F5 Networks, a listed company (NASDAQ: FFIV) making apps go “faster, smarter, and safer” for the world’s largest businesses, service providers, governments, and consumer brands, has announced new offerings providing access controls and dedicated SSL visibility with orchestration capabilities to help thwart today’s most sophisticated cyber attacks.
While most traffic and data handled by applications is now encrypted, many security stack service offerings (e.g., firewalls and IPS) would be unable to efficiently process SSL encrypted traffic at the scale and speed businesses demand. Beyond mere SSL awareness and offload, F5 SSL Orchestrator provides policy-based orchestration capabilities across the full security service chain for any network topology, device, or application.
Orchestration on this level groups devices into services to intelligently decrypt and steer traffic, allowing for independent monitoring, load balancing, and scaling to adapt to changing network conditions and increasing traffic demands. This would mark a vast improvement over the industry’s legacy security model, where piecemeal inspection devices perform decryption independently, frequently leaving gaps for attackers.
As a dedicated security appliance delivering insight to mitigate threats traversing the network, F5’s SSL Orchestrator product would provide:
- Operational efficiency – Dynamic service chaining and policy-based traffic steering 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 cipher management.
Applications would remain the principal gateways to organizations’ and individuals’ valuable information. F5’s 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. Its product features would 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 “secured, flexible, high-performance” proxy solution delivering unified global access management, F5 Access Manager would provide:
- 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 would mean 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 heterogenous environments.
F5 Networks’ SSL Orchestrator and Access Manager products will be generally available in the fourth quarter of calendar year 2018.
