A10 Networks tackles AI threats with platform updates

A10 Networks is updating its platforms in a bid to help enterprises deal with increasing risks, including those that might come from AI-driven attacks.

The improvements to the network security vendor’s technology span multiple products. Among the updates are an enhanced version of the company’s Advanced Core Operating System (ACOS) and an AI-powered bot protection capability. There are also improvements to the company’s Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) services, as well as a new management technology called A10 Control for centralized management of network infrastructure.

“As our customers are looking to modernize their apps and their infrastructure with artificial intelligence, we are already moving in the direction where we help our customers address the latency, resiliency and security challenges posed by AI inference and genAI deployments,” Akhilesh Dhawan, senior director, product marketing at A10 Networks, told Network World.

Improving ACOS for the AI era

ACOS is the core network operating system that runs on A10 Networks’ devices. To date, the technology has been based on the CentOS Linux operating system. Moving forward with the new release, the company is moving to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). 

“This move will allow us to address enterprise-wide and AI-specific use cases,” Dhawan said.

In future release of ACOS, the plan is to include AI models within the operating system. “This will allow A10 to offload some of the processor-intensive tasks and allow AI Inference to deliver the best performance,” Dhawan said. “As part of our future roadmap, we are also looking at protecting customers from AI-focused threats like prompt injections, data poisoning, etc.” 

There is also a new feature in development for AI-powered bot protection. Dhawan explained that A10’s security solutions today focus primarily on protecting against OWASP Top 10 security risks and DDoS attacks, including bot-driven DDoS attacks. AI-powered bot protection will allow A10 to expand protection against other types of bots carrying out business logic attacks such as scraping, scalping, account takeover (ATO) and fraud maliciously targeting websites.

A10 Control provides new view into network security

The A10 Networks portfolio today spans two core areas. A10 Infrastructure solutions address infrastructure challenges related to performance, reliability and infrastructure-level security threats. The other area of the portfolio, known as A10 Defend, addresses challenges related to application-level security threats like DDoS and OWASP threats. 

Dhawan said that to date, A10 has had two separate management consoles for these two solution areas.

“As our customers are looking to simplify their IT, we are unifying our management console with A10 Control, that can manage both our infrastructure and security solutions and provide complete visibility and management in one single dashboard,” he said.

More DDoS Protection

Rounding out the A10 updates is an expanded set of capabilities for DDoS protection.

Dhawan noted that A10 has been protecting large and small service providers as well as enterprises from DDoS threats for years. What’s new is that the existing A10 Defend on-premises DDoS protection is being complemented with the ability to mitigate large volumetric attacks in the cloud. 

“As our enterprise customers have evolved in their security requirements and need protection against occasional DDoS attacks of very large volume, we are moving to address these challenges for them,” Dhawan said.

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