New F5 Security Products Enhance App Protection

F5 Networks today introduced new offerings that provide advanced access controls and dedicated SSL visibility with orchestration capabilities to help thwart today’s most sophisticated cyber attacks.

F5 SSL Orchestrator: Unified Management of Encrypted Application Traffic

While most traffic and data handled by applications is now encrypted, many security stack service offerings (e.g., firewalls and IPS) are unable to efficiently process SSL encrypted traffic at the scale and speed businesses demand. Beyond mere SSL awareness and offload, F5 SSL Orchestrator provides policy-based orchestration capabilities across the full security service chain for any network topology, device, or application.

Orchestration on this level groups devices into services to intelligently decrypt and steer traffic, allowing for independent monitoring, load balancing, and scaling to adapt to changing network conditions and increasing traffic demands. This marks a vast improvement over the industry’s legacy security model, where piecemeal inspection devices perform decryption independently, frequently leaving gaps for attackers.

As a dedicated security appliance delivering insight to mitigate threats traversing the network, SSL Orchestrator provides:

Operational Efficiency – Dynamic service chaining and policy-based traffic steering help organisation intelligently manage encrypted traffic flows across the entire app security infrastructure.
Full Visibility – High-performance decryption and encryption of inbound and outbound SSL/TLS traffic, enabling quicker threat detection and attack remediation.
Improved Risk Management – SSL orchestration enables organisations to maximize their investments around malware, DLP, ransomware, and firewall protections, safeguarding user privacy through hardened security with robust cipher management.

“App security is the definition of a moving target,” said Clint Huffaker, Technical Solutions Architect at World Wide Technology. “Visibility is one of the biggest challenges organisations are facing today, and F5’s SSL Orchestrator gives customers the ability to dynamically control and customise the flow of encrypted traffic through security service chains. We have demos in our Advanced Technology Center to give customers a hands-on experience where they can see the level of visibility it brings to security tools in a service chain. Our customers want to work with industry leaders like F5 that understand the evolving threat landscape, provide a balance between application performance and risk mitigation, and offer effective ways to increase visibility and protect apps from malicious activity.”

F5 Access Manager: New Identity-Aware Access Proxy

Applications remain the principal gateways to organisations’ and individuals’ valuable information. F5 Access Manager protects sensitive data with a Zero Trust model while providing access for authorised users, devices, and APIs, guarding against pervasive threats such as man-in-the-middle attacks. Product features enable organisations to think outside of traditional security boundaries, empowering them to unlock additional business models and operational efficiencies without compromising protections around apps, users, and data.

As a secure, flexible, high-performance proxy solution delivering unified global access management, F5 Access Manager provides:

• Streamlined Access Controls – Context-sensitive policies with guided configuration deliver trusted access to users, devices, and APIs for increased business efficiency, while real-time web-form encryption safeguards user credentials and prevents fraud.
• Accelerated Business Innovation – As IT transforms to support continuous deployment methodologies, Access Manager provides a centralised solution for access control, including API authorisation. This means DevOps teams can hand off apps to NetOps personnel more quickly, and NetOps can better deliver a consistent user experience without sacrificing manageability.
• Scalability into the Cloud – While SaaS and cloud applications provide numerous advantages, many organisations are choosing not to move all apps off-premises. With advanced F5 Virtual Edition support and high-capacity licensing, Access Manager provides the scale necessary to bridge on-prem app functionality to the cloud, effectively integrating with IDaaS solutions and capabilities to support evolving heterogenous environments.

“Applications are everywhere, and increasingly interrelated, with many added capabilities inadvertently yielding new opportunities for attack,” said Ram Krishnan, SVP and General Manager, Security at F5. “Our value proposition is simple: we give you the ability to deploy standalone or integrated security for all types of applications, environments, and use cases. Customers enjoy the versatility of world-class products, cloud-based solutions, support services, and F5’s broad security capabilities that can protect applications better than anyone else in the industry.”