F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM) vs. NETSCOUT Arbor DDoS Protection

We were able to eliminate a firewall from our network architecture by integrating the module into our existing F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM). This allowed us to save on tech refresh costs, since the F5 was able to handle the module without much additional strain on the device. However, if a firewall had features that the AFM lacked, then using that firewall in tandem with an F5 would be preferable.

Incentivized

Good fit

• If you receive layer 7 attacks on a regular basis targeting critical infrastructure that needs to stay up, this is a good fit in conjuction with out-of-band TMS or in-band APS. This is obviously going to be contingent on your budget.

Not a good fit

• If you are looking to mitigate large volume attacks that are saturating your uplinks to the Internet and taking your entire network down, this (or any on-premesis solution, for that matter) is not the solution for you. Look into any external DDoS scrubbing service to let them take the blow and return only the clean traffic to you.
• The Peakflow system has many features similar to an IPS with the ability to block traffic based on layer 7 signatures, but country code, etc and may be tempting to use this as an IDS/IPS solution. This will cause issues for a few reasons, cheif among them is that the system is not intended for permananent or indefinite mitigations. Additionally, signitures are only updated on software version upgrades.

Incentivized

• Port based controls
• Ease of using address objects

Incentivized

• Arbor's layer 7 countermeasures are very good out of the box, but it is very easy to reconfigure values and see the impact in real-time.
• Peakflow SP provides fairly detailed traffic analysis and breakdown for top-N data such as top talkers, top ASNs, top ports and so on. They offer "SP Insight" as a product to build in more powerful reporting on the already-collected metrics with an interface very similar to Kibana or one of its many forks. We are not licensed for that so I can't speak to its capabilities.
• Arbor allows for a good amount of automation. Fast flood detection ensures that if pre-determined thresholds are quickly exceeded, preconfigured mitigations can be started or in the event of an extremely large volumetric attack you can trigger an Arbor Cloud (sold separately) mitigation or a remotely-triggered blackhole announcement to drop traffic to the attacked destination IP address(es) upstream.
• ATAC (Arbor support) is very helpful. The level of support our organization maintains covers ATAC performing all update functions to all Arbor appliances - SP and TMS.

Incentivized

• More intuitive user interface
• Better naming conventions
• Fewer navigation steps to prevent abstraction

Incentivized

• Arbor is a highly expensive company. this was the major reason behind not going for the Arbor sightline in the first place. Although its features are good but the cost is unjustifiable.
• The implementation and the understanding of this tool are full of complexity and perplexity.
• I am looking forward to having a new update on it. They used to update their versions quite frequently but it's been a long time they haven’t updated or maybe it is not in their priority lists right now.

Incentivized

F5 Advanced Firewall Manager has been a solid, strong solution to both keep our systems safe and being seamless for our end users. Most of the time, the end-user is not impacted and does not even know F5 Advanced Firewall Manager is running which is exactly what we are looking for.

Incentivized

Both F5 [BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager] and Radware require training as they are not easy to use. But Radware uses some configuration that needs deep learning and proper labs. From an admin's perspective, Configuration and management for F5 [BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager are] less. Also, the cost of implementing F5 [BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager] is lesser than that of Radware Alteon.

Incentivized

We chose Cisco because we had past experience with some Cisco products and we were ready to invest a high cost for Cisco Secure but unfortunately it didn’t come up to our expectations and left us in despair. The speed, the price and the analytics of Cisco, everything was just average but when we moved to Arbor we came to realize that market still have some good network analytics tool.

Incentivized

• Easy maintenance reduces support hours.
• Consistent experience reduces user learning curve.

Incentivized

• Arbor is good in empower us to monitor the issues in the network.
• We can get better traffic analytics and reports are quite detailed.
• The price is quite high which makes it a little hard choice for us.

Incentivized