The services address the growing threats facing businesses’ networks, and the need to speed up and scale DNS services.
F5 Networks is unveiling new cloud-based
services designed to expand its Big-IP application delivery platform with
greater network security capabilities.
The goal of the new services, announced June
25 and offered as part of Big-IP v11.2, is to enable organizations to better
deal with a threat environment that is getting more sophisticated and more
crowded. The challenge is to really control and understand that threat,
Jonathan George, product marketing manager at F5, told eWEEK.
Once they understand the threat, the
organizations must become more adept at logging and blocking the threats,
George said. That is where F5s new serviceswhich are both available
immediately via a subscriptioncan help, he said.
Included in the new offerings is F5s IP
Intelligence service, which enables businesses to detect IP addresses that are
associated with malicious activity and to stop them from accessing a companys
networking infrastructure. The service offers a dynamic list of high-risk IP
addresses from multiple sources, enabling businesses to block malicious IP
addresses and keep on top of emerging threats. In addition, companies can
update the services as often as every five minutes, ensuring that the database
of IP threats includes the latest malicious activity.
The service can track inbound and outbound
traffic and also can be customized to address an organizations particular
needs, according to George, by leveraging F5s Big-IP Application Security
Manager and iRules technologies. IP Intelligence addresses eight threat
categories, from Windows exploits and denial-of-service issues to Web attacks
and phishing proxies.
F5 offers a key advantage over point
solutions by integrating the security services with its application-delivery
capabilities, giving organizations a more comprehensive solution and single,
unified environment.
F5s dynamic DNS services are designed to
better handle the Domain Name System server environment, adding faster response
time, greater scaling and better security, said Nathan Meyer, product manager
of F5. This is particularly important at a time when the total number of DNS
queries has doubled in the past five years, and Websites may need more than 100
DNS name resolutions to render a full Web page, according to the company.
In the past, most companies dealt with the
problems of pages loading too slowly and poor application availability by
adding more DNS servers, deploying point products or outsourcing DNS functions.
With the new F5 services, organizations can handle those issues without having
to spend a lot of money on more servers, Meyer said. The services will enable
companies to reduce internal and in-network response latency by up to 80
percent and scale their systems by as much as 10 times, according to F5. With
this, companies will be able to reduce the number of DNS servers they need.
In addition, with the services, businesses
will be able to provide greater security in physical, virtual and cloud
environments. The services offer new capabilities, such as DNS caching and
resolving, DNS Security Extension (DNSSEC) validation, and monitoring, to add
to existing solutions aimed at communications service providers and DNSSEC
signing.
The services will leverage F5s Big-IP Global
Traffic Manager and iRules technologies. It also protects businesses from such
threats as distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, according to F5.
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