F5 BIG-IP Access Policy Manager (APM) vs. Microsoft Entra External ID

I think that the platform is well suited to many Remote Access VPN solutions, but I also think there is a lot of room for improvement on the backend. If you are hoping to deploy your APM solution across many different datacenters or colos, it may not be the best choice for the final solution.

Incentivized

It is not easy to calculate the actual ROI due to the difficult quantification of all factors, but it certainly contributed a lot in protecting, monitoring and controlling access to our system. It also made it much easier to detect vulnerable external users with simple and "easy to hack" passwords they use on multiple apps.

• SAML 2.0 identity federation support.
• Integrates with third-party SSO solutions.
• Bridging modern authentication and authorization (SAML, OAuth/OIDC) and classic authentication and authorization methods.
• Policy routing

Incentivized

• Single sign-on simplifies access to your apps from anywhere
• Strong authentication for your customers using their preferred identity provider.
• Integrating with social accounts such as Facebook or Google+

Incentivized

• There's some more advanced configurations within OAuth that I think could be fleshed out and easier to approach.
• There's a lot of things in F5 BIG-IP Access Policy Manager policies that I find myself recreating every policy. An easier way to copy objects from one to policy to another.

Incentivized

• Troubleshooting diagnostic logs effectively requires VS Code
• Group and role management requires additional effort
• The programming model (XML) could use some developer experience love

Incentivized

Integration with F5 BIG-IP systems that we plan to keep using for a while.

Incentivized

If F5 BIG-IP Access Policy Manager usability is fine it's not hard to use if you read the documentation but it does feel dated and could use a responsive design update to modernize user interface to current standards.

Incentivized

It is open platform so support is not good and than F5 and features visibility as not good as F5. F5 Set up and easy to use to admin console. Also have more feature visibility for load balancing, web server accelerator, application server ddos protection and WAF. F5 more efficient to handle concurrent request.

Incentivized

Each one of these alternatives has pros and cons. PingOne from Ping Identity states they "help deliver the secure and seamless customer experience to win battles for customer acquisition, retention, revenue, loyalty, and trust." While that may be the case, they did not fit our needs. We have a complex system and it did not seem to fit into our business.

Incentivized

• Simplified our approach to company-wide VPN solutions greatly by allowing us to use a single product instead of multiple products like we had before
• Can handle 15000-20000 users at once with no issues
• Was able to configure to support users travelling with 4G connections on their laptops and accommodate constant changing IP addresses

Incentivized

• Having monthly active users billing was cost-effective.
• Helped with the IT support that was already managing the Azure platform of the company; this helped to manage the costs better and optimize them.

Incentivized