Overview Organizations today depend on their applications to increase productivity and reduce the cost of doing business. Accordingly, those applications must perform optimally in order to accommodate a geographically dispersed world of employees, partners, suppliers and customers.
The answer isn't more boxes, more complexity or more point solutions. The answer is found at the critical juncture where the application connects to the network itself - where all the application optimization, availability and security required is integrated in a cohesive architecture.
With F5's solutions, organizations can provide employees with reliable and secure access to corporate applications, from wherever they are, no matter what type of device they're using. Customers and partners can rely on applications that are efficiently delivered, with minimal download times and a dramatic improvement in application performance. And organizations reduce their bandwidth expenditures, use fewer server resources, and lower their overall infrastructure costs.
It's why over 10,000 organizations and service providers worldwide rely on F5 as the global leader in application delivery networking - ensuring the secure and optimized delivery of their applications, to any user, anywhere in the world.
Products and Services
BIG-IP® Application Traffic Manager BIG-IP combines high-performance hardware platforms with a powerful version of BIG-IP software (version 9) that incorporates advanced application traffic management and security features in a modular, full-proxy architecture. The foundation of the BIG-IP version 9 software is the Traffic Management Operating System (TM/OS) that allows BIG-IP to serve as a full proxy for traffic passing through it to and from the servers that sit behind it in the data center.
This capability allows BIG-IP to "understand" the content of applications and make decisions based on complex rules associated with a specific application. It differentiates BIG-IP from competing traffic management solutions which can recognize the nature of a message but can't understand it, just as an English speaker might recognize a conversation in Spanish or French without understanding what is being said.
By the same analogy, BIG-IP can understand what is being said, translate between the parties if necessary, and alter the content as needed to provide increased security and deliver functions that would otherwise require a change in the application itself. In addition, its unique architecture enables it to accomplish these tasks at network speed while supporting new functionality as add-on software modules.
TrafficShield® Application Firewall TrafficShield is an application firewall that provides comprehensive, proactive application layer protection from security breaches that conventional firewalls and other types of security devices can't detect or prevent.
What sets TrafficShield apart from intrusion detection and prevention devices is that it uses a positive security model to screen out potential security threats. In contrast to negative security models, which screen incoming traffic against a list of known threats, TrafficShield employs "crawler" technology to comb an application and create a set of permissible inputs or policies which are used to screen all traffic directed to that application, and reject any transmission that does not conform to those policies.
The advantage of this approach is the ability to recognize and stop "zero day" attacks, brand new threats for which there is no existing profile and which have proven to be the most costly to businesses.
iControl® F5's products include an open API called iControl, a standards-based language that allows F5 products to communicate with each other, and with other network devices and applications. iControl permits the creation of an "application-aware" network, where applications are able to anticipate, react and adjust to varying network conditions, automatically. By allowing this communication, it becomes possible to eliminate manual intervention between the application and the traffic management devices. Instead of wasting the technical staff's valuable time on day-to-day tasks like server maintenance, organizations can automate activities that until now required human intervention.
