F5 has expanded its long-standing collaboration with NetApp to help enterprises accelerate AI application performance while preparing for the emerging risks posed by quantum computing. Announced today, the partnership strengthens the integration between F5’s Application Delivery and Security Platform (ADSP) and NetApp’s intelligent data infrastructure, positioning the two companies to meet the rapidly growing demand for secure, scalable AI data delivery.
As enterprises deploy larger and more complex AI models, data movement has become a critical bottleneck. By combining F5’s advanced load balancing, traffic prioritization and global traffic management with NetApp’s enterprise-grade S3 architectures, the joint solution supports high-throughput, resilient, and secure delivery of massive datasets. This helps organisations ensure seamless performance across AI/ML pipelines—from training to inference—while maintaining strong protection for sensitive data.
A major focus of the expanded partnership is preparing customers for the post-quantum cryptography (PQC) era. With quantum computing expected to render today’s encryption algorithms vulnerable, enterprises face growing risk from “harvest now, decrypt later” attacks, where adversaries steal encrypted data today with the intention of decrypting it once quantum capabilities mature.
To mitigate this, F5 is introducing support for hybrid key agreement and NIST-approved quantum-resistant algorithms within BIG-IP, providing additional protection for NetApp StorageGRID clusters. These enhancements allow organisations to move toward quantum-safe encryption incrementally—starting with universal adoption of TLS 1.3, modern ciphers, and hybrid cryptography—without requiring disruptive architectural changes.
John Maddison, Chief Marketing Officer at F5, said the partnership is designed to help enterprises strike the right balance between performance and security. “Our collaboration with NetApp is aimed at simplifying high-performance AI data delivery scenarios, while enabling customers to adopt post-quantum readiness incrementally,” he said.
For NetApp, the expanded integration brings together its StorageGRID innovations with F5’s traffic management and cryptographic capabilities. “By leveraging the latest innovations in NetApp StorageGRID with F5’s advanced traffic management and quantum-secure encryption technologies, customers can unlock the full potential of their AI workflows and protect critical data,” said Spencer Sells, Vice President, Global Alliances at NetApp.
As AI adoption accelerates and organisations prepare for the quantum future, F5 and NetApp are positioning themselves at the intersection of performance engineering and next-generation security—helping enterprises secure data, scale workloads, and modernize infrastructure with confidence.
