Some of the use cases are things like remote access, traditional remote access replacement, and able to access applications from any location with the best possible user experience.
Pros
Some of the things the product does well is allowing customers to access their critical applications without having to do things like hair pinning in through their corporate environment. They can go straight out to the application and ensure that they have a secure connection to an application.
Cons
More of a unified experience as Gartner released their latest sort of sassy trends. A lot of consumers are looking at a more unified experience and that's the sort of compilation of both management and data planes into a single things like single UI, easier management experience for the corporations.
Likelihood to Recommend
Things like hybrid workforce, remote access and replacement of VDI solutions is probably the primary.
VU
Verified User
Employee in Information Technology (5001-10,000 employees)
We have just started using F5 Distributed Cloud App Connect in a POC for testing out future implementation. So far it has been user friendly and fairly straight forward to configure. The site configuration took the longest simply because of organizational policies we had to work through but once those were sorted we were able to get it up and running in very little time. Impressive to say the least compared to standing up a new box or VM.
Pros
Ease of use - standing up a new site took very little time, less then an hour.
Connecting the dots - the ease at standing up a load balancer and advertising it on CEs was simple and straight forward. Once you get familiar with the field layout it's very comparable to BIG-IP
Likelihood to Recommend
I thought F5 Distributed Cloud App Connect worked great to bridge the gap between our gcp environment and on prem. We were lacking in cloud funtionality for native load balancers but XC really connected the dots. We would most likely need a hybrid environment until the irules functionality improves for a few of our apps but most could be migrated over the XC.
VU
Verified User
Administrator in Information Technology (1001-5000 employees)
Instrumental in transforming our application networking and security framework. We utilize the platform to effortlessly link distributed applications across diverse cloud environments, ensuring uniform performance, robust security, and comprehensive observability -Easily connect different applications via APIs, security, scalability
Pros
Transitioning of legacy management system to microservices hosted in multiple clouds.
One application was running in multiple regions so edge services for faster user experience
Cons
User access roles should be more granular what we currently have
user interface should be user friendly
Setup process and guided workflows could add a user friendly process for first time users
log export from SIEM tool still require a manual intervention
Likelihood to Recommend
Required: - Application which requires a faster response time without any delays -Company runs their microservices on multiple cloud platforms -Scenario where company wants to leverage both on-prem and cloud NotRequired: where company operates on single cloud and the feature of it will not be utilized fully- A scenario where a company requires a lot of visual and graphical representation of insight based on logs
Verified User
Engineer in Information Technology (10,001+ employees)
When we were forced to accelerate our move from on prem to cloud post Covid 2 years ago, the biggest challenge was securing connectivity between legacy ERP systems in our data center and the new workloads we were standing up in Azure. App connect's ability to bridge those environments through encrypted tunnels gave us a way to transition without exposing supply chain data. 2 years down the line and still underpins the operations on our cloud based systems.
Pros
service mesh across multiple clusters
good observability across APIs
Cons
The custom policy creation is anything but flexible no matter how much you stress the tool
Likelihood to Recommend
F5 Distributed Cloud App Connect has constantly proven itself in both critical and the day to day operations. For us, it thrives in securing supplier APis across regions or when we need encrypted comms between plants and our analytics workloads. In my opinion, avoid it for standalone workloads
Verified User
Administrator in Information Technology (1001-5000 employees)
More than 90 percent of our clients in finance run distributed applications that span AWS, Azure, and on prem systems. F5 Distributed Cloud App Connect becomes the connective glue that enforces security policies across those environments. Without it, every environment would need its own API gateway setup, WAF tuning and certificate management.
Pros
a built in WAF that actually adapts in real time
service to service encryption with auto management of certificates
Cons
I tried creating a complex fraud detection check for a fintech client at the gateway level but was really limited to how much I can customize
Likelihood to Recommend
A strong 8 because it is highly effective when you need secure and low latency access across multicloud environments. I always know I can rely on it. If you try using F5 Distributed Cloud App Connect for very lightweight projects, you'll quickly discover how much of an overkill it is and hate yourself midway - I learnt this the hard way from a recent gruesome experience
