Your applications depend on networking protocols to transmit data, and many of today's security issues are directly related to the improper use of these protocols. Securing your applications with traditional network firewalls and even web-application firewalls is critical, but it isn't enough. The gap between these measures simply increases the load on web-application firewalls at best--at worst, it leaves your organization open to attack.
F5 provides a full-featured, completely integrated application firewall, designed to protect your web applications, along with a solution that targets security requirements for networking protocols, such as HTTP, FTP, and SMTP. These solutions can greatly increase your security posture without increasing overhead in terms of management or performance.