F5 Distributed Cloud WAF

Cloud-based protection for your distributed web applications

F5 Distributed Cloud WAF (Web Application Firewall) eases the burden and complexity of consistently securing apps across cloud, on-premises, and edge locations.

Protect Web Apps Wherever They’re Deployed

F5 Distributed Cloud WAF combines F5’s industry leading web application firewall in an easy-to-use SaaS format.

Challenges

The evolution of application architectures, deployment locations, and threat landscapes has made it significantly more difficult to effectively secure and operate them.

Balancing security and agility

Ensuring proper security controls is challenging for app dev teams with increasing workloads and deadlines.

Growing operational complexity

Securing apps has become more complex as they get deployed across heterogenous environments.

Volume of threats and false positives

Threats are evolving at an accelerating pace, leading to an ever-greater volume of false positives.

Policy variation reducing efficacy

Differences in system configurations and policy enforcement result in lower overall efficacy.

Why Distributed Cloud WAF?

Dramatically simplified operations

SaaS-delivered WAF that’s quick to set up and deploy, and easy to manage and scale across clouds, on-premises data centers, and edge sites.

DevOps agility + SecOps control

Deliver the programmability that DevOps needs combined with the efficacy and oversight that SecOps mandates, enabling faster application delivery and release cycles.

Reduce time to resolution

Improve visibility and insight across WAF and DDoS security events, and into app performance, including intuitive drill-down capabilities.

Comprehensive protection with fewer false positives

Utilize both signature-based and AI/ML based detection techniques with automatic signature tuning to ensure maximum efficacy and reduced SecOps workloads.

How It Works

Connects, secures, and manages apps in the cloud, on-prem, edge or in the F5 global network.

F5 Distributed Cloud WAF is a next-gen SaaS-based web application firewall that provides signature and behavioral-based threat detection to protect applications wherever they are deployed. 

Frictionless Authentication Diagram

Key Capabilities

F5 Distributed Cloud WAF leverages powerful, advanced WAF technology, combining signature and robust behavior-based protection for web applications. The service acts as an intermediate proxy to inspect application requests and responses to block and mitigate a broad spectrum of risks stemming from the OWASP Top 10, threat campaigns, malicious users, layer 7 DDoS threats, bots and automated attacks, and more.

Robust attack signature engine

Captures Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) plus known vulnerabilities and techniques identified by F5 Labs, including Layer 7 DDoS, threat campaigns, bots, and automated threats.

Advanced behavior engine

Leverages AI/ML to monitor and score client interactions, deciphering intent based on the number of WAF rules hit, forbidden access attempts, login failures, error rates, and more, to help identify an app’s highest priority threats.

Powerful service policy engine

Enables micro segmentation and advanced security at the application layer, utilizing IP reputation and allow/deny lists to block clients with known bad TLS fingerprints, ASNs from suspicious countries, and more.

Automatic attack signature tuning

Easily determines if a signature-identified attack is really a threat, helping reduce the number of false positives.

Streamlined set-up and management

Deploy through a simple UI or automate via APIs including best-practice default protections and the flexibility to create custom rules.

Multi-app dashboards

Rich observability via a single dashboard with a 360-degree view of app performance and security events across distributed applications.

Flexible service levels

Choose to deploy and manage on your own or as a managed service—deployed, maintained, and supported 24 x7 by certified F5 experts in our SOC.

Distributed Cloud WAF Use Cases

Secure Apps Everywhere

Mitigate web app attacks and vulnerabilities with comprehensive security controls and uniform policy and observability, including simplified deployment and management of app security postures across environments.

Defend Against Known Threats and Suspicious Behavior

Using a variety of AI and ML techniques, potentially bad actors are flagged and can be blocked even though the client doesn’t necessarily match a known threat signature.

Secure App Development

Simplify app security by seamlessly integrating the service into the development process with core security functionality, centralized orchestration, and oversight. 

Broad Platform and Cloud Provider Support

Distributed Cloud Services can be delivered to apps running on any platform on any public/private cloud. Connect and secure apps running in VMs, containers, bare metal or serverless.

Simplifying DevOps and SecOps

F5’s native Terraform provider, vesctl CLI tool, and public APIs deliver the automation needs of app teams. Support for alerting tools (i.e., Opsgenie and Slack) and SIEM tools (i.e., Splunk and Datadog) simplify life of DevOps and SecOps.

Ways to Deploy

F5 Distributed Cloud WAF offers self-service or managed options to deliver security anywhere—with flexibility in architecture, routing, and policy enforcement across public/private clouds, on-premises data centers, and edge sites, with centralized visibility and management via a SaaS-based console.

Public clouds

Manage and protect application workloads hosted across clouds, including AWS, Azure, and GCP.

F5 global PoPs

Manage and protect application workloads from any of the points of presence (PoPs) on the F5 global network.

On-premises

Manage and protect applications at your data center and edge sites.


Resources

Next-Gen WAF Leverages Threat Intelligence to Block Attacks

SOLUTION OVERVIEW

F5 Distributed Cloud Web Application Firewall (WAF)

Get the overview ›

Next-Gen WAF Leverages Threat Intelligence to Block Attacks

SOLUTION OVERVIEW

Protecting Web Apps and APIs across Distributed Environments

Get the overview ›

F5-Saas-Model

VIDEO

Mitigate App Vulnerabilities Using F5 SaaS-Based Deployment Model

Watch the video ›

Next Steps

Try the simulator

Try the simulator experience for F5 Distributed Cloud WAF.

View plans and pricing

View entitlements across various plans and pricing.

Contact us

Talk to an expert to schedule a demo or get access to a trial.