Cloud-based protection for your distributed web applications
F5 Distributed Cloud WAF (Web Application Firewall) eases the burden and complexity of consistently securing apps across cloud, on-premises, and edge locations.
Protect Web Apps Wherever They’re Deployed
F5 Distributed Cloud WAF combines F5’s industry leading web application firewall in an easy-to-use SaaS format.
Challenges
The evolution of application architectures, deployment locations, and threat landscapes has made it significantly more difficult to effectively secure and operate them.
Balancing security and agility
Ensuring proper security controls is challenging for app dev teams with increasing workloads and deadlines.
Growing operational complexity
Securing apps has become more complex as they get deployed across heterogenous environments.
Volume of threats and false positives
Threats are evolving at an accelerating pace, leading to an ever-greater volume of false positives.
Policy variation reducing efficacy
Differences in system configurations and policy enforcement result in lower overall efficacy.
Why Distributed Cloud WAF?
Dramatically simplified operations
SaaS-delivered WAF that’s quick to set up and deploy, and easy to manage and scale across clouds, on-premises data centers, and edge sites.
DevOps agility + SecOps control
Deliver the programmability that DevOps needs combined with the efficacy and oversight that SecOps mandates, enabling faster application delivery and release cycles.
Reduce time to resolution
Improve visibility and insight across WAF and DDoS security events, and into app performance, including intuitive drill-down capabilities.
Comprehensive protection with fewer false positives
Utilize both signature-based and AI/ML based detection techniques with automatic signature tuning to ensure maximum efficacy and reduced SecOps workloads.
How It Works
Connects, secures, and manages apps in the cloud, on-prem, edge or in the F5 global network.
F5 Distributed Cloud WAF is a next-gen SaaS-based web application firewall that provides signature and behavioral-based threat detection to protect applications wherever they are deployed.
Key Capabilities
F5 Distributed Cloud WAF leverages powerful, advanced WAF technology, combining signature and robust behavior-based protection for web applications. The service acts as an intermediate proxy to inspect application requests and responses to block and mitigate a broad spectrum of risks stemming from the OWASP Top 10, threat campaigns, malicious users, layer 7 DDoS threats, bots and automated attacks, and more.
Robust attack signature engine
Captures Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) plus known vulnerabilities and techniques identified by F5 Labs, including Layer 7 DDoS, threat campaigns, bots, and automated threats.
Advanced behavior engine
Leverages AI/ML to monitor and score client interactions, deciphering intent based on the number of WAF rules hit, forbidden access attempts, login failures, error rates, and more, to help identify an app’s highest priority threats.
Powerful service policy engine
Enables micro segmentation and advanced security at the application layer, utilizing IP reputation and allow/deny lists to block clients with known bad TLS fingerprints, ASNs from suspicious countries, and more.
Automatic attack signature tuning
Easily determines if a signature-identified attack is really a threat, helping reduce the number of false positives.
Streamlined set-up and management
Deploy through a simple UI or automate via APIs including best-practice default protections and the flexibility to create custom rules.
Multi-app dashboards
Rich observability via a single dashboard with a 360-degree view of app performance and security events across distributed applications.
Distributed Cloud WAF Use Cases
Secure Apps Everywhere
Mitigate web app attacks and vulnerabilities with comprehensive security controls and uniform policy and observability, including simplified deployment and management of app security postures across environments.
Defend Against Known Threats and Suspicious Behavior
Using a variety of AI and ML techniques, potentially bad actors are flagged and can be blocked even though the client doesn’t necessarily match a known threat signature.
Secure App Development
Simplify app security by seamlessly integrating the service into the development process with core security functionality, centralized orchestration, and oversight.
Broad Platform and Cloud Provider Support
Distributed Cloud Services can be delivered to apps running on any platform on any public/private cloud. Connect and secure apps running in VMs, containers, bare metal or serverless.
Simplifying DevOps and SecOps
F5’s native Terraform provider, vesctl CLI tool, and public APIs deliver the automation needs of app teams. Support for alerting tools (i.e., Opsgenie and Slack) and SIEM tools (i.e., Splunk and Datadog) simplify life of DevOps and SecOps.
Ways to Deploy
F5 Distributed Cloud WAF delivers comprehensive application security anywhere—with flexibility in architecture, routing, and policy enforcement across public/private clouds, on-premises data centers, and edge sites, with centralized visibility and management via a SaaS-based console.
Public clouds
Manage and protect application workloads hosted across clouds, including AWS, Azure, and GCP.
On-premises
Manage and protect applications at your data center and edge sites.
F5 global PoPs
Manage and protect application workloads from any of the points of presence (PoPs) on the F5 global network.
