Greater China Conglomerate Jebsen Group guards against malicious web attacks with F5 on AWS

Founded in 1895, Jebsen Group is known for its quality products, services, investments, and solutions across industries such as beverage, consumer, industrial, motors, and logistics. To ensure its leadership in today’s competitive business landscape, the Group leveraged F5 Advanced Web Application Firewall (WAF) in their AWS environments to achieve rapid scale and enhanced security—all while experiencing a significant reduction in costs

Business Challenges

A shipping agency founded in 1895, Jebsen Group has evolved into a marketing, distribution, and investment organization, deeply embedded in the industries and markets it serves. Its 125-year journey in the world’s second-largest economy gives the Group invaluable local knowledge of Greater China’s changing business landscape and consumer lifestyles. In addition, industry specialization puts the conglomerate in a unique position to enable targeted and effective market access in Mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan, as well as a wide-reaching online presence across its sister companies in Southeast Asia, Australia, Germany, and Denmark.

A major part of its success is Jebsen Group’s representation of quality products, services, investments and solutions across various sectors, such as beverage, consumer, industrial, motors, logistics and investments. To ensure its leadership across these portfolios that span a connected and competitive business landscape, Jebsen Group inevitably hosts many business-critical applications across multiple platforms, markets and business groups, which collectively amass vast amounts of data every day.

To better manage and store these datasets, the group decided to migrate over 30 workloads, including applications, websites, and storage to Amazon Web Services (AWS). The benefits of this migration include infinite scalability, unmatched flexibility, and reduced overheads. However, the Group’s shift to the public cloud also brings along a set of concerns. For instance, the increased network segregation and inconsistent application services across multi-cloud architectures could place additional strain on IT departments, while creating loopholes that can result in new security vulnerabilities.

Jebsen Group needed a solution that could implement multi-cloud service consistency across its entire application portfolio, simplify the migration process, and secure its workloads against the most sophisticated threats. While Jebsen Group had previously adopted a cloud-based managed web application firewall (WAF), it realized that the solution had trouble keeping up with the agility, response time, and advanced capabilities of attackers. Also, the WAF solution came at a high cost. The lack of comprehensive protection and high operating costs were key factors that prompted the Group to explore more viable and advanced solutions.

Solution

Much of today’s attacks are automated, thus, Jebsen Group needed a cost-effective solution that would secure these platforms and mitigate any cybersecurity threats. While AWS provides the ability to provision and deploy application workloads in the AWS cloud, using F5 Advanced WAF on AWS meant that Jebsen Group could enjoy comprehensive protection for its websites and applications. F5 Advanced WAF secures the Group’s applications against multiple threats, including application-layer DoS attacks and all OWASP top 10 threats. 

To ensure that the security solution is being deployed promptly, the F5 team brought in relevant cross-functional teams such as professional services and local F5 partners.

Due to the combination of a seamless transition from its incumbent vendor, effective cross-functional collaboration, and successful deployment of the F5 Advanced WAF solution, the Jebsen Group is reviewing F5’s suite of advanced security solutions such as BOT mitigation and API protection, for future implementation.

Benefits

Leveraging the Virtual Edition of F5 Advanced WAF, Jebsen Group utilizes a proactive approach to security, putting in place more effective controls and securing more applications across its portfolios.

Cloud-ready and secure web applications

F5 Advanced WAF’s advanced features secure AWS workloads against increasingly sophisticated threats. The solution also improved multi-cloud service consistency across Jebsen Group’s entire application portfolio for greater peace of mind, and the ability to better focus on the business.

Cost-effective web application protection

F5 Advanced WAF reduces anomalous and malicious traffic patterns without administrator intervention, resulting in lower operating costs of the application server, particularly in public cloud environments like AWS. Reducing the baseline load meant that web applications are less susceptible to application-layer DDoS attacks.

Consistency within a flexible infrastructure

With a flexible service infrastructure, F5 Advanced WAF allows Jebsen Group to better manage the security, consistency, and efficiency of its entire technology stack.