Item: F5 Big-IP Advanced WAF
Rating: 9
Author: Adolfo Rodrguez

Overall Satisfaction with F5 Big-IP Advanced Web Application Firewall

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

It helps us protect everything including our intranet, every company we have on Azure and also even an IBM Power 9AS/400 platform. So we have the left and also a full proxy for the non web application platform.

Pros and Cons

Pros

It provides us with a lot of flexibility for us to move from one data center to another transparently.
It provides us with the capabilities of doing VPN and using multifactor authentication and integrating with all the web platforms that we have in the company and Azure. So very flexible.

Cons

I believe that I haven't seen a version of F5 that works directly on Azure as a platform as a service as opposed to a VM. I believe that I have to provision the virtual edition on a virtual machine. I manage it as a virtual machine instead of a platform. I would like to see something that is self-provisioning and that I can use directly without having to have a machine that I have to manage and manage resources.

Return on Investment

In our case it has been great because the pricing is just right for all the features that we have on the platform and the flexibility. In fact, we acquired another license last year, so that's something that we're interested in. We are currently moving towards the cloud with our ERP systems and eliminating the IBM platform, so we would like to see that F5 virtual option available on Azure.

Usability

It's complex but not that complex, so I would rate it like a seven or eight.

Alternatives Considered

Azure Web Application Firewall

I believe that in the case of Big-IP F5, it has a lot of power, a lot of features including the VPN features and also the evaluation of security posture of the devices that connect through VPN. That's very solid and that's something that is not found in all the WAF solutions and so I haven't seen that in Azure.

Key Insights

Do you think F5 Big-IP Advanced WAF delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with F5 Big-IP Advanced WAF's feature set?

Yes

Did F5 Big-IP Advanced WAF live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of F5 Big-IP Advanced WAF go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy F5 Big-IP Advanced WAF again?

Yes

Likelihood to Recommend

I believe that in industrial environments like ours where we have to have bare metal devices near the production environment combined with hybrid cloud, that is a good platform. That's a good use case. It optimizes traffic. It helps us stay more secure in our data centers. Now with regards to that are fully operating in the cloud, I'm not really sure if we would make the same decision considering the option that I said to have something that is self-provision to avoid too much management of virtual machines on the cloud. So that's an area of improvement.

Comments

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Advanced Web Application Firewall Review