Zakeer Zubair, Director of Solutions Engineering for the Middle East, Türkiye, and Africa at F5, explains that at GITEX 2025, F5 will showcase its Application Delivery and Security Platform (ADSP), empowering organizations to secure AI, APIs, and multicloud environments while strengthening digital resilience and collaboration across the Middle East.
What are F5’s key priorities for participating in GITEX this year, and how does the event support your mission to secure digital experiences across the Middle East?
F5 is set to showcase how its Application Delivery and Security Platform (F5 ADSP) is empowering organisations in the region to overcome security challenges around artificial intelligence (AI), application programming interfaces (APIs), and multicloud networking at our Stand No. H25-C40, Hall 25, in GITEX Global.
GITEX offers a fantastic opportunity to meet many of our key partners from the UAE, GCC, and the wider region. Face-to-face meetings are valuable, providing an opportunity to discuss market trends and challenges, customer needs, and how we can continue to enhance our collaboration to serve our customers better. We will host many meetings with partners and customers at GITEX to strengthen relationships and help organisations improve their security.
The Middle East is facing increasingly complex cyber threats—how is F5 helping enterprises in the region strengthen their application and API security posture?
From a big picture perspective, enterprise IT teams are in crisis. To deliver digital experiences that customers demand, they are managing hundreds of applications connected by an exploding number of APIs, distributed across multiple environments.
90% of customers deploy apps and APIs across a combination of on-premises and cloud locations. Nearly 40% deploy across six different environments.
This adds operational complexity, additional cost, and increased cyber risk. On top of this, enterprise adoption of AI is driving rapid growth in applications and APIs, which will further intensify these challenges. We believe this set of escalating challenges is untenable and, in fact, we’ve given it a name: the “Ball of Fire.”
F5 helps to tame the Ball of Fire across every app, every API, anywhere. We specifically built the F5 Application Delivery and Security Platform to put control without compromise into organizations’ hands—deployable in any form factor, with single policy management, rich analytics and insights, fully programmable data planes, lifecycle automation, and unified policies. This means fewer blind spots, stronger defenses, and better business outcomes.
F5 recently acquired CalypsoAI to bolster its GenAI security capabilities. How does this acquisition enhance your ability to protect AI models, agents, and workflows across enterprise environments?
CalypsoAI’s award-winning platform brings real-time threat defense, red teaming at scale, and data security to enterprises racing to deploy generative and agentic AI. These capabilities will be integrated into the F5 Application Delivery and Security Platform (ADSP) to create the most complete solution for securing AI inference.
CalypsoAI’s adaptive AI security capabilities deliver proactive and continuous AI protection regardless of model or cloud, including:
- Adversarial threat protection: Protection against new AI threats like prompt injection and jailbreak attacks with real-time threat management. Proactive red-teaming tests against more than 10,000 new attack prompts each month to produce a risk score.
- Secure data: Guardrails detect and prevent sensitive data leakage and policy violations at runtime and audit AI interactions across models.
- Unified visibility and governance: Centralised observability, policy control, and audit logs make it easier to meet GDPR/EU AI Act requirements across SaaS, on-premises, and hybrid environments.
With the rise of prompt injection attacks and rogue model behaviors, how is F5 addressing the unique risks introduced by generative and agentic AI in enterprise settings?
F5 addresses the unique risks of generative and agentic AI through a zero-trust, application-aware security approach.
The F5 AI runtime security acts as a checkpoint to inspect all inbound prompts and outbound responses. This technology specifically mitigates prompt injection attacks in real-time by detecting manipulation attempts and enforcing guardrails. For agentic AI, we offer Distributed Cloud Bot Defense to identify and block sophisticated malicious automation frameworks, securing the autonomous actions agents take within the enterprise. We focus on securing the models, data, and agents themselves.
Looking ahead, how do you see the convergence of AI, application delivery, and security shaping the future of enterprise resilience in the Middle East and beyond?
The convergence of AI, application delivery, and security introduces new vulnerabilities because the AI model becomes a new attack surface. The core risks include prompt injection and rogue agents. Prompt injection involves attacks that bypass traditional defenses by manipulating the LLM’s logic, tricking it into overriding system instructions, leaking sensitive data, or generating malicious code. Rogue agents are autonomous agents which have high privileges to perform complex actions, like transactions, and can be hijacked to perform unauthorised or damaging operations across the enterprise.
To manage this, security must shift to inspecting and validating the AI’s internal traffic and behaviour, not just the network perimeter.