Azure CDN vs. F5 Distributed Cloud WAF (Web Application Firewall)

Azure CDN has at hand an infinity of applications and tools to implement in your system and have better control of your data in a clean and secure platform on the web, we recommend this program since the percentage of solutions provided by this program is very high and find a way to make each user's job easier.

Incentivized

It is doing its job effectively, and its scalability is superb. So, if you have a mixed environment with cloud and on-premise systems to protect this product, provide a solution to the challenge. However, its management is more suited to DevOps teams rather than to the ones responsible for on-premise systems, making the management a bit more complex.

Incentivized

• I found the CDN very easy to setup and configure within the Azure Portal.
• Being Azure, there are plenty of free tools that allow you to manage the CDN from a UI that is not the portal. This was especially handy when I trained end users how to manage content within their specific realm.

Incentivized

• Layer seven attacks are becoming far more common. Traditionally it was always layered three, layer four, where you get an additional firewall, but with the application layer attacks become more frequent, more popular, et cetera. So having the web application firewall protecting us, and then with the recent Log4j, that's the most recent use case when it gave us that instant level of protection whilst we remediated the Log4j that we had that and the F5 Distributed Cloud WAF was protecting us.
• I have a great relationship with the account manager, my account manager, and I think he drives the best price possible, um, for me, and I'm happy with that price.
• F5 Distributed Cloud WAF is always innovating and evolving.
• We run a very competitive proof value where we run numerous competitors against each other, and then we evaluate from that and then make the selection, and F5 Distributed Cloud WAF was the winner.

Incentivized

• Tough learning curve--you have to be comfortable with the Azure Cloud logic and UI to use it easily
• Special or uncommon use cases' pricing can be hard to forecast/follow
• Can be expensive for simple use cases

Incentivized

• Lack of warnings, currently the console does not provide a warning when deleting key-value entry.
• The web GUI could use some tweaking, currently no undo option when removing exclusion rules.
• Configuration complexity, currently menus and options are hidden, making it hard to configure vs on prem.

We gave it an 8 because it protects our web apps well and is reliable. The WAF is flexible and meets most of our needs. It could improve in user interface and make integrations easier, but overall, it’s a solid and effective security tool for us.

Incentivized

I give it 9/10 rating because it solved my problem by Caching my website content on global servers to load faster.

I believe is a solution that was designed from the start to be simple and easy to use. Coming from Imperva, it simply eased the burden and complexity of managing and securing our apps on different environments (cloud and on-prem). It easy to scale and very quick to deploy (as a cloud waf should be), provide us with DevOps integrations, visibility and automatic insights from multiple events that guarantee peace of mind for us analysts and opp managers.

Incentivized

Seems no issue

Incentivized

Unnoticed slowness

Incentivized

Great support from the team whenever we're stuck. Very proactive in resolving issues and also making changes as per the requirements of the organization.

Incentivized

I never contacted support for this product.

Incentivized

Online training saves me lots of time

Incentivized

Just make sure you origin servers have F5 IPs allowed.

Incentivized

More user friendly and it’s so easy to learn, the prices may be close to each other, but the service is excellent.

Incentivized

The other one that I've used in the past, they're very similar and I haven't used it recently, so I can't do a side-by-side comparison today. But I can say that F5 does everything we want it to do consistent with what this other product did do and it's got enhanced features and of course we have a long history with F5 as a product set in general.

Incentivized

Dont see any issue so far

Incentivized

• Azure CDN reduced origin instance load by removing the need to constantly serve large numbers of static files, meaning applications can be deployed with smaller/fewer instances.
• Azure CDN reduces apparent load times to customers by serving cached files out of POPs in the local region of those clients, instead of requiring those clients to make multiple, lengthy requests through to the origin servers.

Incentivized

• The biggest gain for us was speed. Before F5 Distributed Cloud WAF, onboarding a new app to our WAF stack meant manual rule tuning, traffic sampling and regression testing. Right now, we spin up a service, tag it with the right policy and its ready (production ready) within hours

Incentivized