Modernizing Application Environments with WWT and F5

Situation  

A prominent healthcare service provider relies on distributed applications to deliver healthcare services to its 3,000 clinics across the U.S. and other countries. Due to the provider's large geographical footprint and the personalized needs of its patients and clinicians globally, the provider knew it needed a secure infrastructure capable of scaling to meet current and future application demands. This would be essential to prevent any performance degradation and significant downtime that could adversely affect patient care and clinician experience.

The provider's IT organization also knew that aging hardware often experiences performance issues and may not have the ability to support modern applications or the latest security requirements. With this in mind, they sought to find a cloud-native solution that could scale seamlessly, improve application availability, and increase security efficacy across public and private clouds and edge infrastructure.

They turned to World Wide Technology, their technology advisor for almost 10 years, to help chart the best way forward.  

Solution

Distributed environments, like the provider's, involve multiple interconnected components spread across various locations. To reduce operational complexity and address security concerns, we needed to team up with the right OEM partner.  

WWT and F5 have been partners for more than 15 years, collaborating on solutions for application security, distributed cloud and automation. We believed that F5 Distributed Cloud Services was the answer to our client's IT requirements.  

F5 Distributed Cloud Services are SaaS-based security, networking and application management services that enable customers to deploy, secure and operate their applications in a cloud-native environment across cloud, data center and edge infrastructure at a global scale.  

With this F5 Distributed Cloud Services solution, we were able to reduce the client's maintenance and support of thousands of VPN connections and infrastructure by moving to a modern mTLS secure communication. The availability and performance of our client's applications increased as their locations could connect securely across the F5 Distributed Cloud network from local points of presence. These highly available F5 Distributed Cloud locations ensure disaster recovery, and through robust application analytics and synthetic monitoring, we significantly reduced their mean time to resolution of application issues.

From a security standpoint, the F5 Distributed Cloud solution increases security efficacy through capabilities like web application firewall (WAF) and web application and API protection (WAAP) features which integrate advanced threat detection and AI/ML intelligence, protecting our client's applications and APIs from cyber attacks.    

By bringing F5's cloud-native solution to the table, our client can fully leverage the capabilities of its applications wherever needed.  

Result  

F5's cloud-native platform is fully integrated across a single policy engine and management console, accelerating time-to-service and reducing complexity and infrastructure costs. This allows our client's IT staff to focus on the future rather than maintaining the status quo.  

The cloud-native solution also reduces latency to deliver fresh employee and patient experiences with a high-performing, multicloud and edge-focused content delivery network (CDN) that integrates with application security services.  

By establishing trust and having a comprehensive understanding of the provider's business needs and objectives, along with our longstanding relationship with F5, we were able to implement a solution that modernizes our client's application environment and improves their security posture.