F5 Advanced WAF Reviews

We are a PPS payment providing services company in banking, so, we are using it for that. We are banking company and we are using it as a web application firewall.

We have an SOC, and for collecting logs we are also using the F5 logs to analyze the securities and events. So having a central log management and F5 really helped us to analyze the security logs. It also helps with blocking the attacks on web applications.

Everything is good about the F5 WAF, except the reporting. It's really difficult to set records from that device, the UI is kind of hard to work with, and the reporting must be improved.

As a suggestion to the F5 company, they have to put in shells to have the next generation WAF. So, instead of buying different modules and different hardware and appliances, they can offer an all-in-one solution for WAF.

The initial setup was was easy to install. Our department wasn't installing it, the infrastructure department installed it, so we gave them the policy that we wanted to use.

Because of the sanctions, we couldn't buy it straight from the US, so we bought it from an Iranian company. They provided us that solution. The company that sold us the device also had some people to consult with us to give us best practices from the previous companies that installed it.

I think it's a good product but the F5 uses shells, so the people who want to work with the device have to be pro in Linux. If they can put everything in the UI so every regular security engineer can work with it, it's fabulous.

I would rate the solution 8 out of 10. We are concerned about the other factors but it's actually not F5 company's fault. The pricing is really high here right now because of the dollar rate but it has nothing to do with the F5, it's because of the sanctions I imagine. At the moment it's a really expensive solution for us, not only F5 but the other appliances. 
If I went to another company, and the other company hired me, I would suggest they use this device. Although we don't have a lot of options to choose from around here.

We are using F5 Advanced WAF to defend against web application attacks.

The most valuable features of the F5 Advanced WAF are the enhanced ASM and the performance. Additionally, the usability and effectiveness are very good.

F5 Advanced WAF could improve on its funding for WAF features. There is a need to be more advanced WAF features.

I have been using F5 Advanced WAF for several years.

My advice to others is F5 Advanced WAF is a powerful WAF for many years in the market, and it has powerful security features.

F5 Advanced WAF is a stable solution.

I have found that F5 Advanced WAF is scalable but there is a limit.

We have hundreds of people using this solution in my organization.

I have not used the support from F5 Advanced WAF.

The initial setup of F5 Advanced WAF is straightforward, but the process is lengthy.

We did the deployment of F5 Advanced WAF in-house. We have a team that's always ready and aligned with the process of maintaining F5 Advanced WAF.

There are different licenses available to use F5 Advanced WAF, such as BT, ASM, and LPM.

I rate the price of F5 Advanced WAF a four out of five.

I rate F5 Advanced WAF an eight out of ten.

F5 is a web application firewall and load balancer. 

The primary use case of this solution is for data protection and security.

I like all of the features, but the main one is the attack signatures.

If they could separate the control plane from the data plane, it would give us more flexibility, especially with the Hyper Cloud. This could be the reason they purchased NGINX.

They have released the first production release but they are not there yet. It would be good to have this separation in the near future.

Also, automation on the cloud is not easy. It's a bit of a job, and it doesn't auto-scale very well.

They need to work on the BIG-IQ, which is centralized management. There are too many devices. Managing them individually is inconvenient. Essentially, BIG-IQ is supposed to centralize the management for all of the boxes but it's not very effective.

I have been using this solution for more than five years.

The stability is very good.

There is no solution that is bug-free, but when comparing it with other vendors, I would say that F5 is less buggy than the others.

The scalability is an issue at the moment, which is the reason they need to separate the control plane from the data plane.

We are using this solution daily. It runs 24/7.

The technical support is very good. They are knowledgeable and helpful.

The initial setup was simple and it took an hour to deploy.

This solution does not require a lot of maintenance but we need to do the patching regularly.

We do the implementation but at times we get consultations from F5.

It's more expensive than other solutions and depending on the modules, there can be additional fees.

If I would compare F5 with other solutions, the main differences are the support and the stability of the code, it has fewer bugs.

For on-premises deployments I would recommend F5, but for the cloud, it would be questionable.

I would rate this solution a seven of ten.

We use the product for load-balancing purposes.

The product has valuable features for load balancing, monitoring tools, and HPXpress services.

They could provide better pricing.

We have been using F5 Advanced WAF for a year.

I rate the product's stability an eight out of ten. 

The product is highly scalable. It is suitable for enterprise businesses. I rate its scalability an eight out of ten.

I rate the initial setup process a seven out of ten.

I rate F5 Advanced WAF's pricing a three out of ten.

I rate F5 Advanced WAF an eight out of ten.

I use F5 for on-premises infrastructure to provide protection.

The most valuable features of this solution are the WAF protection, Data Safe, and the seven-layer DDoS.

I would like to see the API Protection improved.

I have been using F5 Advanced WAF for two years.

We are using the latest version.

It's a stable product. We have no issues with the stability of the F5 Advanced WAF.

We have not yet tried to scale with this solution. We have increased by 15% to 20%. 

There are approximately 100 people in our company who use this solution.

I have contacted technical support several times. They have support consultants to provide help with your cases. I have received advice from them when I have tried to build new systems.

Overall, the technical support is excellent.

I am using it on my personal account on Google Cloud. It is used with cloud solutions. I use Google, Gmail, and Google Drive.

I was not a part of the initial setup.

The solution does not require any maintenance.

This solution was installed by a third party. It may have been the reseller.

I don't have any issue with the pricing of this solution. I am only involved with the technical portion of it.

I am not sure about recommending solutions.

I would rate F5 Advance WAF a nine out of ten.

We are using it to secure a few applications for our customers. 

The valuable features vary from customers to customers. Some customers are okay with the basic features of the WAF, and some customers use advanced WAF with a few other features.

It should be a little bit easy to deploy in terms of the overall deployment session. 

One of our customers is a bit unhappy about the reporting options. Currently, it automatically deletes event logs after some limit if a customer doesn't have any external Syslog server. It is a problem for those customers who want to review event logs after a week or so because they won't get proper reports or event logs. They should increase the duration to at least a month or two for storing the data on the device.

F5 is not a leader in Gartner Quadrant, which affects us when we go and pitch this solution. Customers normally go and take a look at such annual reports, and because F5 is currently not there as a leader, the customers ask about it even though we are saying it is good in all things. 

F5 is not known for something totally different or unique. They were a major player in ADP, and they are just rebranding themselves into security. They should improve or increase their marketing as a security company now. They have already started to do that, but they should do it more so that when it comes to security, customers can easily remember F5. At the moment, if we say F5, load balancing comes to mind. With rebranding and marketing, all customers should get the idea that F5 is now mainly focusing on the security part of it, and it is a security company instead of load balancing. This is the first solution that should come to a customer's mind for a web application firewall.

I have been using this solution almost for a year.

It has good stability. Our customers are happy with the implementation. So far, we haven't faced many issues.

Overall, it has been good. We get proper support, and we haven't faced any challenges. However, F5 doesn't provide support during the demo or POC time. Other vendors provide technical support for demo or POC, but F5 does not. We have to reach out to the local AC every now and then, which is a difficult task because most of the time, he is in some other meeting or busy with something else. So, he isn't able to support us. They should give us some kind of technical support for demos and POCs. We should be able to reach out to them for completing a POC. It would be an added advantage.

The implementation was quite smooth. We migrated from CloudFlare to F5 without any major issues. The deployment took almost ten months, and it included the implementation and fine-tuning. The customer had three applications.

Its price is fair. We have done a couple of deals where they were able to give some kind of discount to the customers. The price was initially high for the customers, but after a couple of negotiations, it came within their budget. They were happy with that.

I would recommend this solution because it is overall a very good solution. As a company, they are very established and stable, and they have a long legacy in the industry. They have been there in the industry for a long time. On top of that, they have very good solutions. They can just improve their offerings and marketing in terms of the new rebranding.

I would rate F5 Advanced WAF an eight out of ten.

This solution inspects your traffic and based on that, automatically create distinct qualities for you, so you can add this to the policy already created. That's what I like most.

I would not expect traffic details to pass through the web application firewall across the length of the whole application. I think that there is a web application where it can let the application function without traffic going in into the WAF.

I think the solution is already being phased out. They are now going for a more advanced option but I'm referring to the web crawler. The web crawler should be able to allow a web application on its own to create policies, rather than wait for traffic to go to the WAF.

There are templates for creating policies, so the initial setup is very straightforward.

I would want to use ASM, or Area Security Manager, which I would rate as seven of ten. That offers lending passability, where the device should be able to lend or call the application and know the component of an application.

We primarily use the solution to protect web and API applications. You can choose either web classic or API to protect against different types of attacks.

With Advanced WAF protection, F5 was able to protect multiple kind of Web Application, supporting both HTTP & API protocols access

There are two main features that we love on F5.

The first is the hardware itself. It's extremely stable and reliable. We never face any issues with it and performance is never affected. 

The second is the features on offer. Feature-wise, they are always cutting edge and up-to-date. Many features aren't available via competitors. There's always a lot of enhanced critical features that just aren't available through anyone else, or, if they are, are too lightweight. They're the leaders in the space.

We usually use a third-party tool for logging and reporting. It would be nice if we could do that right on this solution. They have one, but it's not very stable. Logging and reporting effectively would be a big enhancement.

The solution still needs some development to handle more traffic, especially in huge environments. In small environments, it's not an issue. 

I've bee using the solution for more than ten years.

The solution is extremely stable and robust. There are no issues with bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's great. The stability is a huge selling feature.

It's scalable. There's always options to upgrade the hardware. Any hardware you buy from a store, you have the basic model and the upgraded model. For example, if you buy the 4600 appliance, you can upgrade up to 4800. You get double specs for everything, so you can just upgrade the license of the hardware. However, hardware eventually has a limitation. If you buy too small of a size of hardware, eventually there's some development limitations for the hardware. You can, however, do a cluster. You can add multiple hardware devices. This makes it very scalable.

The solution is not user-based. It's more connection-based, so there's no limitation on the number of users. It's more of a limitation on total throughput or total connection. Limitations depend on the application and how much traffic it generates. We've seen it in Telco environment where there's more than millions of users. We've also seen it do well with online banking where there are thousands of users. Small companies can use it too. It can vary, however, we've seen it in millions of users at Telco.

Technical support is great. We always open tickets. They're always very fast and very professional, and they always solve the issues. We're extremely satisfied with the level of support we receive.

If you want to do the basic installation and get the system up and running, then it's pretty straightforward. However, you have the flexibility to go very advanced and you can get into very complicated scenarios. That's what we like about the solution. There's a lot of use cases where you're required to have the ability to create some advanced features or some complicated scenarios. It gives you the capabilities to handle them.

You have the flexibility to go beyond that and have advanced scripting rules and advanced features in order to have more capability to do new things that are not as common. You need to have the space to improvise things if you need to.

While a straightforward deployment may only take a few hours, as it has a pre-defined rough template, there's always tuning to be done. It's a security product. It's not like it's plug-and-play. There's always a learning phase and tuning is necessary. This is common with any security product. That said, to get it up and operational, it's a matter of hours.

For a proper work deployment, to be frank, you need an ether professional because there's an ether configuration change. You also need a security professional to do the rules and policies and everything. Then, you need the involvement of the web application developer, so you can understand the content of the web application. Security people don't know which link is good and which link is bad inside the application. Usually, you need three people from the team - one each from network, security, and application - to have a proper deployment.

We're an integrator.

We have a big customer base, therefore we always have to be up to date with the latest versions. We feed to constantly look at things so that we know the new features.

I highly recommend the solution to other companies. F5 has a huge portfolio of plug-ins. You can add it to the top of the web. On the same appliance, you can have your balancer, you can have your application authentication, and those things that turn on. You can have multiple other features on the same hardware. It is definitely a technology that adapts. I can use the application in different ways beyond just security.

On a scale from one to ten, I'd rate it at a perfect ten.