F5 Teams With Finance Sector

SEATTLE -- F5 Networks, Inc. (NASDAQ: FFIV), the global leader in Application Delivery Networking, today announced capabilities for maintaining business operations in the event of a crisis such as a flu pandemica scenario that has been attracting a great deal of attention in the financial sector. To address this growing interest, the Financial Banking Information Infrastructure Committee (FBIIC) and Financial Services Sector Coordinating Council (FSSCC) today begin their Pandemic Flu Exercise, which runs through October 12. The exercise is designed to enhance the understanding of systemic risks to the sector and provide an opportunity for firms to test their pandemic plans.

As Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery (BC/DR) preparedness efforts become increasingly critical across a number of industries, F5 can help customers avoid availability issues when a data center goes offline or high numbers of concurrent users need to access company networks and applications from remote locations. This is especially relevant in a crisis situation where employees’ traditional office environments are rendered unavailable.

Secure Application Access and Global Traffic Management F5’s integrated BC/DR capabilities combine the functionality of its FirePass® SSL VPN appliance, which provides secure remote and WLAN client access to application resources, with the company’s BIG-IP® Global Traffic Manager (GTM) for global load balancing. This integration helps organizations maintain user access for remote workers by virtualizing globally distributed FirePass clusters, as well as monitoring and managing user access to each FirePass VPN device. Through periodic, automatic polling of each clustered FirePass device, BIG-IP GTM can transparently direct concurrent user logon requests to a FirePass device with available licenses without any manual intervention by the user. This enables any organization to load balance application access to prevent outages and evenly handle the increased load associated with an unexpected surge of employees working remotely.

“In a crisis situation, thousands of employees may need to work remotely. F5’s Business Continuity solutions can help organizations seamlessly deal with increased remote access demands while providing employees with dependable access to corporate applications,” said Ameet Dhillon, Director of Product Management at F5. “Combining global traffic management with an SSL VPN is a textbook example of F5’s ability to leverage its broad product portfolio to meet customers’ specialized application delivery needs. With F5’s BC/DR capabilities, enterprises have a myriad of powerful ways to optimize their business systems in the face of a business crisis such as a flu pandemic.”

F5 Networks Inc.