F5 Silverline Managed Web Application Firewall (WAF)

I work with F5 Silverline Managed Services , and I'm doing the presales engineering of that product, which is a WAF  solution.

F5 Silverline Managed Services , a Web Application Firewall  solution, is used for protecting web services. Organizations put that product in front of web services to load balance the traffic and create a secure environment, especially for web services operating in HTTPS.

The best aspect of F5 Silverline Managed Services is its two-way security environment for web services. One part is positive security, which allows you to know vulnerabilities in depth, and you can implement CAPTCHA and MFA for logins, while also preventing known threats with included signatures.

F5 Silverline Managed Services utilizes real-time threat intelligence; the traffic flows through the product, allowing us to see all the traffic in clear text, which enables real-time intelligent threat signature analysis and supports a learning mode for codebase evaluation.

The adaptable and flexible security can help prevent threats in learning mode, but admins need to be cautious about false positives that could affect production due to unrecognized vulnerabilities.

One negative aspect is that the product is expensive.

I have been selling F5 Silverline Managed Services for about two years.

Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week expert support is available for F5 Silverline Managed Services, and while the product mostly has no issues, configuration problems largely arise from customer misunderstanding, leading to cases opened for configuration aspects where AI has become increasingly useful.

The installation is easy; if the admin has some basic network and website knowledge, anyone can set up that product without too much difficulty.

F5 Silverline Managed Services is recognized as one of the best solutions in Gartner for WAF; I believe it can effectively manage vast amounts of traffic better than other brands like Citrix or FortiGate's WAF solution.

If the company is a government entity, they primarily use the hardware solution; smaller companies mostly utilize the DVM solution.

The deployment model does not affect visibility and control over security; the difference is only in performance.

The performance is generally good; it depends on the topology, but if the topology is okay and the product is efficiently used, it's acceptable.

I would rate the scalability of F5 Silverline Managed Services as a nine.

I would rate technical support as a seven point five.

I rate technical support as seven because F5 Silverline Managed Services lacks a TAC team in Turkey, which means escalation takes time, and I don't typically give high ratings to any vendor.

I rate this product an overall eight.

I use F5 Silverline Managed Services  for application delivery and security. I have extensive experience with products like LTM (application delivery controller), GTM (global traffic load balancing), ASM, and APM . These products enable me to distribute back-end server traffic, customize and control HTTP headers, and provide security measures like health checks and DNS security.

F5 Silverline offers load balancing, flexibility, and reliability. It allows for centralized management of certificates, protecting applications from top ten attacks like SQL injection and cross-site scripting. It is effective at mitigating DDoS attacks where a profile can be created and applied to virtual servers.

Improvements could include the creation of highly optimized profiles, optimization deployments, and compression profiles for better performance.

I have been using F5 solutions for 15 years.

The stability of the solution is very good.

The solution is fully scalable, and I would give it a rating of ten on a scale of one to ten for scalability.

Sometimes tech support can be slow. They take more time assigning engineers to complex issues, however, they resolve the issues by joining me to fix them.

I also work with Fortinet solutions.

The setup of F5 Silverline Managed Services  is straightforward and easy. One person is enough for installation, however, for high availability, deploying two devices as active-standby or active-active is better.

Using F5 results in time and cost savings, estimating a return on investment of 100%.

The solution is expensive, however, the quality and performance are good.

I work with Fortinet solutions, specifically FortiGate , FortiAnalyzer, and FortiManager.

For comparison, I prefer F5 over Fortinet because of its simplicity in operation and administration. I have been working with F5 for about ten years, and its support is professional.

Overall, I would rate F5 Silverline Managed Services at nine out of ten.

We use it for thing application deployment for our application, which is known as CBN. Most of the traffic is put to Silverline.

We only use for Web Application Firewall (WAF). We only did one.

There is room for improvement in the stability of the solution.

I have been using this solution for two years.

We use the latest version because we use SaaS.

I would rate the stability an eight out of ten.

I would rate the scalability an eight out of ten.

The initial setup is straightforward.

Overall, I would rate the solution an eight out of ten.

We use the solution for protection from Layer 3, Layer 4, and Layer 7 DDoS attacks and for web application firewalls.

The product’s UI is easy to understand.

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.

I have been using the solution for more than two years.

The product is stable.

The solution is scalable. More than 100 people use the solution in our organization.

Support is not good. The team takes a long time to respond.

The initial setup was easy. The solution has good documentation for the initial setup. F5 also provided us with support.

The product’s pricing is reasonable.

As a customer, if we need more control, then we should choose F5 ASM. We use multiple applications and products. We use the tool for corporate applications because it fulfils our requirements. I will recommend the solution. If it fulfils your requirement, you can definitely go ahead and use it. Overall, I rate the tool a seven out of ten.