widely used by enterprises in India across industries such as banking, financial services, IT/ITES, insurance, telecom, DNB healthcare and government institutions
Name few of your major customers?
We at F5 are helping companies such as Puma, Trinity Cyber, NGINX, Minsheng Bank to strengthen their digital infrastructure and mitigate cyberattacks through our solutions. In India, F5 caters to businesses across industries and one of our major customers is Asian Paints, India’s leading paint company. With our F5 Distributed Cloud Web Application Firewall (WAF), we enabled Asian Paints to manage its complex WAF policy and compliance needs through the certified experts in the F5 Security Operations Center (SOC). We have also partnered with Deltatech Gaming Ltd, a frontrunner in the nation’s organized online gaming industry, to deploy F5 Distributed Cloud Bot Defense to help protect applications running in its AWS cloud environment from bots.
