NEC XON is one of the only African organisations capable of maximising customer benefits from F5 Networks solutions since it recently gained rare certifications, which has improved opportunities for African organisations to adopt secure and optimised multi-cloud architectures.

F5 Networks solutions provide security services for public, private and hybrid cloud, as well as traditional on-premise architectures, traffic management, automation and orchestration, provided via several architectures.

NEC XON, a Gold Sponsor at the F5 Networks Forum at the Maslow on April 30, will demonstrate several use cases at the event. These will include migrating from HA Proxy to F5 LTM in the banking sector, upgrading legacy F5 applications, ASM and GSM as well as migrating from LVM to F5 LTM in the financial services sector, migrating DevOps to the public cloud in the media sector, and implementing LTM in the banking sector during their break-away session.

The company's enhanced capabilities bolster several years of experience in migrating customers to the cloud on its own public cloud platform, Wingu.

"Multi-cloud gives organisations opportunities to avoid being locked in by vendors and any one cloud service provider. It helps reduce costs, improves performance, and there are numerous security benefits, such as distributed denial of service (DDoS) mitigation, better reliability, disaster recovery (DR) advantages, and more," says Mark Harris, chief marketing officer at NEC XON. "The recent availability of Microsoft's Azure and Amazon's AWS clouds, among others, signal that this trend is in high demand in South Africa and across the continent."

He says a majority of South African businesses initially seek to migrate elements of their IT infrastructure and operations to the cloud. A popular choice is disaster recovery (DR).

"Ensuring that your architecture capitalises on the unique benefits F5 offers in securing

these cloud environments, particularly in multi-cloud and hybrid environments, can make an enormous difference to the returns, efficiencies, and benefits businesses derive," says Harris. "Enterprises face the same security and compliance issues in the cloud as in traditional data centres. Public cloud typically guarantees the security of the infrastructure, but application owners take responsibility for securing their applications and data.

"Consistent security for applications among multiple cloud environments, or in hybrid environments, is still a challenge for nearly half of all organisations," he says. "F5 surveyed nearly 2 000 organisations worldwide in 2018 and 87% of them already have application-first multi-cloud architectures. Businesses in South Africa and Africa are quickly catching up with that scenario so these types of challenges are set to become more pronounced."