F5 > Case Studies > Auckland Transport Enhances Public Transportation Experience with F5 Solutions

Auckland Transport Enhances Public Transportation Experience with F5 Solutions

Technology Category

Functional Applications - Transportation Management Systems (TMS)
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Public Cloud

Applicable Industries

National Security & Defense
Transportation

Applicable Functions

Logistics & Transportation
Quality Assurance

Use Cases

Autonomous Transport Systems
Traffic Monitoring

Services

System Integration

About The Customer

Auckland Transport (AT) is the organization responsible for all of the region’s transportation services, including buses, trains, and ferries, as well as roads and related facilities like foot and cycling paths, and parking. AT also plays a significant role in planning and funding public transportation, operating the local road network, and promoting alternative ways for people to get around. AT's operating principle is based on Vision Zero, a Swedish-based approach that focuses on a core life principle that human life and health can never be traded for other benefits, such as journey travel times. Safety lies at the heart of AT’s business, where the top priority is to develop a transport ecosystem that is safe for all users of the roads.

The Challenge

Auckland Transport (AT) is responsible for the region’s transportation services, including buses, trains, ferries, roads, and related facilities. With public transport trips expected to double from 70 million per year in 2012 to 140 million by 2022, AT needed a modern transportation system that could seamlessly connect people, devices, and systems, offer enhanced safety, improve commuters’ travel experience, and reduce operational costs. AT also wanted to address the fast-changing consumer landscape, where commuters and citizens expect dramatically improved levels of service, usability of customer-facing platforms, accelerated response from organizations, and high availability of information related to traffic and transportation schedules. To achieve this, AT had to improve the integration of its transportation network using an integrated single-system approach while moving away from its legacy information technology systems to a cloud-based environment. The constantly evolving technology also changed the nature of the transportation business, with AT amassing large amounts of customer data, especially through their mobile applications: AT Mobile and AT Park. This meant that AT had to abide by regulatory frameworks, particularly the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Finally, AT also recognized the need to protect its systems from increasingly sophisticated and dangerous cyber-attacks that have the potential to disrupt its transportation network.

The Solution

AT selected F5 to deploy a modern, integrated transport system with F5 BIG-IP Access Policy Manager (APM). With F5 BIG-IP APM, AT is able to provide unified global access control to users, devices, apps, and application programming interfaces (APIs). By implementing context-based dynamic access decisions, BIG-IP APM strengthens AT’s corporate compliance with security standards, corporate controls, and government regulations. It also provides improved visibility through a single management interface and ensures users are equipped with appropriate, authenticated, secure application access. To address the challenges of data encryption and growing privacy concerns, AT utilized F5 SSL Orchestrator to gain visibility into encrypted traffic and expose hidden threats. This allows AT to enjoy high-performance decryption of inbound and outbound SSL/TLS traffic, while enabling security inspection to expose threats and stop attacks. To increase contextual awareness of internet sites and protect requested applications from IP addresses with known malware or viruses, AT added F5 IP Intelligence Services to BIG-IP APM. This significantly reduces risks and increases data center efficiency by eliminating the time spent processing bad traffic.

Operational Impact

With F5, AT established a platform that ensured resilience across all transport modes, providing intelligent transport and optimal experiences to its passengers. AT utilizes a number of APIs to ensure all parts of its transportation system are secure. To prevent exploitation of their APIs, AT leveraged F5’s BIG-IP APM’s proxy-based access controls deliver a zero-trust platform for both internal and external application access. This ensured that applications are protected while extending trusted access to users, devices and APIs. With trusted access ensured, AT can now expand beyond traditional security boundaries to unlock new business models and operational efficiencies—without sacrificing security or commuters’ experience. As the pace of attack methodologies change increases, AT needed a near real-time host protection to augment their security deployments to mitigate bad actors during attacks. Adding F5 IP Intelligence Services, AT was able to bolster their security infrastructure and effectively guard against malicious internet hosts. Positioned at the perimeter of the network, the F5 IP Intelligence service delivers a database of over 1 million malicious internet addresses to support a dynamic security perimeter with near real-time protection against phishing, attackers, and scanners. This database of addresses is refreshed every five minutes from the cloud to minimize the threat window and keep AT’s data—and its reputation—safe. In addition, F5 solutions are compliant with the GDPR framework, helping AT become more focused and efficient at protecting personal data from the most likely threats. This ensures the confidentiality, integrity, and available of users’ personal data while also improving AT’s overall security strategy.

Quantitative Benefit

AT can process 1.8 million Layer 7 requests and 12 million Layer 4 HTTP requests per second
F5 IP Intelligence service delivers a database of over 1 million malicious internet addresses
The database of addresses is refreshed every five minutes from the cloud to minimize the threat window