F5 Networks today announced that the latest release of the F5 BIG-IP product family has been certified by ICSA Labs as a network firewall, helping customers protect their public-facing Websites from today’s massive cyber attacks.

The newly certified solution handles eight times more traffic at the same cost of the closest competitor’s solution.

“F5 provides an entirely new and more intelligent approach for defending public-facing web properties and DNS services against harmful attacks,” said Anil Pochiraju, Managing Director, F5 Networks India.

“Many of the world’s largest and most prestigious brands are leveraging F5’s BIG-IP solution to protect Eeb properties that have substantial traffic levels and are frequent targets of malicious attacks. An added benefit of our solution is that it delivers dramatically better price/performance than traditional firewalls,” he added.

F5’s approach is unique in that the security capabilities noted above can be deployed on BIG-IP Application Delivery Controllers (ADCs)—best known for providing industry-leading intelligent traffic management and optimization capabilities. This firewall solution is part of F5’s comprehensive security architecture that enables customers to apply a unified security strategy. For the first time in the industry, organisations can secure their networks, data, protocols, applications, and users on a single, flexible, and extensible platform: BIG-IP.

The repeated failure of traditional network firewalls is a primary cause of outages and data leaks, which can profoundly impact revenue, degrade corporate reputations, and jeopardise regulatory compliance. Traditional security solutions attempt to piece together point products such as network firewalls, DDoS appliances, DNS appliances, Web application firewalls, and basic ADCs. This point product approach not only increases complexity, it also contributes to network latency and adds multiple points of failure. Worse, these divergent solutions have no ability to integrate information from different attack vectors, leaving potential gaps in protection and making it impossible for organisations to deliver a unified defense.

“Many organisations are finding that their network firewalls operating at layer 3 or 4 in the TCP/IP stack are having problems protecting against application layer attacks because the traffic is encrypted by SSL,” said Jeff Wilson, Principal Security Analyst at Infonetics.

“Lacking the visibility and intelligence to inspect the entire protocol stack, traditional firewalls can’t protect against today’s increasingly sophisticated and massively distributed attacks. In addition, many network firewalls have only a fraction of the connection capacity required to handle the millions of requests per second that typify modern DDoS attacks,” he added.