F5 Networks introduces application delivery firewall

F5 Networks announced new security offerings designed to safeguard organizations’ network and application infrastructures.

When deployed with F5’s new VIPRION 4800 hardware, the F5 application delivery firewall solution provides performance levels well beyond what other vendors can offer, including:

• 640 Gbps of firewall throughput
• 288 million concurrent sessions
• 8 million connections per second.

By consolidating the network and security functions of several BIG-IP modules into an integrated solution, F5 helps organizations reduce management complexity and overhead, while maintaining superior performance and scalability. In support of the F5 application delivery firewall solution, today’s announcement marks significant milestones from a product perspective, including:

BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM)

At the core of F5’s application delivery firewall solution, the BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager product is an innovative network firewall built on full-proxy architecture to provide outstanding security. By orienting application security around the applications themselves, F5’s approach simplifies firewall policy management. This application-centric security model leverages F5’s industry-leading application delivery capabilities and intelligence to enhance customers’ overall security posture, while alleviating the complexity associated with mapping application infrastructure to static constructs such as traditional firewall zones.

Enhancements to BIG-IP Access Policy Manager (APM)

With support for SAML 2.0, F5 now offers improved single sign-on (SSO) capabilities for web-based, VDI, and client/server applications—whether hosted in corporate data centers or the cloud. In addition, BIG-IP APM offers identity federation across multiple product instances within an organization, reducing the number of passwords needed by users to access corporate applications. Managing credentials in this way helps customers mitigate security risks and reduces the burden of administrative tasks on IT personnel.

Enhancements to BIG-IP Application Security Manager (ASM)

BIG-IP ASM includes several new functions to help businesses strengthen their security posture for web applications and address evolving threats. BIG-IP ASM now features support for applications written with the Google Web Toolkit, meaning security teams can enforce application security policies that use this widely adopted framework. Additionally, BIG-IP ASM can better detect and mitigate clickjacking, a growing web threat that attackers use to trick others into revealing personal information.