Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences) vs. F5 Distributed Cloud Bot Defense

Fastly has been the ideal CDN (Content Distribution Network) to solve and optimise the management of our content in our applications and portals; we have easily integrated its use, which has meant an increase in performance, a time savings in terms of management, and a saving of resources that we can use to make further improvements to improve our customers' web experience.

It works very well as long as your protected forms are located on specific pages.However, it is less suitable if, for example, you have a login form on every page of your website. As a JavaScript needs to be injected on every page for bot detection, which increases the number of license-relevant requests - which may increase your licensing costs

Incentivized

• Quickly helps mitigate the retooling and newer advanced bot attacks
• Excellent customer service from our f5 bot Defense team/partners
• Easy to do Traffic Analysis/False Positive reviews with their dashboard of data
• Our F5 Security/Solutions Architect and TAM is always there for us whenever we need them
• First class service by the F5 Distributed Cloud Bot DefenseSOC, the Tactics Team, the F5 Testing person that helps us, the mobile SDK experts, the Client-Side Signals experts and F5 management
• Industry best Threat Briefings
• Not only is F5 Distributed Cloud Bot Defense great at stopping the advanced bot attacks, they also have protection against any tampering or replay attacks.

• On a technical side, we've had a lot of deployment issues. This is not a one-sprint solution.
• We ran into undocumented failure modes and had to rely on L2 and L3 customer support, delaying troubleshooting significantly [in our experience].
• Accurate log ingestion is a larger challenge than one would want in a security tool.

Support is quick to respond. They help guide you through any issues you have and ensure everything has been resolved before disconnecting. Wait times can vary, but it depends on the time of day. Eventually, excellent support is reached, and you can learn a few things from them as well.

Incentivized

Implementation of Distributed Cloud is accomplished a few different ways, it would pay to meet with the F5 team and map out your implementation prior to acquisition to make sure you Infrastructure and Operations teams are aligned to the approach and requirements.

Incentivized

F5 Distributed Cloud Bot Defense provides strong protection against automated threats, but there are always opportunities for enhancement.

Incentivized

• We experience large web/data scraping attack campaigns and F5 Distributed Cloud Bot Defense over the years has helped mitigate these for us and significantly reducing load off of our origin servers.
• Also, we experience many large Credential Stuffing attacks and F5 Distributed Cloud Bot Defense helps us stop these attacks and protects our customers.