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F5 Security Supporting AWS Cloud Services

Dave Morrissey Miniatura
Dave Morrissey
Published February 21, 2023

While workloads and applications continue to migrate to the cloud, keeping them secure is a worry for many organizations. A recent survey found that 72% of IT and security leaders are very or extremely concerned about their ability to secure the cloud. Shared responsibility between cloud providers and their customers can also lead to confusion about what customers need to protect and the security methods available to them.

That’s why F5 and AWS share a mission to provide the best enterprise services to meet customers where they are on their cloud journeys and remove security barriers so they can achieve their cloud vision. With cloud security concerns alleviated, organizations can migrate to the cloud with confidence.

F5’s best-in-class security and traffic management solutions complement AWS cloud services and extend their native security capabilities. These cloud-friendly solutions address modern app use cases like containers and DevOps practices, protect against rapidly evolving threats, and enable consistent security across complex hybrid cloud environments. Cloud-delivered SaaS solutions give you the flexibility you need to meet your organization’s unique performance, security, and compliance requirements.

To support your AWS cloud journey, F5 has made a number of investments, including:

  • The broadest set of performance and security services with the depth needed for enterprise-level apps across hybrid cloud environments
  • Cloud-friendly technology that supports platform engineering teams focused on streamlining cloud migration, including rehosting, replatforming, and rearchitecting apps
  • Declarative interfaces that allow you to build intent-based actions and easily scale platforms with automation and infrastructure as code (IaC)
  • A broad array of commercial models to provide greater flexibility and match the consumption needs of every customer
  • Deep integrations across the F5 portfolio to provide a more seamless management experience and shared intelligence across solutions

As an AWS partner, F5’s qualifications have been validated by AWS with competencies in Security, MSSP Level-1, Container, and Networking. F5 solutions are available in the AWS Marketplace for easier management, consolidated billing, and a faster time to value.

F5 Security Solutions for AWS Cloud Services

Amazon CloudFront

Content delivery networks (CDNs) like Amazon CloudFront need protection against malicious bots to avoid the risks of poor customer experience and compromised data. Attackers rapidly retool to evade detection. F5 Distributed Cloud Bot Protection provides the deep analytics, behavioral analysis, and artificial intelligence needed to accurately block malicious bots and allow desired traffic. The F5 Distributed Cloud Bot Defense Connector for Amazon CloudFront makes it easy to add extra defenses without friction for your customers or your cloud engineering team.

AWS Global Accelerator

If you’re using Global Accelerator for better traffic management and application performance, you have built-in DDoS protection at the network and transport layers (L3 and L4) when using it with Amazon EC2 instance endpoints. To add additional protection at the application layer, where most modern attacks occur, F5 offers web app security, bot security, protocol validation, user authentication, and more.

AWS Gateway Load Balancer

Amazon’s Gateway Load Balancer helps you easily deploy, scale, and manage your third-party virtual appliances, which makes it ideal for adding security features to your AWS environment. With products like BIG-IP SSL Orchestrator, F5 makes it easy to add security controls to your network traffic transparently, including policy-based security and advanced WAF capabilities for north-south and east-west traffic—without impacting performance.

AWS WAF

You can use this web application firewall with multiple AWS resources and applications to defend against bots and exploits. F5 offers a set of written, curated, and integrated rules for AWS WAF that extend your capabilities and protect against bots, vulnerabilities, and the OWASP Top 10.

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS)

Amazon EKS lets you easily run and scale Kubernetes in the AWS cloud or on-premises infrastructure, but these new container environments need protection, especially if they’re running outside of AWS. F5 offers ingress control to deliver apps reliably and securely without compromising performance as well as a service mesh to monitor and protect east-west traffic within a cluster to keep your apps safe.

AWS Fargate

This serverless compute engine runs containers using EKS and Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) without the burden of infrastructure management. To protect those containers and applications, teams need visibility into what’s happening in and to the environment. By monitoring process activity, network flow data, application code, and AWS logs, F5 mitigates risk and helps to harden your infrastructure.

To learn more about the F5 and AWS technology alliance and how you can take your business-critical apps to the cloud with confidence, go to: www.f5.com/partners/technology-alliances/amazon-web-services