F5 Distributed Cloud Bot Defense vs. VMware AppDefense (discontinued)

F5 Distributed Cloud Bot Defense is well suited for large Enterprises that face advanced bot attacks from Web
Scraping, Credential Stuffing, Carding/Credit Card Stuffing, Fake Account
Creation, and more where the collection of the Client-Side signals helps clearly show if the attackers are telling lies vs. other bot solutions that place a lot of the responsibility on their customers to tune bot scores.

Being a VMware product, AppDefense has the advantage of compatibility with all of the VMware product feature updates and patches ( ESXi, NSX, vCenter, etc.). Paired with Carbon Black, it's resource overhead is well-tuned compared to traditional antivirus products.

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.

• I think that the AppDefense approach is clever and sets it apart from other products. Having a baseline of normal behavior that I can see is something I haven't seen in another product before.
• AppDefense doesn't overload my systems with performance draining agents.
• AppDefense integrates with VMWare products I have or plan to purchase.
• Access to AppDefense support has been better than any other VMWare products.

Incentivized

• 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.

• PowerShell functionality.
• Sorting results in some areas are not applicable.
• Email alerting through AppDefense Manager does not exist, but support has said it is a feature to come.

Incentivized

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

The product is still quite new, and there seems to be a lack of technical information available for both the E.U. and support staff. That being said, the support staff that I have worked with have always been very knowledgeable and ensure that they see a ticket through to completion.

Incentivized

F5 Distributed Cloud Bot Defense and our partners are great at helping us with in-depth Traffic Analysis of protected endpoints first in Monitoring Mode. After 7-14 days of Traffic Analysis/False Positive reviews, we can clearly tell when we are ready to place protected endpoints into Mitigation Mode.

We have tried a whole bunch of solutions before we got Shape bot defense solution. But non of them worked for us the way F5 Shape solution worked

Incentivized

We have several security applications, but none exactly like VMware AppDefense. That is one of the reasons I like it, as it seems to take a different angle on monitoring and protection. The other apps monitor different things, but one thing AppDefense seems to have over them is a streamlined interface and not a lot of false positives.

Incentivized

• [F5] Shape [Security] established a clear negative trend line in bot traffic to our retail site.
• [F5] Shape [Security's] anti-automation has moved our business out of reach for ROI for attackers.
• So far, [F5] Shape [Security] has not caused any incidents as a technology, and has stifled attacks which would have certainly landed as a Sev 2 without this protection.

• As with everything now, automation is key. AppDefense effectively monitors the activity on all our VMs, freeing administrators to work on more projects
• Makes it much easier to diagnose issues when system are not running as intended

Incentivized