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F5 Essential App Protect Service Now in Preview

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F5
Published January 15, 2020

Agility is the way of IT these days. We all strive for developers and operations to go faster, to unleash creativity, unhindered by the burdens of provisioning app infrastructure and resources. The trick is balancing our need for app delivery speed with the need to stay secure and compliant.

According to the 2019 State of Application Services Report, nearly half of organizations say that protecting their apps from existing and emerging threats remains their greatest challenge. The move toward microservices, distributed API-driven architectures, containers, and multi-cloud deployments make addressing this challenge even more complex. With so many moving parts, wouldn’t it be nice to have an ‘insurance policy’ for your app-layer security?

F5's Essential App Protect offering gives you just that: a proactive measure to shield your web-facing apps, as-a-Service!

Simply put, Essential App Protect takes the guesswork out of securing web apps and brings a whole new level of agility to market:

  • Ready: Pre-configured and ready-to-protect across a number of attack vectors without requiring you to be an expert. Leverage 20+ years of F5’s enterprise networking and app security expertise.
  • Set: It is checkbox-simple to secure your apps or tune configurations with a few clicks or API calls.
  • Go: In a matter of seconds, it starts monitoring your app traffic, using features like intelligent probability-based rating systems to detect and mitigate malicious attacks (see Figure 1).
Figure 1: Monitor Application Event Map

Best of all, it is always up to date, recognizing targeted attacks or malicious traffic by using real-time F5 Threat Labs data (see Figure 2).

Figure 2: Configuring Hi-Risk Attack Mitigation

We capture the attack, provide you with the rich data that you can either analyze or forward to your Security Operations team, or both (see Figure 3). We’re doing all the heavy lifting of staying ahead of security issues so that you don’t have to!

Figure 3: View Events Detail

Finally, Essential App Protect is architected for multi-cloud, with its global data plane enabling co-location of app protection services right next to your cloud-based apps. This means a ridiculously low latency overhead for our end-users. And, of course, all of this and more can be configured through APIs and quickly integrated into your app delivery toolchain by your DevOps personnel and developers.

So, do you feel confident in the security of your apps and web facing services? Do you have the sufficient focus and resources to stay ahead of security events? Could your web-facing apps benefit from multiple layers of protection with minimal investment and effort from your team? What if you had a fast, simple, and economic way to add security protection without the complexity and expense of many traditional web application firewalls? What is that peace of mind worth for you?

Ask yourself these questions. Be proactive, join the Preview to give feedback, and help us prioritize features based on your security requirements. You owe it to your apps and to your business!