The worldwide leader in application delivery networking, F5 Networks, proclaimed that its BIG-IP version 11 software delivers end-to-end application access control to aid federal government organizations improve their security position and reduce the risk of network- and application-based attacks. Improvements in BIG-IP v11 are particularly applicable to federal government agencies and contractors, as well as any public sector association functioning to secure its environment against cyber threats while keeping service levels high and expenditure low.

These days, IT departments are migrating more and more information and data to virtual and cloud environments to reduce overhead costs as well as boost service levels. However, the decentralized nature of cloud environments often makes it more difficult to assure application and data security. For example, threats and attacks related to DNS services and interactive Web 2.0 applications are constantly on the rise. In 2010, government agencies saw a 39 percent increase in cyber incidents.  Of late, government agencies and public sector organizations, too, have experienced their share of WikiLeaks-style breaches of classified information.

Even as they are battling a propagation of increasingly intricate attacks, the government agencies and public sector organizations are also burdened with meeting progressively severe mandates and standards. These include data center consolidation efforts, the "Cloud First" program, and federal necessities like the Federal Information Security Management Act of 2002, Federal Information Processing Standards, and Domain Name System Security Extensions.

Additionally, agencies have to do all of this while working within the constraints of today's budget deficits. Conventional static data center solutions additionally limit the IT organization. For example, to prevent DNS denial of service (DoS) attacks, many IT departments scale their DNS infrastructure by adding more DNS servers. This in turn escalates hardware costs, adds to administrative complication, and increases IT administration overhead. All this without accomplishing the linear performance scalability that's required.

In a release, VP of Product Management and Product Marketing at F5, Erik Giesa, said that "BIG-IP v11 delivers a centralized point of control for security, enabling government agencies and other organizations to respond dynamically to constantly changing web threats. We've made significant advancements in this release, for example, with iApps templates that provide appropriate configuration settings for NIST 800-53 compliance, making it quick and easy to deploy new devices and check configurations of existing ones. With BIG-IP v11, we look forward to helping our federal government customers improve their security posture and scale to support global environments--all while dramatically reducing IT infrastructure and administrative costs."

To find out more information, please visit www.f5.com.