SK Telecom, F5 sign partnership on AI cloud security
Heo Min-hoe, left, head of AI Cloud at SK Telecom, and Lee Hyeong-uk, managing director of F5 Korea, hold up a signed agreement during a partnership ceremony. Courtesy of SK Telecom
SK Telecom said it signed a partnership with global security company F5 to expand cooperation on artificial intelligence (AI) cloud security, aimed at strengthening the carrier's ability to defend against web and API attacks as well as distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) and bot attacks.
Under the deal, SK Telecom will act as both a value-added reseller, which resells F5 products with added services or technology, and a managed service provider, which uses F5 products to deliver managed IT services to customers — making it F5's first domestic managed service partner for its software-as-a-service security platform.
F5, headquartered in Seattle, is a global leader in multicloud application and API security, providing solutions to more than 90 percent of Fortune 500 companies. Its software-as-a-service-based security platform, F5 Distributed Cloud, helps companies protect applications and APIs across multicloud environments as part of their digital transformation.
SK Telecom said the partnership responds to the rapidly growing AI market and tightening security regulations. The market for "agentic AI" — AI systems capable of making decisions and carrying out tasks on their own — is projected to grow at an average annual rate of 43.8 percent from 2025 to 2034, according to market research firm Market.us. As such systems spread, AI increasingly connects to external services or works alongside other AI systems, raising the need for stronger security across AI infrastructure.
Beyond reselling F5's technology, the partnership will bundle in management and operational services, with SK Telecom providing web application firewall, API security, and DDoS and bot attack defense based on F5 Distributed Cloud. The company said this would let it protect and manage applications and APIs more consistently across multicloud and hybrid cloud environments, building on its existing cloud infrastructure operations to offer integrated managed services from deployment through operations and security.
An F5 Korea representative said the partnership comes as F5 Distributed Cloud establishes a service region in Korea, and that combining its enhanced security solutions with SK Telecom's customer base would create greater synergy for the agentic AI era.
An SK Telecom AI Cloud official said the company is expanding its enterprise AI infrastructure business using its cloud capabilities, data centers, GPU-as-a-service and network assets, and that combining these with F5's technology would allow it to offer stronger solutions to large enterprise customers.
This article was published with the assistance of generative AI and edited by The Korea Times.