Industry accolades for F5’s Shape Security point to technology, scale, and results

Last week, F5 Shape Enterprise Defense (SED) brought home a win in the annual AI Breakthrough Awards—earning the nod for Best AI-based Solution for CyberSecurity and adding to the growing body of industry validation for our approach to frictionless identity services, and for the SED platform overall.

The announcement comes on the heels of SED’s recent silver Globee Award in the Identity and Access Management as a Service (IDaaS) category for Shape Recognize. And in March, SED was also named a finalist for the 2021 SC Awards as one of the industry’s best cloud computing security solutions.

SED came to F5 through the acquisition of Shape Security in 2020, and is one of the industry’s leading AI-based platforms for protecting against sophisticated bots and abuse. SED provides the primary application defense for websites and mobile apps for the majority of the world’s largest banks, airlines, federal agencies, and many Fortune 500 companies.

The AI market in cybersecurity is an increasingly crowded one, but the industry recognition Shape is receiving amid that vast adoption shows how the platform breaks through in three key ways: its technology, the scale of the data that SED utilizes—and the outcomes the platform delivers for customers.

Groundbreaking technology

One distinctive strength of the Shape platform is in client-side R&D. SED has been granted more than 80 patents and is unique among all cybersecurity and AI offerings in its ability to analyze and classify the behavior of users on web browsers.

In 2019, Shape contributed five out of nine total new additions to the JavaScript language specification, more than all other organizations put together—including Google, Facebook, and Apple. The unique features and context SED is able to capture allow its machine learning systems to yield insights that would be impossible for other platforms.

Unparalleled scale

SED protects Internet users from more 2 billion attacks daily. As a result of being the primary defense for some of the largest companies in the world, SED protects more accounts against advanced automated traffic than everyone else in the industry combined.

And since the most sophisticated attacks disproportionately focus on those large companies, this means that the SED system learns from a more advanced and useful dataset of attacker activity, which other solutions never even get the opportunity to see.

As a result of SED’s proven effectiveness, F5 is now applying its unique approach to AI across an extended set of use cases as well (within security and beyond), which will transform how F5 supports web and mobile applications.

Delivering results for customers

Effective security matters to every organization of every size, because attacks continue to increase, whether engineered by humans or automated by bots. To help our large and small customers alike succeed, we need to make security easy to adopt, and offer a choice of consumption and delivery models so they can truly secure their apps and APIs everywhere.

SED helps customers secure applications and APIs by providing visibility and control wherever it’s needed—from L4 to L7, and across clouds, data centers, and a growing set of edge locations. SED consistently finds false positives and false negatives in any combination of competing approaches, and as a result, we see customers gravitate to SED over time when cybercriminals eventually evolve past their existing defenses.

All enabled by experts behind the scenes

What these recent accolades don’t explicitly call out is all the work that goes on behind the scenes by F5 and Shape’s world-class threat tactics researchers, SOC analysts, engineering groups, and services teams. They are the secret sauce for our app and API security, bringing their passion to our platform and our customers every day.

Securing applications and their APIs is increasingly at the heart of the demands created by today’s ongoing technology and AI revolution. SED is the most effective, widely adopted, and—increasingly—industry-recognized solution of its kind protecting against today’s biggest cybersecurity threats.

Our vision is to remove the high friction and silos in today’s security controls to create a predictive and adaptive security environment that drives—not slows—your business. This growing body of industry accolades shows that our execution on that vision is on the right track.