Extranets aren’t dead; they just need an upgrade

And because it's part of the F5 platform, you get a lot of value in a small deployment footprint:

1. Centralized app & API security
You get WAAP-as-a-service (Web App and API Protection) baked into your deployment, complete with Layer 7 firewalling, bot defense, API schema enforcement, DDoS mitigation, and TLS termination.

That means each partner connection has tailored access to specific APIs, apps, or data, without spinning up redundant firewalls or creating Access Control List (ACL) nightmares.

2. Per-partner policy enforcement
With Distributed Cloud CE, you can define per-connection controls at Layer 7 to enforce authentication, access rules, rate limits, and even traffic shaping. Your bank partner gets different API exposure than your third-party CRM vendor.

Security is no longer a shared perimeter. It's a policy you assign with surgical precision.

3. Faster, cheaper onboarding
Onboarding a new partner used to mean standing up infrastructure like VPNs, routers, and NAT policies with lead times measured in weeks.

Now? Provision a namespace, define a policy, generate credentials, and ship. What used to take weeks now takes hours. And what used to require bespoke engineering now happens inside a UI or an API call.

4. Built-in resilience & observability
Because Distributed Cloud CE runs natively as a VNF on Equinix, you get built-in global availability, failover, and full observability of what's going on between your apps and your partners.

That includes:

• Real-time traffic monitoring
• Per-API analytics
• Anomaly detection
• Integration with your SIEM or observability stack

This isn't a theoretical use case. It's real infrastructure for industries that live and die by compliance, traceability, and uptime.

Healthcare providers can segment patient data access per lab or partner system without dragging a VPN into every conversation. Banks and FinTechs can expose just the necessary services to processors or affiliates while enforcing strict rate limits and behavioral controls. Even manufacturers can integrate with supply chain partners without blowing a hole in their internal network model.

The core value? It works like a platform, not a patchwork solution of point products.