Akamai CDN vs. Cloudflare vs. F5 Distributed Cloud API Security

Akamai is a well-established brand name with a great product. It meets and many time exceeds the needs for global content delivery and security management layer at the edge. Fine grain security tuning seems cumbersome as the definition of the app keeps changing. It also requires an investment of time for the setup which doesn't necessarily make sense for smaller scale scenarios. Some products offered by AWS, Azure or the Google Cloud can be more tightly integrated with cloud provider offerings thus easier to configure.

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Cloudflare works well as security measure that gives peace of mind without needing to work too hard to get it functioning well. It provides great tools to customize the security experience as well. This is all the same for the caching tools as well. They have a lot of built in tools that make using the caching easy right out of the box, but they provide the customization options to get things just right for your site.

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I believe it covers everything related to the applications' security aspects, but there are a lot of improvements that need to be made. For example, better granular controls like bot categories listed on the distributed console and a granular URL-based control for the rate-limiting option are needed.

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• Content offloading - once rules are set up within Akamai you don't need to even think about how many images or large JavaScript or CSS files (for example) are being served from your own estate, Akamai takes care of it all via rules that are quick, easy and flexible.
• Page caching - for pages that don't change very often Akamai allows you to set up rules, quickly and easily, to serve up your page content for you, which takes even more load away from your origin servers.
• Quick rollback - the Akamai system allows easy testing of rules and changes via a staging system, and also offers a quick rollback option, which is perfect for the rare occasions when something has been set up incorrectly.

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• The best part is the content delivery network. Cloudflare has a large network of data centres around the world that helps cache and delivers content quickly to our customers.
• Cloudflare offers us with a fast and reliable DNS service and with the world class features such as Cloudflare workers, SSL verification, certificate management and web application firewall. When all of these are combined together, it provides very strict security for our organization.
• One of the most important feature that we use is the analytics and threat detection. It provides us with the real time insights of all the threats originating from multiple locations and landing on our websites.

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• It auto-discovers APIs, even the ones engineers forget to document. Then profiles them without needing changes to our codebase.
• Shadow API exposure.
• It's pretty decent at abnormal behavior detection.

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• The interface in their control centre could be a bit more user-friendly with some of the settings in places that you wouldn't expect them to be. The search offsets this problem to an extent but it's still sometimes slower than you'd like to find what you are looking for.

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• In some cases, using Cloudflare can actually lead to slower website speeds if the network is congested or if the website's traffic is particularly heavy.
• Some website owners may find that the level of customization offered by Cloudflare is limited, especially in comparison to other solutions.
• While Cloudflare is easy to set up and manage, it may be too complex for users who are not familiar with web technologies.

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• More accurate detection of advanced persistent threats (APTs) targeting APIs.
• A greater emphasis on checking APIs' schema and contract may prevent them from accepting misconfigurations or malicious input.
• More customized, dynamic, and targeted protection for high-value APIs or high-risk user groups.

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lower cost

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F5 Distributed Cloud API Security provides robust API protection with solid threat detection, excellent visibility, and seamless integration into our architecture

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Everything is extremely concise and all settings apply immediately and take effect globally. There is no reason to explicitly plan/think in terms of individual regions as one would have to traditional cloud offerings (AWS, OCI, Azure). All Cloudflare products integrate seamless as part of a single pipeline that executes from request to response.

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Great product. Working with F5 for many years, we found the products F5 provided are all cutting edge technology. Although in F5 Distributed Cloud API Security we still have a lot to find out, but we believe this experience will be very good. Especially on the security side. Trust in F5.

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In 6+ years of relying on Cloudflare, I think we experienced one or two brief outages that were Cloudflare's fault.

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Always available

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Their Argo for the global network is the core feature we love.

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The UI is cloud-native and generally responsive. Report generation is easy Integrates with cloud providers

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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.

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Excellent product, Cloudflare is a true pioneer of the modern Internet, providing tools, services, and expertise that vastly improve the performance and security of web services. Any issues are resolved quickly with detailed RCA and follow-ups published publicly. I'm thankful to Cloudflare and use their services both at work and at home.

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Lo hacemos mediante un partner We did it through a partner

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Very well executed implementation where our team was able to handle the implementation with guidance.

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F5 Distributed Cloud API Security is our company looking forward product. With more and more API is using in both on prem, private cloud, public cloud and multi cloud environment, we as a financial institution, we are keep into the security settings to protect the information. That's the main reason we want to use this product.

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We've used -- and considered -- a whole number of CDN offerings. The good news is that almost all of the CDN products on the market are terrific, and will pay for themselves via increased customer satisfaction and lower monthly hosting bills. For some cases, we're still more likely to suggest CloudFlare (which has a free tier) or an integrated offering from a cloud provider, like Cloudfront.

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They have the most generous free offering, and after the free offering limit is reached - you're still getting plenty of value for the buck.

They have very good reputation.

They have an ever expanding list of tools that can support multiple scenarios under one roof.

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We ran a short POC with Salt. Its data classification and attack replay features were impressive. What held us back was the limited support for hybrid deployments and poor integration into our CI/CD pipelines, as F5 did.

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They are built for scale and have the capacity to handle all the traffic we could ever expect to get.

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Centralized policy management: You can manage API security policies consistently across locations without duplicating effort, which supports scaling.


API discovery and monitoring at scale: It automatically discovers APIs and monitors them in real time across large and complex environments.

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• Akamai RoI improved over a period of times since it comes with heavy costs, however global deliveries in over 100 counties and global web platforms usage helps improve RoI
• With the complex UI challenges, ROI could be impacted negatively when you have to invest in operations and time.

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• Immediate ROI on Registrar and DNS hosting while giving a single plane of glass to managing both with domain registrations at cost, and no cost DNS hosting
• WAF helped us move at risk servers/applications into a protected state allowing us to perform remediations at a measured pace and get them done right instead of band aide solutions.
• CDN proxying increase the speed of our website while simultaneously reducing server load.
• DMARC management and report interpretation allow use to identify weak points in our email systems, remediate and move to stricter policies without significantly increasing staff time spent managing it.

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• F5 Distributed Cloud API Security mitigates many API-related security threats, including bot attacks, DDoS, data breaches, and unauthorized access attempts.
• F5 Distributed Cloud API Security uses robust threat detection, machine learning, and real-time monitoring for speedier identification.
• Reductions in security events result in fewer breaches, reduced downtime, and lower attack remediation costs.

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