Barracuda SSL VPN vs F5 BIG-IP Access Policy Manager (APM) comparison

Your army of road warriors and remote workers require a quick, flexible, reliable and completely secure way to connect to your internal enterprise applications, information and network resources. They want to do this from anywhere in the world, at any time and from any suitable device. The Barracuda SSL VPN provides the security and connectivity to deliver this access, via a web browser or virtually any mobile device.

F5 BIG-IP Access Policy Manager (APM) is an access management proxy solution for managing global access to the enterprise networks, cloud providers, applications, and application programming interfaces (APIs). Through a single management interface, BIG-IP APM consolidates remote, mobile, network, virtual, and web access. 

BIG-IP APM can also serve as a bridge between modern and classic authentication and authorization protocols and methods. For applications which are unable to support modern authentication and authorization protocols, like SAML and OAuth with OIDC, but which do support classic authentication methods, BIG-IP APM converts user credentials to the appropriate authentication standard supported by the application.

BIG-IP APM Benefits:

• Ease of use
• Flexibility
• Ability to integrate with other systems
• Security features
• Granular access control
• Responsive and helpful support team

BIG-IP APM Features:

• Support for Identity Aware Proxy (IAP) enabling Zero Trust application access
• Context-based authorization with dynamic L4/L7 ACLs
• Integration with third-party MFA solutions
• DTLS 2.0 mode for delivering and securing applications
• SAML 2.0 identity federation support
• Support for OAuth 2.0 authorization protocol
• SSO support for classic authentication (Kerberos, header- based, etc.), credential caching, OAuth 2.0, SAML 2.0, and FIDO2 (U2F)
• AAA server authentication and high-availability
• Integration with leading IAM vendor products (Microsoft, Okta, Ping Identity)
• BIG IP Edge Client and F5 Access integrate with VMware Horizon ONE (AirWatch), Microsoft Intune and IBM MaaS360
• Risk-based access leveraging third-party UEBA and risk engines (HTTP Connector)

Reviews from Real Users

Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by BIG-IP APM users.

Mahmmoud Rabie, Senior Site Reliability Engineer, writes that BIG-IP APM is "A highly stable solution for load balancing, but the initial setup is complex."

Clyde Livingston, Senior Process Specialist at Telstra, says that BIG-IP APM is "Easy to use, useful access remotely, but lacking stability."

Chris Lam, Senior Solution Consultant at Macroview Telecom Limited, states that BIG-IP APM is "Useful for remote access VPN and VPI integration with VMware.