Telstra bolsters F5’s network backbone to help scale F5 Distributed Cloud Services

The background

In a world that is increasingly moving online, digital experiences and applications are becoming ever more important. They are now the primary way that people interact and transact with almost every organization. That includes everything from ordering a meal delivered to your door to refinancing a mortgage to uploading and sharing a family video on social media, and everything in between.

As a multi-cloud application security and delivery services company, F5’s aim is to empower its customers—the world’s largest enterprises, service providers, financial and educational institutions, government entities, and consumer brands—to create, secure, and operate applications that deliver differentiated, high-performing, and secure digital experiences.

To help deliver on this promise, F5 teamed up with Telstra to provide global network infrastructure and further enable F5’s growing suite of application security and delivery offerings such as F5 Distributed Cloud Services. In fact, the two companies have worked together for 20 years, with F5 also providing network application security for Telstra, its customers, and partners.

The challenge

A key pillar of F5’s approach in helping enterprises with their digital transformations and cloud deployments has been rapidly growing the company’s digital footprint and points of presence (PoPs), including in Asia Pacific—with its complex compliance and policy requirements, as well as environmental challenges.

For any business looking to grow their digital footprint in Asia Pacific, it’s important to consider the regulatory landscape, along with potential pitfalls if not correctly coordinating with local governments or maintaining a presence on the ground in applicable countries. This complexity can be compounded when seeking to balance multiple different territories, revenue models, and unique business environments.

Aside from the strict regulatory and compliance requirements in the region, doing business Asia Pacific also involves navigating environmental factors impacting network performance, including heavily trafficked shipping routes, a massive fishing industry, and seismic activity—all of which can cause damage to critical subsea cables and other infrastructure carrying heavy loads, significantly diminishing the digital experiences of end users.

To improve resilience around these region-specific challenges, F5 sought to improve network redundancy and increase network diversity in Asia Pacific by removing isolated infrastructure and potential points of failure within the network. Assessing the unique set of circumstances presented by the region, F5 engaged Telstra.

The solution

Telstra owns a large amount of network infrastructure (PoPs, subsea cables, cable landing stations, etc.), holds licenses to do business, and routinely meets regulatory requirements in most countries in Asia Pacific, stemming from its decades of experience and extensive workforces on the ground.

Telstra’s technical expertise, combined with its agility, consultative approach, and detailed regional knowledge were instrumental in helping F5 navigate some of the Asia Pacific region’s challenges in building out a diverse and redundant network backbone.

Telstra helped to rearchitect F5’s network design and backbone to dramatically increase capacity across the Pacific Rim, ensuring the highest levels of diversity and resiliency within the existing subsea cable systems and terrestrial networks. This provided low latency, high availability, and physical path diversity across Asia Pacific, the United States, and Australia.

“The Asia Pacific region presents a unique set of connectivity challenges when it comes to building and maintaining subsea cable infrastructure. Telstra and F5 were able to design a solution to avoid these issues and ensure the upmost resiliency and consistency for deploying F5 Distributed Cloud Services,” said Raphael Maunier, CTO of Network and Infrastructure, F5. “The Telstra team was instrumental in developing collaborative plans to address outages, repairs, and capacity, as well as providing additional planning assistance and offering interim solutions during scheduled maintenance.”

Additionally, the deployment gives F5 the network infrastructure capabilities to provide comprehensive multi-cloud solutions aimed at helping their customers deliver extraordinary digital experiences, simplify operations, and digitize their organizations. By broadening infrastructure diversity with Telstra, F5 is able to provide services more quickly and securely to customers around the world.

“Telstra’s consultative approach combined with their technical expertise is industry-leading,” said Maunier. “We were able to rely on their expansive knowledge of the region and leverage their partnerships to navigate any region-specific issues in an extremely agile fashion. It is rewarding to collaborate with a customer-centric partner that can help lead the way through both their technology and their expertise.”

Building new mutual opportunities

The smooth delivery process and successful implementation will also yield future opportunities for Telstra and F5 to collaborate and continually improve infrastructure.

“We look forward to combining our vision of adaptive applications with Telstra’s vision of an adaptive network to expand our reach further for new and emerging markets. We’ve established a dynamic working relationship with Telstra over the years, and we aspire to be doing more together in the future,” concluded Maunier.