F5 Named a Strong Performer in the Forrester Wave™: Bot Management Software, Q3 2024 Report

The Forrester report notes that F5 bot defense is part of the F5 Distributed Cloud Services offering, “a single stack that includes tools like WAF, API security, and DDoS.” This is important for enterprise security teams because of the difficulty of managing many distinct tools from different vendors. Instead, F5 provides a complete web app and API protection (WAAP) stack via its flexible Distributed  Cloud Platform, enabling deployments on premises, at the edge, and across multiple clouds. In API security, F5 is the only vendor to provide both shift left API discovery and vulnerability detection and shield right real-time protection.

Forrester calls out F5 for its “standout mobile app protection; it is the only vendor whose mobile SDK can extend into a mobile application shielding tool.” F5 believes this is important for organizations because mobile security and bot mitigation need to go hand in hand; both require the integration of a mobile SDK and both depend heavily on sophisticated code obfuscation to prevent reverse engineering and signal collection tampering, either of which would dramatically compromise effectiveness. In combining these capabilities, F5 defends mobile applications against two distinct attack vectors: bot attacks against the application’s API endpoints and malware attacks against the app as it runs on mobile devices.

The Forrester report states further that F5 “stands out for privacy, allowing customers to specify the region to help drive data retention policies.” F5 believes that its privacy capabilities are critical to enterprises because of compliance requirements and their respect for customer privacy concerns, and so F5 will continue to make privacy a priority.

The Forrester report quotes an F5 enterprise reference customer who states that F5 was “the most effective of those we evaluated against an active attack.”  This is a crucial point. While evaluations like the Forrester Wave are valuable in determining the vendors that play in a particular security market, there is no substitute for seeing a data analysis of your own traffic. F5 leads the industry with efficacy, meaning the lowest false negatives and near-zero false positives, and can demonstrate that clearly by evaluating an enterprise’s traffic. Indeed, SecureIQLab confirms F5’s leading efficacy through its independent research, giving F5 Distributed Cloud Bot Defense a perfect score of 100%, well above the industry average.