Many organizations that use Office 365 are exposed to security risks that they are unaware of. As they extend SharePoint to meet their business needs, they build applications using technologies that range from end-user Microsoft Flow to developer-focused SharePoint Framework. Unfortunately, all of these custom applications are capable of circumventing the security measures organizations have in place exposing the organization and its data to security…
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F5 Distributed Cloud Bot Defense
Score 8.3 out of 10
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F5 Distributed Cloud Bot Defense (formerly Shape Defense, acquired January 2020) provides security to protect a website from bots, fake users, and unauthorized transactions, preventing large scale fraud and eroded user experiences. Companies get visibility, detection and mitigation outcomes to reduce fraud and cloud hosting, bandwidth and compute costs, improve user experiences, and optimize their business based on real human traffic.
For Microsoft shops that are doing custom development on the Microsoft cloud platform in Office 365 and Azure, the Rencore toolset is an absolute must, especially if you are involved in converting farm solutions to cloud, or just moving into cloud development for the first time.
I'd strongly recommend it, but with a few caveats depending on how mature the team is with behavioral based security tools. One of our fintech clients was getting hit with low volume, widely spread login attempts, below our rate limiting thresholds. F5 Distributed Cloud Bot Defense was able to flag abnormal input timings, inconsistent device fingerprinting and high entropy in field population behavior. You can only imagine the wave of downstream account lockouts this saved the client. On the other end we had a client with a real time trading platform using Graphql over websockets. F5 Distributed Cloud Bot Defense wasn't able to tap into that stream natively. we had to reverse engineer a proxy layer to inspect events. It worked but it was clunky and not officially supported
Unique expert knowledge of their target platforms. Not many companies have such a unique position in their target market. Their employees have a deep understanding of SharePoint, Office 365 and Azure and also regularly advise Microsoft on these matters.
Community involvement and contribution to open source projects. Key employees at Rencore are considered thought leaders in their area of expertise and contribute to high profile Microsoft open source initiatives.
Rencore's unique position when it comes to code quality analysis in the SharePoint space sets it apart. There's really no alternative.
Platform governance is another Rencore strength. No other product provides the insights into your SharePoint Online environment with full auditing of not only configuration changes but also who changed which code where and when. Again no alternatives exist.
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.
Rencore's product line is of course still a bit of a niche: SharePoint code quality is not something every organization on the planet is concerned with - although Rencore does much more than that.
We feel Rencore's marketing efforts are mainly targeted at technologists. There's a lot of other potential, especially for their platform governance product.
Official support can sometimes take time to reach the right people. However, once you are in contact with the appropriate experts, the support is excellent, as F5 staff are true specialists. On the other hand, we always receive prompt assistance from our local sales team, who typically help us connect with the right people quickly.
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.
I don't know of any products that compete in the space and if there were any, they would not stand a chance against Rencore. Behind any good product is a team of highly skilled individuals, who all have the same goal, who are passionate what they do and lastly, are in it for the betterment of where they started; As Developers themselves. You can't buy that
Clodflare bot management was our other obvious option for us. We tested it on a staging version of our RFQ platform. It was great for broad traffic filtering but had a hard time with nuanced differences between real subcontractors and low volume bots mimickingt human input whereas that's where F5 Distributed Cloud Bot Defense thrived
The clear impact was the amount of time saved code reviewing or going through lines of code marked off by other tools that are not relevant. We cannot put a number on it since the project started off with the tool in place but based on the rules applied it could be as high as 20% of the project time.
Prior to F5 Distributed Cloud Bot Defense, we were averaging 12k plus credential stuffing attempts weekly across client portals That number fell down to less than a thousand in just 4 weeks
Over 90 percent of scraping and unauthorized price harvesting blocked
