Akamai Bot Manager vs. F5 Distributed Cloud Bot Defense

One of the most serious issues with commercial websites is dealing with bots. Even a good bot can slow down or render a website unresponsive. Because not all bots are evil, Akamai Bot Manager allows us to handle the bots that are required and those that are not. It adds an extra degree of security where typical solutions fail.

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

• Bot detection
• Good selection of actions in case of bot detection
• Easy implementation of its standard features

Incentivized

• Quickly helps mitigate the retooling and newer advanced bot attacks
• Excellent customer service from our f5 bot Defense team/partners
• Easy to do Traffic Analysis/False Positive reviews with their dashboard of data
• Our F5 Security/Solutions Architect and TAM is always there for us whenever we need them
• First class service by the F5 Distributed Cloud Bot DefenseSOC, the Tactics Team, the F5 Testing person that helps us, the mobile SDK experts, the Client-Side Signals experts and F5 management
• Industry best Threat Briefings
• Not only is F5 Distributed Cloud Bot Defense great at stopping the advanced bot attacks, they also have protection against any tampering or replay attacks.

• Support might not be as fast as we want for custom implementations.
• At the beginning the interface might be confusing.
• Some new features they introduce might break existing features.

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

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

Security concerns call for the deployment of Akamai Bot Manager. It assists in preventing bots from being unable to target our website and applications. The Akamai lab rejects the request or attack before it reaches my cloud infrastructure or my applications. My application is more secure as a result.

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

• Reduce overall infrastructure maintenance due to less incoming traffic and leverage of caching rules
• Better user experience on the website due to better overall performance

Incentivized

• Prior to F5 Distributed Cloud Bot Defense, we were averaging 12k plus credential stuffing attempts weekly across client portals That number fell down to less than a thousand in just 4 weeks
• Over 90 percent of scraping and unauthorized price harvesting blocked