Item: F5 Distributed Cloud WAF (Web Application Firewall)
Rating: 9
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with F5 Distributed Cloud WAF (Web Application Firewall)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We have integrated the WAF in our environment to use in conjunction with our edge services to protect our application services between Layers 4-7. The application servers are running with high resources which limits the ability to perform SSL offloading. The WAF gave us the option to protect these servers along with providing the ability to perform SSL offloading and also working as an app firewall. This helped us save costs on installing a firewall with sub standard UTM services.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Very good data analysis and dashboard
ease of configuration
DDOS protection
API services

Cons

Better integration between different F5 solutions
Fail over between devices feels unstable if there are thousands of objects attached to the traffic-group. Needs to be more simpler.
We have seen issues with malicious user detection where we have used open protocols due to legacy applications, and have been caught with legitimate traffic being blocked.

Return on Investment

Incident Management
Reports for Audits and Management
Ease of Use

App Security Simplification

Being able to set up the WAF on the edge and being able to look at a granular view of how traffic comes in and how it is being checked and reviewed gives a good view of how secure the environment is. Being able to stop DDOS with on the profiles is excellent and being able to consistently monitor and pull reports based on the traffic flow gives flexibility.

Distributed environments

No - We are running the WAF's dedicated to the on-prem environments across different locations with a view to see the performance before moving in to the private and public clouds. Based on the the quality of performance, these are in the pipeline to be integrated with the cloud environments in the near future.

Key Insights

Do you think F5 Distributed Cloud WAF (Web Application Firewall) delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with F5 Distributed Cloud WAF (Web Application Firewall)'s feature set?

Yes

Did F5 Distributed Cloud WAF (Web Application Firewall) live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of F5 Distributed Cloud WAF (Web Application Firewall) go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy F5 Distributed Cloud WAF (Web Application Firewall) again?

Yes

Other Software Used

F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM), Linux Containers LXC, Mirantis Kubernetes Engine

Likelihood to Recommend

The WAF provides a good outline for protecting the services on the edge and gives flexibility to tune the applications for security. We have used WAF for SSL offloading, and L4-7 protection. These are best used for external customers coming in to access your services. Setting up the application servers behind LTM, DNS and WAF provides end to end security and visibility which helps in tracking unwanted actors & traffic.

Comments

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Sherry Arnold
(Vendor Representative) commented 6 months ago
Thanks so much for taking the time to write such a thoughtful review We appreciate your feedback
Sherry Arnold
(Vendor Representative) commented 6 months ago
Thanks for taking the time to write a thoughtful review We appreciate and use your feedback

F5 Distributed Cloud WAF review

Modules Used