According to a recent Forbes Insights and VMware CIO survey, empowered employees – those who have easy access to their apps from any device, are nearly five times more likely to report gains in personal productivity compared to traditional employees. And empowered employees are nearly 2 times more likely to report that apps are very important in accelerating the decision-making process in their company compared to traditional employees. It’s clear that empowering employees powers the real difference in performance across organizations. But delivering business applications with security, simplicity, and scalability can prove challenging to IT and security teams as a typical enterprise delivers upwards of 200 business apps, per the F5 Labs 2017 State of Application Delivery report. Just that sheer number can raise the complexity of securing and managing apps and can be daunting in the eyes of the IT and security staff who sets out to empower their employees. And as complexity increases, the risk for cyber threats also increases.
To help overcome these challenges, today we are excited to announce integration between VMware Workspace ONE and F5 BIG-IP APM as a Gateway. This integration helps accelerate the delivery of business applications to any device, with security, simplicity, and scale. The integrated solution helps to speed business innovation without disrupting existing legacy application access, as end users can access all applications with a consistent, modern user experience. Let’s take a look at the details of the integration.
What is Workspace ONE?
VMware Workspace ONE, powered by VMware AirWatch technology, is an intelligence-driven digital workspace platform that simply and securely delivers and manages any app on any device by integrating access control, application management, and multi-platform endpoint management. With Workspace ONE, organizations can remove siloes of cloud, desktop and mobile investments, and unify management of all devices and apps from one platform.
What is F5 BIG-IP?
F5 BIG-IP is a smart evolution of Application Delivery Controller (ADC) technology. Solutions built on the BIG-IP platform are comprised of full proxies, security gateways, traffic inspectors, firewalls, and more. F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager™ (LTM), Access Policy Manager™ (APM), and Domain Name Server (DNS) ensure the successful delivery of the digital transformation solution.
What benefits do customers see with the integration?
When combined with Workspace ONE, the portfolio of BIG-IP’s leading ADC technologies optimizes the user experience by delivering speed, scale, and resiliency. Customers can reap several benefits from the integration, including:
Access to Apps without Disruption
- This integration helps clients non-disruptively accelerate, simplify, and secure the delivery of business applications. End users are presented with a modern workspace that increases productivity with single sign-on access. IT organizations can utilize their Workspace ONE platform to extend the same user experience to legacy or custom applications. Using identity integrations, VMware provides the platform and user experience, while F5 provides the scale and application interoperability.
- Reducing Risk Across the Entire Organization
- IT now has access policies that reduce the risk of data loss across the entire organization. Policies include app access (including legacy apps), conditional access and device compliance. Workspace ONE and F5 can leverage modern authentication protocols like OAuth to offload and simplify identity and access management.
- Providing Great User Experience Across All Devices
- New features in the Workspace ONE and F5 integration, like OAuth and JSON Web Tokens (JWT) help deliver a transparent user experience while support ensuring secure access across all devices including mobile, desktop and web interface.
- Consolidation of Gateways
- Gateway-sprawl can lead to complexity in an environment. With this integration, IT can simplify management of gateways by consolidating them into a single platform using the Workspace ONE and F5 integration.
VMware and F5 can empower organizations with a secure, simple and scalable digital workspace solution that can in turn help empower employees. And empowered employees can make all the difference in driving performance as businesses continue their journey towards digital transformation. To learn more about Workspace ONE, visit https://workspaceone.com and to learn more about F5, visit https://f5.com/products/big-ip. The product integration guide is available at https://f5.com/Portals/1/PDF/Partners/apm-proxy-with-workspace-one-integration-guide.pdf. And be sure to visit both VMware and F5 at the RSA Conference from April 16-20 to learn more!
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