F5 Distributed Cloud WAF leverages F5's Advanced WAF technology, delivering WAF-as-a-Service and combining signature- and behavior-based protection for web applications. It acts as an intermediate proxy to inspect application requests and responses to block and mitigate a broad spectrum of risks stemming from the OW ASP Top 10, persistent and coordinated threat campaigns, bots, and layer 7 DoS.
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Hitachi Enterprise Cloud
Score 7.0 out of 10
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Hitachi Vantara offers the Hitachi Enterprise Cloud, an infrastructure-as-a-service platform. Hitachi provides a full portfolio of integrated hardware, software and enablement services designed to bring a pre-engineered level of efficiency and predictability to creating a cloud platform.
So a lot of companies that have a digital side and they have a lot of applications in the cloud, this is one of those areas that it can protect the net so it can lock 'em down, it'll build a baseline so you understand what that application's doing. So if it sees something not normal, it'll get protected against that.
1) If you are gathering lots of data from many different points and transforming that data into something customized, and you need it secure yet accessible, this is a great option. 2) If you are looking for a platform and not just a service provider, this would be a great option. As a platform, there is a one-stop-shop feeling that gets you some better customer service and performance. But it also locks you into one provider, so don’t jump in if you feel like you’ll want a lot of flexibility. 3) Building or running VMware is really what this platform is all about. If you’re creating an app drawing from some complex data/sources, it’s an easier go with this tool than most others.
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.
It fills a niche that was needed before we as a company fully embraced the cloud with Azure. It was a great introduction to the cloud and there are some features I wish were more readily available with some of our Azure tools. Staying on top of your expenses is much harder without the transparency Hitachi provides.
It allows the small team managing it to simplify cloud operations using prebuilt computing and storage templates. Very easy to monitor, manage and optimize cloud operations.
Pre-Engineered, turnkey solutions with prebuilt services make it quick and easy to select the service needed for each app. With many different suppliers, we cater to many different connectors.
So we just had some performance issues when it comes to routing. Because the web application firewall sits in front of our website, which is hosted on-site, we had some trouble with the VGP protocols between the two sites and it took us a while to figure it out. So that is probably one area where we could improve. Otherwise, when it comes to the WAF functionality itself, it's really good.
Their ability to offer a public cloud solution that feels like a private cloud solution is a great feature, but not one that is easily understood outside of someone using the tool. I think they need more training and marketing around what they can do for cloud-native development.
I think they are lacking a solution to play in other playgrounds easily. Many of their offerings are better than what Azure provides, so I think there is room for them to leverage Azure size with customized, personalized features.
They really need something big to set them apart from the larger players in this space. I think of Snowflake with their amazing pricing model and the “oops!” button that undoes serious accidental deletes. Something like that would grow the user base and make it a major player.
Basically, Cloudflare is a more economical solution at the level of DNS balancing, easy to use with a few simple clicks and that has gained an advantage in the market, however, compared to F5, it falls short of the entire protection panorama that the solution provides since F5 does not It's just DNS that goes further and that's where it differentiates and stands out.
Hitachi Enterprise Cloud is a pleasant surprise, offering better management and control of your cloud containers and VMware. It is a platform and contains all you need to get going, so there is great appeal in smaller companies and isolated divisions/departments in larger companies. If I were managing a small group with a specific endpoint I would no doubt choose a solution like this, but being a large corporation we tend to drive towards larger solutions with internal competencies to support those larger roll-outs.
Accelerated time to value as it was a requirement for a workload being provisioned on that cloud
As an existing f5 customer, access to their solutions integrator (GridZero) made the sizing, licensing, purchases, and downloading of the software very quick and painless
The positive pricing aspect has been with the rate card and compute pricing transparency, being better able to manage the budget.
It is a small solution for us, so we are probably not realizing the potential savings we could get by rolling all our corporate cloud work into a single solution, but it is also good to keep multiple irons in the fire, so to speak.
The implementation has done very well in a small, controlled atmosphere. So while the ROI may not have been as high as we’d like to see, the success of the project has made it valuable none the less.
