F5 Networks offers the Advanced Web Application Firewall (WAF) to provide bot defense, advanced application protection, anti-bot SDK, and other features.
F5 Distributed Cloud WAF leverages F5's Advanced WAF technology, delivering WAF-as-a-Service and combining signature- and behavior-based protection for web applications. It acts as an intermediate proxy to inspect application requests and responses to block and mitigate a broad spectrum of risks stemming from the OW ASP Top 10, persistent and coordinated threat campaigns, bots, and layer 7 DoS.
I believe that in the case of Big-IP F5, it has a lot of power, a lot of features including the VPN features and also the evaluation of security posture of the devices that connect through VPN. That's very solid and that's something that is not found in all the WAF solutions …
AWAF provides most complete web application and API protection; including L7 DoS; in custimer's multi cloud deployments whether on-premises, public cloud, private cloud, etc.
Currently, we are using our IPS tools and IDS tools, but for the applications, we also use endpoint detection and those kinds of tools. But the firewall is actually a very important tool rather than those products. Because it exactly happens at the layer that we really want it …
F5 WAF provides much more control and has a lot of features that can be used to protect your applications. You can have granular configuration settings per application and disable attack signatures on very specific scenarios whenever is needed. Also, the logs are very detailed …
Sure! Here's a made-up but professional response you can use or adapt depending on the context (e.g., a report, RFP, internal justification, etc.):
Describe how F5 BIG-IP Advanced WAF stacks up against them and why you selected F5 BIG-IP Advanced WAF.
In my previous company we used Akamai WAF. I know that in my previous company with usage of Akamai there were some issues, but as far as technically how they compare, I couldn't really tell you.
This plaform has advanced threat detection technology and mitigation of this tool is also great that's why why it helps us in securing from many attacks including damages from 7 attcks, BOTS Mitigations and DDoS Protection. Also this plaform has customised security management …
F5 Distributed Cloud WAF allowed us to protect internal applications without public exposure, edge routing, or cloud dependency. We gained robust protection without exposing internal systems to the internet and F5 gave us the flexibility, security, and control we needed for a …
When comparing F5 Distributed Cloud WAF, Akamai, Cloudflare, and Fastly, Fastly generally stands out for its raw speed and focus on developer-friendly features, while Cloudflare is often considered the best balance of speed, security, and ease of use, making it a popular choice …
Advanced WAF is well suited for protection against account enumeration attacks, protection against known and new increasing attack vectors through out of the box attack signatures and threat campaigns. Also, up to date and accurate IP intelligence database to block based on known IP reputation.
It is doing its job effectively, and its scalability is superb. So, if you have a mixed environment with cloud and on-premise systems to protect this product, provide a solution to the challenge. However, its management is more suited to DevOps teams rather than to the ones responsible for on-premise systems, making the management a bit more complex.
So the product definitely is helping us for sudden attacks through DDOS, some injection ingestion into UI URLs, and definitely it's capturing those and I definitely see that as an advantage for us. They can stop the hackers from using our endpoints.
Layer seven attacks are becoming far more common. Traditionally it was always layered three, layer four, where you get an additional firewall, but with the application layer attacks become more frequent, more popular, et cetera. So having the web application firewall protecting us, and then with the recent Log4j, that's the most recent use case when it gave us that instant level of protection whilst we remediated the Log4j that we had that and the F5 Distributed Cloud WAF was protecting us.
I have a great relationship with the account manager, my account manager, and I think he drives the best price possible, um, for me, and I'm happy with that price.
F5 Distributed Cloud WAF is always innovating and evolving.
We run a very competitive proof value where we run numerous competitors against each other, and then we evaluate from that and then make the selection, and F5 Distributed Cloud WAF was the winner.
The UI for events. E.g., clicking the "Accept" button does nothing.
Traffic learning suggestions are often very incorrect. We were originally suggested to use "Automatic" learning, and had to completely scrap the policy due to the suggestions.
"All in one" dashboard for viewing application URL/parameter overrides per policy.
Fail over between devices feels unstable if there are thousands of objects attached to the traffic-group. Needs to be more simpler.
We have seen issues with malicious user detection where we have used open protocols due to legacy applications, and have been caught with legitimate traffic being blocked.
I would continue using F5 Distributed Cloud WAF because I am highly satisfied with its robust and comprehensive features that effectively protect our applications from evolving cyber threats. The advanced AI capabilities enhance threat detection and response, providing proactive security. Additionally, the excellent customer support ensures quick resolution of any issues, making the overall experience reliable and efficient. Trust in the manufacturer’s innovation and continuous updates further motivates me to keep this solution as a core part of our security infrastructure.
Most* of it is very intuitive and easy to use. The "Help" section is fairly fantastic. See some of my other comments about things like the "Traffic Learning" section being wildly wrong sometimes, and also the event logs with UI buttons that don't do anything. Overall though, it's an excellent product.
I believe is a solution that was designed from the start to be simple and easy to use. Coming from Imperva, it simply eased the burden and complexity of managing and securing our apps on different environments (cloud and on-prem). It easy to scale and very quick to deploy (as a cloud waf should be), provide us with DevOps integrations, visibility and automatic insights from multiple events that guarantee peace of mind for us analysts and opp managers.
I believe that in the case of Big-IP F5, it has a lot of power, a lot of features including the VPN features and also the evaluation of security posture of the devices that connect through VPN. That's very solid and that's something that is not found in all the WAF solutions and so I haven't seen that in Azure.
This plaform has advanced threat detection technology and mitigation of this tool is also great that's why why it helps us in securing from many attacks including damages from 7 attcks, BOTS Mitigations and DDoS Protection. Also this plaform has customised security management policy to tailor security measures according to our specific needs.
In our case it has been great because the pricing is just right for all the features that we have on the platform and the flexibility. In fact, we acquired another license last year, so that's something that we're interested in. We are currently moving towards the cloud with our ERP systems and eliminating the IBM platform, so we would like to see that F5 virtual option available on Azure.
