Leading healthcare provider improves visibility and security with F5 ADSP

Zach WestallSenior Product Marketing Manager

For one of the largest healthcare organizations in the United States, application performance and uptime are inseparable from patient care. With a large, complex application estate spanning hospitals, outpatient facilities, and insurance operations, the organization needed to modernize critical infrastructure, while supporting a major electronic health record (EHR) consolidation initiative.

To help reduce risk during that transformation, the healthcare provider expanded its investment in the F5 Application Delivery and Security Platform—modernizing its F5 BIG-IP footprint, adding deeper operational visibility with F5 Insight for ADSP, and strengthening on-premises API security with F5 API Security Local Edition.

The result is a more resilient, observable, and secure foundation for delivering mission-critical digital services.

Supporting a high-stakes EHR transformation

The organization’s immediate priority was a major EHR consolidation project centered on Epic EHR software—one of the most critical application environments in its data center.

For this F5 customer, multiple EHR instances needed to be brought together into a centralized system, and teams needed clear visibility into the BIG-IP systems and virtual servers supporting the migration, both before and after cutover.

With little tolerance for downtime, the organization needed to quickly isolate faults, understand application behavior, and validate that implementations aligned with recommended deployment guidance. That requirement extended beyond a single application. Across a large BIG-IP estate—spanning physical appliances and virtual editions, including deployments in Azure—teams were managing tens of thousands of configuration objects and large volumes of operational metadata.

As with many customers, this healthcare provider presented significant operational challenges, stemming from a lack of visibility. And, like many customers, the organization didn’t struggle with a lack of data. It struggled with the ability to quickly find answers.

Building on a long-trusted F5 foundation

A customer for more than a decade, the healthcare provider already relied heavily on F5 BIG-IP across its environment. That existing foundation made F5 a natural strategic partner as the organization worked to modernize infrastructure and improve operational visibility without disrupting application availability or changing established traffic patterns.

This customer expanded its use of the F5 Application Delivery and Security Platform by investing in:

• F5 Insight for ADSP to improve visibility, troubleshooting, and operational understanding across its BIG-IP environment
• F5 API Security Local Edition to enable API discovery, continuous monitoring and governance of the APIs that enable their critical on-premises applications supported by BIG-IP
• A BIG-IP technology refresh from iSeries to rSeries, paired with premium support, to strengthen performance, continuity, and long-term scalability

Together, these strategic investments gave the organization a path to modernize while staying aligned with its operational model and governance requirements—both of which are critical in highly-regulated industries like healthcare.

A flexible, modular architecture

Several factors shaped the decision.

First, the customer had already seen value from early work with F5 Application Study Tool (AST), which helped application and infrastructure teams get more focused visibility into their Epic environment. That experience created internal momentum for broader adoption of F5 Insight for ADSP.

Second, F5 was able to meet the organization where it operates. This healthcare provider has a rigorous enterprise architecture and governance process, especially for technologies that involve cloud services, AI capabilities, or data leaving the premises. For many of its most critical applications, including those tied to patient systems, on-premises deployment remains essential.

That made deployment flexibility a decisive factor. With F5 API Security Local Edition, the customer could move forward with API discovery and governance in a way that integrates seamlessly with their existing BIG-IP-centric architecture—enabling them to leave current traffic patterns alone and avoid any additional changes to applications.

Just as important, optionality mattered. While F5 Insight for ADSP offers powerful expert guidance and expertise in the form of the built-in AI Assistant, healthcare data governance and privacy policies are paramount. With its modular, flexible architecture, customers can choose which features they’d like to enable, without sacrificing holistic observability into app delivery and security or the underlying infrastructure supporting it. This flexibility and ability to meet customers where they are helped lower approval barriers and accelerate time to value.

Turning complexity into operational clarity

Before this expansion, the organization relied on a mix of tools for visibility and management, including SIEM workflows and internally adopted reporting tools. But at the scale of its environment, making sense of the data—and turning it into action—remained a challenge.

F5 Insight for ADSP provides holistic observability across applications and infrastructure to help streamline operations.

With F5 Insight for ADSP, teams gain a clearer operational view of their BIG-IP environment, helping them:

• Isolate faults faster across a broad application portfolio
• Analyze large volumes of configuration and telemetry data more effectively
• Validate that deployments align with vendor and application best practices
• Strengthen readiness for operational priorities such as certificate lifecycle management

Identify key traffic patterns and application usage in the Top N dashboard.

For a small team managing a large and demanding application delivery environment, that kind of visibility is critical. It helps shift operations from reactive troubleshooting to more confident, consistent decision-making.

Expanding API security without compromising governance

The customer also needed to address a growing gap in API visibility. While it had evaluated other options, the organization lacked a comprehensive API security approach that could satisfy both technical and governance requirements for its on-premises applications.

F5 API Security Local Edition addressed that need directly.

API Security Local Edition overview dashboard

By enabling API discovery, monitoring and governance in an on-premises deployment model, F5 gave the organization a way to expand security coverage for critical applications while preserving privacy, performance, and architectural control. For a healthcare environment with strict review processes and crown-jewel workloads in the data center, that was essential.

Modernizing for what comes next

As part of the broader engagement, the healthcare provider also completed a major BIG-IP refresh from iSeries to rSeries, enabling it to support future growth with stronger scale, reliability, and service continuity.

The healthcare provider’s investment in F5 has reinforced a broader truth: when organizations are modernizing critical application environments, they need solutions that improve security and delivery, while supporting ongoing operations, without forcing disruption.

Using F5 ADSP, the healthcare provider has obtained a platform approach that’s helping it to modernize with confidence, protect critical services and data, and reduce risk during one of its most important transformation initiatives.

Visit the F5 Application Delivery and Security Platform webpage to learn more about the power of a platform approach.

Also, see these powerful solutions in action at F5’s Demo Center.

About the Author

Zach WestallSenior Product Marketing Manager

More blogs by Zach Westall