Partnerships should be encouraged between technology companies, vendors and industry leaders to enable customers to deploy flexible, cost-effective IT solutions and minimise security threats.
This is according to Martin Walshaw, senior engineer at F5 Networks, who adds: "Companies should realise that you can't do everything by yourself. Hackers are always a step ahead of the latest security trends. Companies also face the challenge of delivering business applications to anyone, anywhere, at any time," explains Walshaw.
According to Walshaw, these situations will at times call for organisations to partner with competitors, so that a certain level of safety and quality is maintained in their services.
"There are numerous factors that should be taken into account for business applications to work efficiently," he says. "These include security, availability, mobility, performance, access and identity."
As much as organisations need to leverage the cloud, for example, Walshaw states that the challenge remains in guaranteeing and managing the security aspect. "Added to this are also concerns of size and scalability," he says.
For companies that are continuously growing, explains Walshaw, the volume of stored data increases accordingly, as do customer demands, and the number of hits on their Web sites, for example, won't be the same as they were three years ago.
"This often presents challenges for companies to stay on top of the latest security threats. How does an organisation deal with this without the costly exercise of having to uproot and build new systems all the time?" he asks.
Walshaw highlights that F5 Networks tapped into its partner support ecosystem, collaborating with Cisco, VMware and HP, among others, on its new Synthesis architectural vision, designed to bring all these factors into one solution.
"F5 Synthesis isn't built on new products and features. It's built on comprehensive solutions. We took a big-picture look at the trends affecting businesses today - from security to mobility to performance and beyond - and designed architectures that pull together specific device, network and application scenarios to help companies better identify and understand which solutions meet their network needs," he says.
He explains that, instead of IT managers buying a security box from Cisco, for example, and another from Check Point, leading to a cluster of boxes carrying different solutions, they can consolidate their security services using this technology.
F5 Synthesis also regularly runs vulnerability reports, during which it checks for threats on any of the company's platforms, and then automates a response to the particular threat.
Walshaw adds that partnerships also facilitate flexibility.
Customer requirements are never the same, remarks Walshaw, with every region presenting its own unique set.
"Partnerships allow for new problems to be solved easily on already existing platforms, affording the customer an opportunity of buying into a complete strategy, rather than in bits and pieces," he concludes.
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