PaymentWorks vs. F5 Distributed Cloud Bot Defense

Appropriate only for US customers with domestic banking institutions who speak English fluently.

Not appropriate for any foreign vendor to get paid in less than 6 months. The data is poorly designed. The software defaults to domestic banking information such as routing number. Vendors then choose check payments overseas which take 45 days and usually never arrive. I end up submitting the same payments over and over. Customers are always angry and I have no ability to help them.

I'd strongly recommend it, but with a few caveats depending on how mature the team is with behavioral based security tools. One of our fintech clients was getting hit with low volume, widely spread login attempts, below our rate limiting thresholds. F5 Distributed Cloud Bot Defense was able to flag abnormal input timings, inconsistent device fingerprinting and high entropy in field population behavior. You can only imagine the wave of downstream account lockouts this saved the client. On the other end we had a client with a real time trading platform using Graphql over websockets. F5 Distributed Cloud Bot Defense wasn't able to tap into that stream natively. we had to reverse engineer a proxy layer to inspect events. It worked but it was clunky and not officially supported

Incentivized

• The data is kept secure

• Regularly analyze traffic patterns and bot activity. Use the insights provided by the platform to refine rules and policies.
• Configure rules to specify acceptable behavior for user interactions and alter sensitivity levels as appropriate to reduce false positives.
• Integrate F5 Bot Defense into our existing security stack, which may include WAFs (Web Application Firewalls) and SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) solutions.

Incentivized

• Software design especially in regards to entering foreign bank accounts
• Customer service never really assists the customer
• Admins are not notified when there is incomplete registration or problems with the information entered. We have to wait for the customer to contact us and by that time they are very angry and their payment is very delayed
• The only language available is English. The tax forms are only available in English

• On a technical side, we've had a lot of deployment issues. This is not a one-sprint solution.
• We ran into undocumented failure modes and had to rely on L2 and L3 customer support, delaying troubleshooting significantly [in our experience].
• Accurate log ingestion is a larger challenge than one would want in a security tool.

We are more likely than not, to renew it. It saved us from a really huge data breach 4 months ago. It has earned its shower so far

Incentivized

Administrators hate the system because they cannot see any information in order to assist customers. Customers hate it because registration is lengthy and difficult and only available in English

Official support can sometimes take time to reach the right people. However, once you are in contact with the appropriate experts, the support is excellent, as F5 staff are true specialists. On the other hand, we always receive prompt assistance from our local sales team, who typically help us connect with the right people quickly.

Incentivized

Implementation of Distributed Cloud is accomplished a few different ways, it would pay to meet with the F5 team and map out your implementation prior to acquisition to make sure you Infrastructure and Operations teams are aligned to the approach and requirements.

Incentivized

I was not involved in this choice and the people who chose the system are not end users of this software. The end user experience was never considered when this decision was made. Admins and customers hate PaymentWorks. It is only effective at wasting your time and money and employee resources

Clodflare bot management was our other obvious option for us. We tested it on a staging version of our RFQ platform. It was great for broad traffic filtering but had a hard time with nuanced differences between real subcontractors and low volume bots mimickingt human input whereas that's where F5 Distributed Cloud Bot Defense thrived

Incentivized

• Zero return on investment. It takes 3 people to do the work that one person used to be able to manage.
• The only way that I can find out if there are problems is if the customer contacts me about non-payment.
• Zero integration with our accounting software. New vendors have to be manually transferred from PaymentWorks to the accounting software. Updates to PaymentWorks have to be manually carried from one system to the other. There are no notifications when these processes have been completed

• We experience large web/data scraping attack campaigns and F5 Distributed Cloud Bot Defense over the years has helped mitigate these for us and significantly reducing load off of our origin servers.
• Also, we experience many large Credential Stuffing attacks and F5 Distributed Cloud Bot Defense helps us stop these attacks and protects our customers.