Application security and delivery company F5 Inc. and Oracle Corp. today revealed plans to bring F5’s protection for web applications and application programming interfaces to customers running workloads on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

For now the arrangement rests on a nonbinding memorandum of understanding between the two. Under the plan, F5’s security technology would be integrated directly into OCI.

Oracle and F5 are aiming it at organizations that need to defend critical applications and APIs against sophisticated attacks without specialized security expertise in house. Security, application and platform teams would do that work from inside a cloud environment they already know.

John Maddison, F5’s chief marketing officer, said attacks powered by artificial intelligence “can find and exploit vulnerabilities faster than enterprises can patch them.” Oracle and F5 see AI runtime defense as the answer for cloud teams, he said, because it allows virtual patching that shields exposed systems until the permanent fixes are in place.

Customers need application and API protection that “keeps pace without adding operational complexity,” according to kp Papamiltiadis, senior vice president of global partnerships at Oracle. He said F5’s application security expertise would come into OCI backed by Oracle’s cloud infrastructure and support.

Oracle already has a web application firewall service of its own on OCI. Bots, application-layer distributed denial-of-service attacks and SQL injection are among the threats that product is built to stop. The service can also protect applications hosted on premises or in other clouds. The announcement did not say how F5’s technology would fit alongside Oracle’s firewall.

The two vendors go back a long way. F5 says it has worked with Oracle since 2001, mostly on application delivery for Oracle software such as E-Business Suite and PeopleSoft. Oracle also uses F5 products for some of its own enterprise applications and cloud services.

F5 now groups its delivery and security products, BIG-IP and NGINX among them, under the Application Delivery and Security Platform. The platform’s AI Guardrails and AI Red Team tools formed the F5 side of a partnership with data security company Forcepoint LLC in March. The Oracle announcement came a day after F5 reported fiscal fourth-quarter revenue of $917 million, up 13% from a year earlier.

Neither company gave a date for the OCI integration to become available or named the F5 products it would include. Pricing went unmentioned. A disclaimer in the release adds that the collaboration does not create a partnership or joint venture between F5 and Oracle.

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