Akamai CDN vs. F5 Distributed Cloud Bot Defense

Akamai is a superior premium services offering if that's what you need from a CDN. For more typical use cases, we're often more often than not implementing MaxCDN, or integrated CDNs from cloud providers (e.g. CloudFront, Azure CDN, etc). If you find that Akamai's offerings are really what you need, and you are okay paying the premium, the services themselves are great. There's a reason they're used by major enterprises of all sizes, and used for hosting video content from the NFL, etc.

Incentivized

I'd strongly recommend it, but with a few caveats depending on how mature the team is with behavioral based security tools. One of our fintech clients was getting hit with low volume, widely spread login attempts, below our rate limiting thresholds. F5 Distributed Cloud Bot Defense was able to flag abnormal input timings, inconsistent device fingerprinting and high entropy in field population behavior. You can only imagine the wave of downstream account lockouts this saved the client. On the other end we had a client with a real time trading platform using Graphql over websockets. F5 Distributed Cloud Bot Defense wasn't able to tap into that stream natively. we had to reverse engineer a proxy layer to inspect events. It worked but it was clunky and not officially supported

Incentivized

• Caching is one of the greatest benefits that Akamai allows for, saving time, money and experiencing the user experience.
• Knowing they provide DDOS and other attack protection gives you peace of mind.
• How finely you can tune all of the different settings available to you, from blocking IPs, cache settings, headers, redirects and even handling error statuses .

Incentivized

• Regularly analyze traffic patterns and bot activity. Use the insights provided by the platform to refine rules and policies.
• Configure rules to specify acceptable behavior for user interactions and alter sensitivity levels as appropriate to reduce false positives.
• Integrate F5 Bot Defense into our existing security stack, which may include WAFs (Web Application Firewalls) and SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) solutions.

Incentivized

• Akamai platforms does not come with an intuitive UI to configure and it requires training for set up.
• Akami is mostly costly and will be proven very expensive for small organization that are not scaled.
• Akami activation takes a longer time for a lot of testing with multiple scenarios especially with edge servers scenarios.

Incentivized

• On a technical side, we've had a lot of deployment issues. This is not a one-sprint solution.
• We ran into undocumented failure modes and had to rely on L2 and L3 customer support, delaying troubleshooting significantly [in our experience].
• Accurate log ingestion is a larger challenge than one would want in a security tool.

We are more likely than not, to renew it. It saved us from a really huge data breach 4 months ago. It has earned its shower so far

Incentivized

Their support documents are excellent and provide a lot of useful information for all their services. The only reason I didn't give them a 10 is that the time it takes for them to respond to an issue could be slightly faster.

Incentivized

Official support can sometimes take time to reach the right people. However, once you are in contact with the appropriate experts, the support is excellent, as F5 staff are true specialists. On the other hand, we always receive prompt assistance from our local sales team, who typically help us connect with the right people quickly.

Incentivized

Implementation of Distributed Cloud is accomplished a few different ways, it would pay to meet with the F5 team and map out your implementation prior to acquisition to make sure you Infrastructure and Operations teams are aligned to the approach and requirements.

Incentivized

Akamai offers sophisticated security and defense layers in addition to its content delivery network. Its focus on security is well known and beats offerings from AWS and Azure to punches. It redefined the cloud security market by extending its core offering.

Incentivized

Clodflare bot management was our other obvious option for us. We tested it on a staging version of our RFQ platform. It was great for broad traffic filtering but had a hard time with nuanced differences between real subcontractors and low volume bots mimickingt human input whereas that's where F5 Distributed Cloud Bot Defense thrived

Incentivized

• Positive - Akamai vastly reduced the number of content delivery servers needed here, saving money, hardware and management overheads.
• Negative - I don't think it's a "cheap" option, but also, you get what you pay for and for such a powerful product you don't expect it to be free.
• Positive - some of the support we have had has been really good.

Incentivized

• We experience large web/data scraping attack campaigns and F5 Distributed Cloud Bot Defense over the years has helped mitigate these for us and significantly reducing load off of our origin servers.
• Also, we experience many large Credential Stuffing attacks and F5 Distributed Cloud Bot Defense helps us stop these attacks and protects our customers.