F5 Networks offers the Advanced Web Application Firewall (WAF) to provide bot defense, advanced application protection, anti-bot SDK, and other features.
Advanced WAF is well suited for protection against account enumeration attacks, protection against known and new increasing attack vectors through out of the box attack signatures and threat campaigns. Also, up to date and accurate IP intelligence database to block based on known IP reputation.
So the product definitely is helping us for sudden attacks through DDOS, some injection ingestion into UI URLs, and definitely it's capturing those and I definitely see that as an advantage for us. They can stop the hackers from using our endpoints.
The UI for events. E.g., clicking the "Accept" button does nothing.
Traffic learning suggestions are often very incorrect. We were originally suggested to use "Automatic" learning, and had to completely scrap the policy due to the suggestions.
"All in one" dashboard for viewing application URL/parameter overrides per policy.
Most* of it is very intuitive and easy to use. The "Help" section is fairly fantastic. See some of my other comments about things like the "Traffic Learning" section being wildly wrong sometimes, and also the event logs with UI buttons that don't do anything. Overall though, it's an excellent product.
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.
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.