Despite the size of the company, the manufacturer worked with a particularly lean team of IT generalists. Consequently, the company relied heavily on managed services vendors to sustain IT operations. As a result, its IT staff was forced to balance numerous duties and roles on a given day.

For several years, the client had maintained F5 LTM and ASM equipment in its environments, but because of the IT team strain, the company knew that it was not getting the full potential out of its F5 devices. Moreover, the company’s primary F5 engineer had left for a different job, and his responsibilities fell to a more junior network engineer with minimal experience with F5 technology. As a result, the IT team made the difficult decision to simply switch the F5 ASM modules off because they didn’t have the expertise to manage them. With only the network engineer to cover several jobs, the manufacturer was forced to neglect proactive support and focus its resources on maintaining long-term monitoring.