F5 Advanced WAF Reviews

It is used for application security and load balancing. As we have a few customers who are using banking applications, and stock market applications, they are more concerned about security and how to protect the product and their business applications. And that's why we offer security applications. Besides that, there are new features for load balancing in the F5.

Customers find the load balancer feature as the most valuable.

The tool needs to improve its pricing. 

I have been using it for two years.

It is a very stable product. It is the favourite product of banking customers in Egypt.

It is a very scalable product. You can write down any iRule you want as it is very convenient.

We used Citrix ADC, Fortinet FortiWeb, and Barracuda before F5 Advanced WAF. We switched to F5 Advanced WAF due to its efficiency and the port lockdown feature that the customers in Egypt like. Also since it's certified by Gartner, the customers feel confident using it.

The initial setup was simple.

If you are looking for a really good product, you should consider F5 Advanced WAF.

I would rate it a nine out of ten.

The most valuable features of F5 Advanced WAF are SSL uploading, signature, and anomaly detection. It is overall a high-quality solution.

The solution could improve by having an independent capture module. It has a built feature that you can deploy the capture on your published website. However, it's not very user-friendly. When you compare this feature to Google Capture or other enterprise captures, they are very simple. It needs a good connection to the F5 Advanced WAF sandbox. When you implement this feature in the data center, you may suffer some complications with connecting to the F5 Advanced WAF sandbox. This should be improved in the future.

I have been using F5 Advanced WAF for approximately 10 years. This includes my experience when the solution was  formerly named Advanced Security Module(ASM).

F5 Advanced WAF is an extremely stable solution.

I have found F5 Advanced WAF scalable.

Technical support is handy and useful when you have your contract available. Once you lose it, you are all alone and there is a penalty to extend your subscription.

I have used FortiWeb previously.

These products are not meant to be compared, because they are serving in different areas of expertise. When you are low on budget, it's better to use the FortiWeb. When you have a budget and want quality, it's most recommended to use the F5 Advanced WAF. We are talking about different classes of quality.

When you are using the F5 Advanced WAF for any reason, you have to employ an expert. It's not the same as other solutions, such as FortiWeb, it is not easy to use. It's an advanced device, and you have to have an advanced person to operate it. This is the biggest problem that F5 Advanced WAF.

The price of the solution is reasonable when compared with other products, such as FortiWeb. I am very satisfied with the price.

My advice to those wanting to implement F5 Advanced WAF is they will need to have an expert on any stage of operation. Then once they decide to use the F5 Advanced WAF they have to have very good expert advisors for choosing the product because there are a variety of license options, and you may spend more than what you need. 

In the implementation stage, you have to have experts. At least three experts for the implementation phase. When it comes to the operation, you can't have a temporary expert that comes and goes, you have to have the F5 Advanced WAF expert in your company. It's an advanced device. It's completely different from the FortiWeb and the other devices. It gives you lots of options but it's complicated to implement. You have to have an expert to support you.

I rate F5 Advanced WAF an eight out of ten.

We use it for ASM and ATF. I am working at the PCI company, and I am a manager of F5. I work with F5 WAF and ASF.

Currently, I use version 50.1.4, and I'm going to update to the new version, 50.144.1.

I like the solution for ASM. There is an online update certification, but access is locked so we couldn't use it.

I would like to see a better interface and better documentation compatibility with other products. It's more complicated with OWASP.

F5 has a learning university, but it's very complex. I teach other people, and it can be confusing with the different versions of software. It's very hard to support that.

I've been working with this solution for four years.

The product is very stable. It is a PCI company, so there are 10,000-12,000 people using the solution. 

My TLS connection is unlimited, so I have a lot of clients because of internet payments. All of the internet payments are behind the ASM for the F5.

It's scalable and very easy to manage.

I worked with FortiWeb for a few years. It's a good product, but it's not very good for a big company. So we decided to migrate to F5.

The initial setup is from a configuration utility.

I would rate this solution 9 out of 10.

In APM or IT intelligence, it's the best. But in the ASM model, it's not as good as a 40G for Palo Alto.

What a WAF is happens to be exactly what we are using F5 WAF for: a firewall for our web applications. It is a totally customizable solution. You have our signature-based rule sets and then we can customize to our heart's content depending on what our application can and can not do or what we are trying to protect against.  

So we are using this for anything that is internet-facing. We are applying the WAF there and we are putting it in block mode wherever possible.  

The features I think are the most valuable starts with the IP intelligence component. That is separately licensed and it is definitely one component that we have made heavy use of. Geo-blocking is another — which can be done without a WAF because you do not necessarily need a WAF to do it — but the F5 WAF has those capabilities.  

The signature-based controls that F5 has are another one of the heavier-used components that Advanced WAF has. We do not have to worry about updating signatures, et cetera. WAF will automatically update the signatures for us. I think that is a nice feature.  

Those are the biggest things that we are making use of month-to-month.  

I think the contextual-based component needs a lot of help. It is all based on regular-expressions. That is something I think companies like Signal Sciences are doing a really good job with. We are transitioning off to Signal Sciences on some of our WAF components because of the capabilities Signal Science has. I think that contextual-base signatures would definitely help in F5 WAF.  

Within the enterprise, F5 Advanced WAF (Web Application Firewall) has been rolled out for about six or seven years. I have been working on it for about three to four years.  

It is a stable product.  

F5 WAF is a scalable solution. A lot of the employees and other end-users (virtually anybody on the internet who is coming to your site) benefit from the solution. As far as the people who are directly dealing with the administration, maintenance, and deploying the updates, there are maybe two people. But it can certainly scale-out to service passive use.  

The F5 tech supports is fairly decent. It is not the top of the line, but they do their job. They give you an account team. The account teams are normally really responsive. When you need to run something by them, they are unlike some other products. With other products you have to go through opening up a ticket — because that is the only way they will respond to you — and later they might come back and say it is not their problem and you need to figure it out on your own. The F5 is very different from that perspective in providing support. Your account team is your go-to group. They will walk you through solutions, help you design solutions, and it is part of the value add of using F5Advanced WAF. I really liked them for the extra effort they put in to provide good support. They do not upsell professional services or anything like that. Because of that, I would rate them a little on the higher side for support than just your average support experience.  

The installation of F5 Advanced WAF is complex. Any WAF that you put in takes a lot of time to install correctly. You never really just drop it in and have it working right off the bat. The only exception I can say that I have come across to that right now is Signal Sciences. You can literally drop that solution in place and put it in blocking mode within the same day. With F5 there is a learning period where you allow it to learn and then you go back because it is based on regular expressions. So you have to go through and check to see that there is normal traffic going through your site, et cetera. In other words, there is training involved. It can take from seven to fourteen days before you get a good signature set up.  

If you just need to turn on the licensing key, that might take 10 seconds to do and that is available essentially immediately when you implement WAF. But when you are talking about implementation — and this is true with any WAF — it is time-consuming. You are integrating a piece of technology with applications that have already been written. It might be a legacy app, it might be a new app or whatever that you use for whatever your use case might be for that application. You are using WAF in order to protect that app. You have to invest time in creating the signatures. That period of time where you are creating the signature is what is complex and extends the period of the implementation.  

That is what I think the true difference is between F5 WAF and the new-gen stuff like Signal Sciences is. With Signal Sciences you literally can just drop in and turn it on.  

F5's licensing varies. I do not know exactly what the individual WAF component costs because they bundle up services and the bundle is what I pay for. I do not pay for individual components.  

Advice that I would give to people considering F5 WAF is to look at and consider other products as well. They have to make sure they know what they are getting into. That is key to finding the right solution. I think WAF requires a lot of time and patience as well as an understanding of your applications in order to make the best use of its capabilities.  

On a scale from one to ten (where one is the worst and ten is the best), I would rate the F5 Advanced WAF as a solid eight-out-of-ten.  

There is the Simple WAF and the Advanced WAF. We are currently working on the Advanced WAF, but previously, before the Advanced WAF came out, we were just using the Simple WAF.

We use the on-prem version because the cloud solution is not that popular here.

I have a customer here who has multiple applications dealing with the day to day operations. We have deployed the application firewall in the network and most of their web traffic from outside of their network comes into that WAF. This includes the email application Outlook and their own in-house application tools deployed that they use to sell their merchandise. They have a feature where you can transfer money to the other user based on their mobile phone number. So these web applications and in-house tools are the most used applications in their network.

In terms of F5 Advanced WAF's most valuable features, I would definitely say its stability. F5 is one of the most stable products. Either as the load balancer or the web application firewall, it is very stable.

Additionally, the method it uses to block attacks and the logging and support are very good. You can see anything you want in the logging and reporting section of the device, it is very detailed. These are two valuable features from F5.

If I had to summarize what needed improvement, I'd say they are currently in the process of updating their software. But more specifically, I would say their graphical interface, the GUI. I don't like the GUI as much as before, but now I think they're focusing on it. We are getting some new good features in the latest update. But there is still room for improvement on the user interface as well. It's easy to use. It's not difficult but it is not pleasing to the eye. Most of the time you want to see something dynamic, something like the reporting section or the system usage, the CPU, some detailed graphs, anything of that sort. So I guess they have some room for improvement there. Don't make it more complicated, just make it more pleasing to the eye.

We are using the most stable version. Because recently we got an email from F5 suggesting that if you have any user on the 14.1.2.0 that there was a vulnerability on that feature. And it was quite a severe one, so they asked us to immediately update that license to another version.

They currently have 15 versions, but they are not stable. They didn't recommend them to us. So most of the customers in Pakistan are using the 14.1.2.6 version. That is the most stable version and is recommended by F5.

My focus is normally on logging and reporting, because customers always ask for a clear reporting criteria. I would like it if they could simplify the reporting process. If I create something, I want to get a good report on it that I can read in seconds or in minutes. I don't want extra details in it. They should work on the exporting of the logging and reporting.

I have been using Advanced WAF since it came on the market last year. Advanced WAF is the advanced version of WAF which I have been using for three years.

F5 basically starts their hardware model from a 10GB distribution. So it is a good device to start with and in Pakistan we mostly have up to 40 or 60 gigabytes of devices.

As far as scalability is concerned, we already talked to the customer in detail about what kind of traffic they are expecting in the next five or seven years. Then we decide the box on that data basis and normally we don't have to worry about scaling later.

In terms of adding more features on the F5 hardware, that is a question based on the module. If it takes too much of the CPU, then it is difficult and scaling would be difficult with that hardware. If the hardware is not so many CPU's, then we have to dedicate to each module. Then the scalability becomes a bit difficult. But if you already have hardware that has CPU's in abundance, you can add as many modules as you want. There's no problem.

F5 lets you decide if you want to assign a specific module, a dedicated CPU or nominal resources. You can even decide if you want nominal resources or if you want full resources for that specific module. It all depends on the importance of that module in your business application.

If they are a small company, 250 to 500 employees, or less than 250, then we can go for the virtual Edition of the F5, because as I said, the hardware solution starts from a 10GB box. This can handle thousands of requests per second.

It would be a bit costly for a small scale business. If someone wants F5 and he has less applications and nominal users, he can go for the Virtual Edition. Most of the customers in Pakistan who are using F5 are in the banking sector. They have a good amount of users already, 1500, 3000. So mostly we have banks in Pakistan using F5. And I guess also a few in the education sector and businesses. Otherwise, not many small businesses have F5. The one I mentioned that is using AWAF is a big telecom in Pakistan and they have millions of users. It is not for the very small businesses, I guess.

I have had many experiences with customer support, both good and bad. Truthfully, they can improve a bit. There are two methods to engage the F5 support. You either call or email them. It's your choice. 

You decide which location you want to call, either the Singapore or UK office, because there is no support in Pakistan. We have to ask for support from either UAE, Singapore, the UK or the US. If I call, I normally prefer to call Singapore, because our region mostly deals with the Singapore head office. Sometimes there's a problem understanding Singaporean language and it's tough to talk to them. 

But if you reach out over email, then obviously it is easier. Talking to them on the phone is quite a difficult task. Secondly, if you open a customer request from a portal, we have a customer support portal for the client as well. Normally we get the engineer from UK or Singapore. It also depends on the engineer - sometimes he's very responsive. He will just respond to you in an hour or day. And sometimes you get an engineer who is absent for two, three days and you have to call them and change engineers because the first one is not responding.

In short they have to improve a bit on support.

We mostly deal with F5 and we always ask our customers who want the web application firewall to go for F5. We do have other web solutions as well, like Fortinet FortiWeb, another popular solution. For small businesses, we don't suggest that. 

We are gold partners with F5, so we always suggest F5.

In terms of the initial setup, for a person who is a bit experienced it is not that difficult. It is a straightforward device. You follow the same principle and the same steps and you are good to go. Just follow the steps. F5 guides you through the initial configuration, which is another of their features. If you don't want to go for the manual config you can just follow their step by step. Press - next, next, next, next then you have the initial configuration done. 

Then you can move to your own configuration according to your network and according to your need. It's an easy device to configure, it's not difficult. 

Only the graphical user interface needs some kind of improvement to make it more modern. But as far as the straightforward install is concerned, it's good and easy.

One person is enough for the deployment and for the check.

In terms of how long it takes to deploy Advanced WAF, it depends on the number of applications you have to put behind the F5 number one. 

The initial network configuration won't take so long if you have all the required data. 

You can set up the initial configuration in an hour or two. But the more applications you add will determine the length of the configuration. 

We mostly deploy Advanced WAF in automatic mode. We don't do the manual configuration of the security side. We just put application details there and we let F5 decide the learning process. It normally takes 15 to 20 days to get a good grip on the application, the language, and the do's and don'ts. We let F5 decide. 

It takes around 15 to 20 days to get it into the blocking mode. But for the configuration for one application it will hardly take 30 minutes to be configured. It all depends on the amount of applications you have.

My advice is that if you need a web application firewall you should go for F5. It is one of the best solutions in the past six or seven years.

F5 has been the leader in this field. It's a stable solution. One just has to decide their organization's goals in the beginning for the next five years or so. Because if they wrongly select the hardware module, they cannot do the scalability if they want to add  a number of modules in the future. So selecting the product should be done with great care. Otherwise, I guess it's okay. If you want a good web application firewall go for F5.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate F5 Advanced WAF a nine.

For me, the primary use case is to secure web applications from external threats, including cross-site scripting, SQL injection attacks, file inclusion vulnerabilities, and many more. The tool has simplified protection against web applications and recent threats that might be visible. If your applications are vulnerable, it gets protected by F5.

It is a very flexible solution. iRules is quite appealing when it comes to F5, and they apply it throughout their solution. BIG-IP is a known platform, and it is a part of F5 now. Application delivery or web application firewalls, F5 understands these terms and then suggests better data policies. But you have to do the work on your application's performance first. You have to look in the logs and understand the total attack you should prevent when we put it in the circuit protection mode, which works perfectly well.

iRules truly excites me because it has the ability to prevent the end-user and infrastructure from external threats.

Even if the F5’s default signatures and the default behavior are unable to help you, you can customize iRules to reach the objectives.

I don't like the management control of F5.

Moreover, if you are not an expert, it would be really difficult to set it up.

I have been using the product for fifteen years or more.

It is a stable solution.

It is definitely a scalable solution.

The initial setup is quite straightforward. I didn't experience any complexity. It could be difficult for somebody who is not familiar with application load balancers or web applications. It takes a month to understand the entire architecture. It primarily depends upon how great deployment could be.

It usually takes about five to seven days to configure and deploy the F5 Advanced WAF in production mode. It is essential to ensure that your configuration works properly before putting it into production mode.

When you have already designed it, it takes around five to seven days to set up. But it takes more than a month to understand the entire architecture of the F5.

I would rate it an eight out of ten.

We host public-facing web applications or APIs. There are web applications that are owned by the company that is exposed to the outside. The internal infrastructure is within the premise. We use F5 to protect them. It's an HA model, and we have two sites.

We need to have an extra layer of protection. We were previously exposed to the public API. The deployment and the rate of deploying web-based applications had increased. After we introduced the web application firewall, it increased our ability to expose more of the services to the public. 

My favorite feature of F5 is the ability to play around with the ciphers. I also like the ability to have an immediate display of the support IDs when a real blockage occurs. The protection offered is great.

The reporting portion of F5 Advance WAF is not great. They need to work out something better, as it is very basic. You only see the top IPs, I think there is more they can offer.

I have been using F5 Advanced WAF for four years, since 2018.

F5 Advanced WAF is a stable solution.

For the initial deployment, from what we were planning to implement, it was scalable. 

We now have other requirements that we need to engage with. They believe we need to increase our license, so we can accommodate more features.

There have been issues in the availability of quick support. For general issues there is no concern. The issue is when you need support right away, but it is not available.

Positive

The solution was deployed using network security. At the time of deployment, the appliance was there, but we did not have any person that was able to accomplish the deployment. It took six months to deploy.

We have definitely seen a ROI by using F5 Advanced WAF.

As far as the pricing of F5 Advanced WAF I would rate it a four out of five depending on what features I am looking for. Imperva is more expensive.

The price has remained consistent at a constant rate. There have not been any increases or any unforeseen increases when we're renewing our license. The price is fixed.

I reviewed Imperva only to compare pricing.

On the initial engagement, you should try to look on how best you can accommodate the quick support features, as this was a big struggle for us.

Overall, I would rate F5 Advanced WAF an eight out of ten.

We use this solution for web application protection. The solution offers layer seven protection of the applications and can be configured against attacks.

There are a lot of good features.

I would like for there to be a cloud-based solution, this would also help to improve scalability.

I have been using this solution for about a year or so.

This solution is quite stable.

Scalability is limited since it is an on-premise solution. You will have to size your box properly, based your throughput and capacity. Our company uses it to protect all traffic of out 5.5 thousand users and we have plans to expand the usage.

Support was helpful when we reached out.

We used Kona Defender and Akamai Web Application Firewall for about a year prior to using F5. The main reason that we switched was due to costs.

The initial setup was rather complex taking a lot of time and information to be configured. We have two administrators for maintenance. 

Our consultant was able to help us integrate the solution in a day or two.

There is a perpetual license that comes with your hardware. There is also an additional fee for support.

When you choose to go with F5, be sure to size your box properly so that the capacity is taken care of. From there, you will be able to easily configure the platform to provide you with a lot of value. Overall, I would rate the solution a seven out of ten.