In terms of areas for improvement, I would say that one scenario is that F5 Silverline Managed Services needs to adapt compliances related to India's DPDP, as I have informed the F5 person. They are normally following only PCI DSS standards or GDPR compliance, but in India, we are using different data protection rules, so across compliances, they have to adapt.
Automating processes could enhance F5 Silverline Managed Services. For example, introducing preemptive support prompts would reduce the manual effort required for creating policies or blocking specific IPs. Implementing this feature would streamline the process and lessen the need for manual steps.
Since we use the solution’s cloud, the product has more control over the back end. The customer will not have control. It is part of the product’s feature. When we get more complex requirements or if we want to write more complex tools, the support team will have the visibility to write them because they have control. The navigation is difficult to use. The navigation should be improved. Other products are quite straightforward. If I try to implement a new application and do an onboarding, it is not very easy. We must go to one feature, inside which there will be more features. It should be simplified, and a menu should be provided.
Assistant Manager Application Security Team at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Feb 13, 2023
We'd like more AI to be used. Right now, they don't use it enough. We'd like the solution to offer open sessions so that the session syncs to other IP faster. The protection could be a bit better in various areas. The stability could be a bit better. It could offer better pricing.
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.
F5 Silverline Web Application Firewall, being a new product in the market or comparatively related to a new product, currently supports less number of PoPs. They should introduce more PoPs. The current number of PoPs that they have is around 10 or 12, which is still relatively less as compared to 2,400 plus PoPs that Akamai offers. The user latency or the number of hops a user needs before reaching the actual web application is less in Akamai because it has its internal fabric to route the traffic. They need to spin up more data to increase its traffic handling capability. They can also include the bot detection capability, though it is a pretty advanced functionality. If they could include DataDome like functionality, that is, bot prediction, then F5 Silverline Web Application Firewall will be top-notch in the market.
Senior System Engineer at a financial services firm with 11-50 employees
Real User
Feb 17, 2020
I think F5 is one of the best web application firewalls in the world. So support is pretty good. They provide the best protection features in the market at the moment. I can't tell how they could improve. I just hope the price can be cheaper. I think they are changing. They are also providing some other pricing models, deployment models, etc. It's actually quite okay for us. It fulfills all of our requirements. But from the product perspective, I believe, there is some room for them, to improve. I think they need to improve the APIs or tools. We are doing a lot of automation, so I find the APIs are not very easy to use. So the current automation is not that good for F5 at the moment. We still need to develop something by ourselves, so it's not that good, in the modern IT offices. I think that's a key thing that I want them to improve in the future.
In terms of areas for improvement, I would say that one scenario is that F5 Silverline Managed Services needs to adapt compliances related to India's DPDP, as I have informed the F5 person. They are normally following only PCI DSS standards or GDPR compliance, but in India, we are using different data protection rules, so across compliances, they have to adapt.
Automating processes could enhance F5 Silverline Managed Services. For example, introducing preemptive support prompts would reduce the manual effort required for creating policies or blocking specific IPs. Implementing this feature would streamline the process and lessen the need for manual steps.
Improvements could include the creation of highly optimized profiles, optimization deployments, and compression profiles for better performance.
There is room for improvement in the stability of the solution.
Since we use the solution’s cloud, the product has more control over the back end. The customer will not have control. It is part of the product’s feature. When we get more complex requirements or if we want to write more complex tools, the support team will have the visibility to write them because they have control. The navigation is difficult to use. The navigation should be improved. Other products are quite straightforward. If I try to implement a new application and do an onboarding, it is not very easy. We must go to one feature, inside which there will be more features. It should be simplified, and a menu should be provided.
We'd like more AI to be used. Right now, they don't use it enough. We'd like the solution to offer open sessions so that the session syncs to other IP faster. The protection could be a bit better in various areas. The stability could be a bit better. It could offer better pricing.
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.
The price of F5 Silverline Managed Services could be better.
F5 Silverline Web Application Firewall, being a new product in the market or comparatively related to a new product, currently supports less number of PoPs. They should introduce more PoPs. The current number of PoPs that they have is around 10 or 12, which is still relatively less as compared to 2,400 plus PoPs that Akamai offers. The user latency or the number of hops a user needs before reaching the actual web application is less in Akamai because it has its internal fabric to route the traffic. They need to spin up more data to increase its traffic handling capability. They can also include the bot detection capability, though it is a pretty advanced functionality. If they could include DataDome like functionality, that is, bot prediction, then F5 Silverline Web Application Firewall will be top-notch in the market.
We need to have support for cloud protection, which is not offered by this solution.
I think F5 is one of the best web application firewalls in the world. So support is pretty good. They provide the best protection features in the market at the moment. I can't tell how they could improve. I just hope the price can be cheaper. I think they are changing. They are also providing some other pricing models, deployment models, etc. It's actually quite okay for us. It fulfills all of our requirements. But from the product perspective, I believe, there is some room for them, to improve. I think they need to improve the APIs or tools. We are doing a lot of automation, so I find the APIs are not very easy to use. So the current automation is not that good for F5 at the moment. We still need to develop something by ourselves, so it's not that good, in the modern IT offices. I think that's a key thing that I want them to improve in the future.
The price is high in comparison to other products.