Akamai CDN 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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Always available

Incentivized

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

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

Lo hacemos mediante un partner We did it through a partner

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized