F5 has announced the launch of a new AI-powered assistant

The AI assistant will sit within F5 Distributed Cloud Services, helping SecOps and NetOps teams to monitor network activity, understand attack patterns and implement recommended actions.

Trained on event data from F5's entire global network, the AI assistant is equipped to help those teams simplify the oversight and security of apps, managing complex tasks quickly and ensuring a robust security posture.

It comes as organisations continue to adapt to managing apps and APIs over increasingly complex and distributed networks. According to F5's 2024 State of Application Strategy report, 88% of organisations now employ a hybrid model. More than a third (38%) now operate across six different models, up from a fifth in 2023.

Key AI assistant features include:

Suggested queries for teams to interrogate site health and posture across multi-cloud deployment. Queries can also be customised with either simple or complex prompts.

Advanced and instant summaries of security events on demand, ranked according to attack style and risk, drawing on high volumes of data to provide critical insights.

Accelerated response in the event of a zero-day threat, guiding users to identify and analyse malicious traffic patterns.

Actionable recommendations that enable users to swiftly identify threats as they emerge and put in place mitigations such as exclusion rules or blocks on malicious addresses

Automation of ongoing security and networking tasks, designed to improve operational efficiency and allow teams to focus on strategic initiatives.

The AI assistant is powered by the F5 AI Data Fabric and is designed with a natural language interface. Existing users of F5 Distributed Cloud Services can access it directly from the console.