Likelihood to Recommend 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.
Read full review I really do think it's well suited for any placement on the edge, especially with the WAF portion. APM is a whole different module unto itself that allows for VPN Connect connectivity, web top access. So it really is for these modules anyway, an edge appliance for us and not really usable in the interior of the network.
Read full review Pros 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. Read full review Easy connection: you can connect to your corporate network with two clicks. IP restriction: F5 has a list of possible insecure IP numbers, if someone tries to connect using one of these numbers, F5 BIG-IP won't connect. Always on feature: Very handy feature, if you install always on, you won't need to click connect. Read full review Cons 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. Read full review I think the policy configuration that had some improvements on the ASM word things, improvements may be on the signatures that would be good because it's a little bit confusing on the ASL, how they are updated and deployed, and this staging. So that's something that could be. Read full review Likelihood to Renew Only way to to this type of tasks
Read full review Usability Great customization and easy to use help reference menus
Read full review Support Rating 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.
Read full review On the occasions when we've had to engage f5 support, they have been great. They have always resolved our issues quickly and been easy to work with and professional. The reason I give them a 10 out of 10, however, is because when we've had issues that have crossed over between the f5 BIG-IP, our Cisco switches, and our Microsoft IIS server the f5 support representatives have been extremely knowledgeable about every product and device involved and have been able to troubleshoot end-to-end without having to engage other vendors.
Read full review Implementation Rating implementation is fine
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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.
Read full review F5 BIG-IP is my first F5 product that I have stared to work, and it brings me more experience doing a lot of migration upgrades from old code version to new code. The way F5 has all configuration help us to develop scrips to improve our process.
Read full review Return on Investment 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. Read full review Having a load balancer of F5 helps to address large traffic limit on organisation's application This means that organisation gets a lot of revenue due to the usage of their application Hence provide a very positive impact onthe inverment or ROl of the organisation Read full review ScreenShots