F5 Security in the ATC

Security innovations happening in the ATC around multi-vendor integrations and SSL demos

Within WWT's Advanced Technology Center (ATC), there are several strategic technical partnerships with F5 Networks. The national security team has been diligently working on the integration between F5 and several of our other key OEMs. This includes integrations with Splunk, Palo Alto, Symantec, Cisco and others.

WWT also has environments built to show how F5's security products like their web application firewall, single sign-on and cloud federation solutions strengthen a customer's security posture for their applications and provide protection against attacks and vulnerabilities. These also provide seamless user access whether users are contractors or corporate employees and regardless of whether the enterprise is leveraging cloud applications, off-prem cloud infrastructure, converged or hybrid, public or private.

In addition, top of mind in the field is SSL encryption and decryption. In our ATC, we can demonstrate how F5 can integrate with NGFWs to provide SSL visibility giving the NGFW/NGIPS an opportunity to use more resources for other important security services. This "airgap" architecture provides a perfect place between the client/server connection for added inspection and delivery of services. This architecture varies customer by customer but we have proof of concepts where it has been used alongside ICAP, DLP and Outbound Proxy as well as the inbound architecture aforementioned.

The integration of F5 and Splunk is also an interesting framework. Using F5 to determine what traffic should be sent to Splunk can benefit customers not only in visibility and awareness, but can also affect the customer's bottom line. If one controls the logs or even builds specific partitions to send to Splunk, one can control the amount of information flowing to the Splunk instance and thus control the budget for Splunk. The important data that F5 has access to gives the customer analytics for metrics that they would have never had the ability to see otherwise.

WWT's investment in the ATC and our partnership with F5 is a strong combination to help both F5 and WWT teams in finding the best solutions for our customer's initiatives.

Please contact a member of the national security team for more in-depth conversations and demonstrations around these topics or check out this lab to learn more about F5 capabilities.