What is our primary use case?
F5 Silverline Managed Services is our main solution for protecting our application from DDoS attacks and providing web application firewall services to our enterprise network.
A specific example of how we have used F5 Silverline Managed Services in a real-world scenario involves a customer who has internet-facing applications with a global presence. We created a solution to protect their public assets and public websites against malware, ransomware, and denial of service attacks by deploying and routing all the traffic of their web application via F5 Silverline Managed Services.
We also use the WAF services of F5 Silverline Managed Services, wherein we perform an HTTPS redirect of our public application through a WAF proxy. This helps to provide security and defend against the top 10 threats, including zero-day vulnerabilities, using advanced policy management.
How has it helped my organization?
F5 Silverline Managed Services has positively impacted our organization by helping us protect our public assets and providing global scalability for our web hosting for our end users.
The positive outcomes of using F5 Silverline Managed Services include minimized downtime. We have observed many instances where the web application has been receiving excessive unintended traffic, and F5 Silverline Managed Services prevents the application from any kind of denial of service attack while distributing the load evenly across all the nodes handling the web application.
What is most valuable?
The best features F5 Silverline Managed Services offers include 24/7 SOC access, which helps to keep our team connected with live security experts who can handle configuration and monitoring. These experts can intervene in live attack mitigations.
Regarding the features of F5 Silverline Managed Services, their policy management provides a variety of attack prevention signatures, which are very helpful in preventing attacks that use HTTPS traffic. The service can detect client and server behavior and can intervene and protect according to the latest signatures.
What needs improvement?
F5 Silverline Managed Services can be improved in areas with complex onboarding processes and slow deployment settings. Tuning of policy requires significant technical expertise, and there is a lack of knowledge in the F5 world where one needs to go through a steep learning curve in understanding what and how the policy should be configured for effectively protecting an application. These processes need to be streamlined.
Knowing the limitations of F5 Silverline Managed Services, F5 has come out with a new product called F5 distributed cloud WAF platform, which has a better API integrated with security modules. It also offers advanced auto discovery, swagger, and open API validation, which is much better than Silverline.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been working with F5 Silverline Managed Services for the past one and a half years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
F5 Silverline Managed Services is stable, and I can confirm that.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
The scalability of F5 Silverline Managed Services is high, as it is a SaaS-based platform that can be scaled on demand according to our end customer's needs.
How are customer service and support?
My experience with the live security experts during incidents has been limited, but what I have heard is that they work 24/7 and are readily available in case of higher priority incidents. I believe they are effective at what they do.
The customer support for F5 Silverline Managed Services is very good and highly trained, as anyone who comes on a call has deep knowledge of how this product works. I am satisfied with the support provided.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We have not used any different solutions before; F5 Silverline Managed Services was the first solution we came across and implemented.
What was our ROI?
I have seen a return on investment as F5 Silverline Managed Services is a global solution we have used for one of our customers, providing high scalability and protecting all of our public assets in both low and high demand situations, which is very important for any customer with a global presence. The solution provides 99.98% uptime throughout the year.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
I was not involved in any discussions regarding pricing, setup costs, and licensing for F5 Silverline Managed Services.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We did not evaluate other options before choosing F5 Silverline Managed Services.
What other advice do I have?
I rate F5 Silverline Managed Services a 10 out of 10 because it offers a very robust mechanism for preventing DDoS attacks and has a very wide scalability for deploying the iRules, which can be deployed on the SaaS cloud firewall. The solution can support F5 iRules, allowing engineers to write highly complex scripts for custom traffic distribution and deep packet manipulation.
Regarding the AI capabilities of F5 Silverline Managed Services, I believe they are good. I have not experienced the AI directly, but whatever they do in their backend, they do it robustly and are able to protect our publicly exposed assets.
The accuracy and reliability of the output from F5 Silverline Managed Services are good, as they provide backup services with 24/7 available support that can be engaged in high-priority incidents on demand.
My advice for anyone looking into using F5 Silverline Managed Services is to first conduct a POC for F5 distributed cloud WAF and see how well it improves over the legacy Silverline. This is important because choosing the legacy option means inheritance to a platform that will eventually require architecture migration, so it is better to use a newer platform over the old one.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Public Cloud
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
Other