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F5 Fights Cyber Attacks with Certified Network Firewall

By Carrie Schmelkin, TMCnet Web Editor

Whether we want to believe it or not, cyber attacks are a consistent part of our everyday operations and we have automation and botnets to thank for that.

“The value of security needs to be communicated in business terms that revolve around risk management, reliability of service, brand reputation, and compliance,” David Holmes, technical marketing manager for F5 Networks (News - Alert), told TMCnet. “Once the business value is articulated then the discussion can move to enabling a solution that is most relevant in solving problems in the data center environment that includes blended attacks both at the network and application layers, and minimizing exposure of new vulnerabilities.”

Fortunately for businesses out there, F5 – a provider of application delivery networking and traffic management – offers a solution to what has become an increasingly ubiquitous problem. And its solution is being recognized.

Today, F5 announced that the latest release of its F5 BIG-IP product family has been certified by ICSA Labs as a network firewall. This news means that customers will now be better equipped to protect their public-facing websites from massive cyber attacks. The newly certified solution handles nearly eight times more traffic at half the cost of the closest competitor’s solution, company officials said.

“We’ve approached security at the upper layers and now we have the accreditation that is necessary at the lower layers that brings it all together as a complete solution,” Holmes said. “F5 is redefining data center security by offering a full stack of security services that can be embedded in your service delivery model.”

What makes F5’s latest news stand apart, officials said, is that these security capabilities can be deployed on BIG-IP application delivery controllers (ADCs), which are well known for providing industry leading intelligent traffic management.

With the firewall solution, F5 has created a comprehensive security architecture that allows customers to apply a single, unified security strategy. Now, for the first time, organizations can secure their networks, data, protocols, applications, and users on a single, flexible, and extensible platform: BIG-IP.

“F5’s approach to the firewall problem converges security services into a single set of Application Delivery Controllers (ADCs) at the edge of the data center,” Holmes said. “By certifying the BIG-IP product family it allows customers to leverage F5 products for security and compliance requirements like PCI.  This truly differentiates F5 from the competition by being the only ADC (News - Alert) to be offer layer 3-7 protection.”

F5’s newest firewall builds upon the company’s vision of a dynamic data center and ties back to the BIG-IP version 11 announcement that focused on helping customers protect their Web 2.0 applications, secure their DNS infrastructures, and control application access and policies in a centralized manner. This new network firewall certification – the first of its kind available on an ADC – rounds out F5’s existing ICSA Labs’ certifications for its BIG-IP web application firewall and SSL VPN solutions.

According to company officials, the need for this firewall is well -ounded as a network firewall failure can result in outages, data leaks and the degradation of corporate reputations. While traditional security solutions attempt to piece together point products such as network firewalls, DDoS appliances, and DNS appliances, these solutions are complex and contribute to network latency and points of failure. Moreover, these solutions do not have the ability to integrate information from different attack vectors, leaving potential gaps in protection and making it impossible for organizations to deliver a unified defense.

“Many organizations are finding that their network firewalls operating at layer 3 or 4 in the TCP/IP stack are having problems protecting against application layer attacks because the traffic is encrypted by SSL,” said Jeff Wilson, principal security analyst at Infonetics (News - Alert). “Lacking the visibility and intelligence to inspect the entire protocol stack, traditional firewalls can’t protect against today’s increasingly sophisticated and massively distributed attacks. In addition, many network firewalls have only a fraction of the connection capacity required to handle the millions of requests per second that typify modern DDoS attacks.”

BIG-IP solutions enable customers to: reduce hardware and operating costs by as much as 50 percent; perform comprehensive inspection services to defend against 30 plus types of network and application layer DDoS attacks; respond rapidly to new security threats for which a patch does not yet exist, reducing the window of exposure; and significantly limit revenue loss and damage to corporate credibility caused by malicious cyber attacks.

For more on F5 and its latest news, click here.

Want to learn more about the latest in communications and technology? Then be sure to attend ITEXPO East 2012, taking place Jan. 31-Feb. 3 2012, in Miami, FL. ITEXPO (News - Alert) offers an educational program to help corporate decision makers select the right IP-based voice, video, fax and unified communications solutions to improve their operations. It's also where service providers learn how to profitably roll out the services their subscribers are clamoring for – and where resellers can learn about new growth opportunities. For more information on registering for ITEXPO registration click here.

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