What is our primary use case?
Our primary use case for this solution is DDoS and firewall protection.
What is most valuable?
F5 Silverline Managed Services's most valuable feature is 24/7 organic mitigation. The service consists of real people mitigating attacks in real time. When a real person is mitigating an attack, you will get the best possible defense.
What needs improvement?
F5 Silverline Managed Services is expensive. You do get world-class quality of mitigation, but I think it is still pricey. You can find similar services, potentially of slightly lower quality, from other vendors like Cloudflare or Akamai for about half the price. When you compare what you get for the money you spend at Cloudflare or Akamai, you do get less protection but you are not dishing out too much for it. On the other hand, at F5 Silverline Managed Services, you do get better protection but, but you are paying double for it.
We have had mixed feedback from our clients about this. Most of them would rather pay less for a bit of a lower-quality defense than overshoot their budget. The most common piece of feedback we receive is that the difference in protection levels is not reflected in the price.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using F5 Silverline Managed Services on a daily basis for the last three years. Most vendors fulfill the requirements for standard DDoS protection, but F5 Silverline Managed Services has a better understanding of defending web applications like HTTP and can mitigate more bot activity than any other vendor.
The main advantage of using F5 Silverline Managed Services – if you are protecting your whole system and especially web applications that you are delivering to customers – is that it has a plethora of tools and awareness about bots that are constantly crowding and traveling towards your website. In other words, in addition to protecting against DDoS attacks, F5 Silverline Managed Services also has that additional layer of body defense. F5 Silverline Managed Services is a better fit for those focused on publishing web applications toward the internet.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
F5 Silverline Managed Services is stable. On a scale of one to five, one being not stable at all and five being very stable, it gets an easy five.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
F5 Silverline Managed Services is scalable. It only takes three or four clicks to upgrade the capacity for everything, which is not a big deal.
How are customer service and support?
There is a lot of room for improvement with their tech support. I am not sure F5 Silverline Managed Services can be classified as having tech support. A lot of the time, and this is not only the case for Silverline but for the whole F5 portfolio, the biggest issue is their tech support. When you have an issue and open a ticket, it will get transferred from one person to another for next three months, and after that period, if you don't have a connection inside F5 – like, you personally know a deputy manager or somebody like that – your ticket will not ever get solved ever.
How would you rate customer service and support?
How was the initial setup?
On a scale of one to five, with one being difficult and five being very easy, I would give F5 Silverline Managed Services's initial setup a four. How difficult the deployment is will depend in large part on the experience of the person on the back end. I have about 15 years of experience in IT. My journey started with small deployments and eventually included the ISP. I have been working in Serbia at an intern service provider for eight years. In other words, I may not be the best person to judge simplicity because I have seen some complex systems. I would personally classify a F5 Silverline Managed Services deployment for a common enterprise customer as easy.
Deployment does require you to have knowledge of routing protocols that are not part of the F5 solution. That is the only prerequisite that you need to meet before you start doing something in the cloud itself. You need to understand how to steer traffic towards the cloud and that requires good planning.
If a customer is currently under attack, implementation can take three to four days. If a customer had been proactive and evaluating different solutions for DDoS before getting hit with the attack, deployment could take maybe three weeks, but there is no need to waste more time than that. I'm including the regular process of onboarding the customer, configuring everything, and acceptance tests in this time frame.
What about the implementation team?
We are a distributor SE. We are basically the middleman between F5 Silverline Managed Services (the vendor) and partners that delivering solutions on the premises of the customers. I am the guy who helps partners and engineers as a first level and maybe second level of support in everything from deployment towards the troubleshooting and maintaining the whole solution in that.
Deployment and maintenance in this model would require an individual like me and two engineers from partner companies. These engineers would implement the solution on the customer premises and do all the maintenance. When they get stuck, they would escalate the issue towards me.
What was our ROI?
There is a global shortage of skilled people in cyber security. With this solution, you do not need to have anyone inside your company managing it on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis because it is could-based. If you take that into account, I would say that the return on investment is getting a secure system without needing to hire more people or train an employee to master the technology. From that standpoint, F5 Silverline Managed Services is a worry-free service.
One a scale of one to five for return on investment, with one being very low and five being very high, I would give F5 Silverline Managed Services a three. I have seen better.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
On a scale of one to five, with one being the most expensive and five being affordable, I would rate F5 Silverline Managed Services a one in terms of pricing. However, additional services like separate threat feeds and IP intelligence are not so pricey.
What other advice do I have?
F5 Silverline Managed Services is an add-on for on-prem DDoS protection. If, for example, you are using Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM) on-premise, F5 Silverline Managed Services will serve as additional layer of protection when you are under attack. It has a hybrid deployment structure using both on-prem and cloud technology.
F5 Silverline Managed Services' scrubbing and mitigation is done in-cloud, so there are no new versions. Their soc team does the manual mitigations in the cloud in their scrubbing center.
F5 Silverline Managed Services provides industry-standard DDoS protection. It is not missing anything that any other vendor would be offering in that regard. As a client, you want to have a solution that will successfully defend you from volumetric attacks from the internet, and F5 Silverline Managed Services does that.
It also offers standard reporting. It shows you how hard you have been hit and how mitigation kicked in and what it did.
There is no universal, one-size-fits-all solution in this field, but when a customer has a lot of public services – they provide a web application or API – F5 Silverline Managed Services is the way to go for them.