F5 Networks introduced new offerings yesterday that provide advanced access controls and dedicated SSL visibility, including orchestration capabilities to help thwart today’s most sophisticated cyber attacks.
"...the ability to deploy standalone or integrated security for all types of applications, environments, and use cases." - Ram Krishnan, SVP and General Manager, Security at F5
F5 SSL Orchestrator: Unified Management of Encrypted Application Traffic
“Applications are everywhere, and increasingly interrelated, with many added capabilities inadvertently yielding new opportunities for attack,” said Ram Krishnan, SVP and General Manager, Security at F5. “Our value proposition is simple: we give you the ability to deploy standalone or integrated security for all types of applications, environments, and use cases. Customers enjoy the versatility of world-class products, cloud-based solutions, support services, and F5 Networks’ broad security capabilities that can protect applications better than anyone else in the industry.”
While most traffic and data handled by applications is now encrypted, many security stack service offerings (e.g., firewalls and IPS) are unable to efficiently process SSL encrypted traffic at the scale and speed that businesses demand. Beyond mere SSL awareness and offload, the new F5 SSL Orchestrator provides policy-based orchestration capabilities across the full security service chain for any network topology, device, or application.
Intelligently manage encrypted traffic flows across the entire app security infrastructure
Orchestration on this level groups devices into services, intelligently decrypting and steering traffic, allowing for independent monitoring, load balancing and scaling. This enables adaptation to changing network conditions and increasing traffic demands. it marks an improvement over the industry’s legacy security model, where piecemeal inspection devices perform decryption independently, frequently leaving gaps for attackers.
"Dynamically control and customize the flow of encrypted traffic through security service chains"
SSL Orchestrator: A dedicated security appliance
SSL Orchestrator is a dedicated security appliance that delivers insights to mitigate threats traversing the network. SSL Orchestrator provides:
- Operational Efficiency – Dynamic service chaining and policy-based traffic steering, to help organizations intelligently manage encrypted traffic flows across the entire app security infrastructure.
- Full Visibility – High-performance decryption and encryption of inbound and outbound SSL/TLS traffic enable quicker threat detection and attack remediation.
- Improved Risk Management – SSL orchestration lets organizations maximize their investments around malware, DLP, ransomware, and firewall protections, safeguarding user privacy through hardened security with robust cypher management.
“App security is the definition of a moving target,” said Clint Huffaker, Technical Solutions Architect at World Wide Technology. “Visibility is one of the biggest challenges organizations are facing today, and F5’s SSL Orchestrator gives customers the ability to dynamically control and customize the flow of encrypted traffic through security service chains. Our customers want to work with industry leaders that understand the evolving threat landscape, provide a balance between application performance and risk mitigation, and offer effective ways to increase visibility and protect apps from malicious activity.”
F5 Access Manager: New Identity-Aware Access Proxy
Applications remain the principal gateways to organizations’ and individuals’ valuable information. F5 Access Manager protects sensitive data with a Zero Trust model while providing access for authorized users, devices, and APIs, guarding against pervasive threats such as man-in-the-middle attacks. Product features enable organizations to think outside of traditional security boundaries, empowering them to unlock additional business models and operational efficiencies without compromising protections around apps, users, and data.
As a secure, flexible, high-performance proxy solution delivering unified global access management, F5 Access Manager provides:
Streamlined Access Controls – Context-sensitive policies with guided configuration deliver trusted access to users, devices, and APIs for increased business efficiency, while real-time web form encryption safeguards user credentials and prevents fraud.
Accelerated Business Innovation – As IT transforms to support continuous deployment methodologies, Access Manager provides a centralized solution for access control, including API authorization. This means DevOps teams can hand off apps to NetOps personnel more quickly, and NetOps can better deliver a consistent user experience without sacrificing manageability.
Scalability into the Cloud – While SaaS and cloud applications provide numerous advantages, many organizations are choosing not to move all apps off-premises. With advanced F5 virtual edition support and high-capacity licensing, Access Manager provides the scale necessary to bridge on-prem app functionality to the cloud, effectively integrating with IDaaS solutions and capabilities to support evolving heterogeneous environments.
Web application attacks the largest cause of security breaches conducted their own extensive research questioning security professionals worldwide, collaborating with the Ponemon Institute. External research was also combined with F5 internal data sets on DDoS attacks and major incidents, afterwards analyzed by dozens of F5 security experts.
Findings uncovered that web application attacks were the largest cause of security breaches (30 percent), with an average loss from a serious web application security incident estimated at nearly $8 Million. It was also revealed that a typical organization runs 765 web applications, with 34 percent considered mission-critical.
