F5

Securing Your Enterprise Applications

with the BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager

Using BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager and Application Security Manager for

Comprehensive Application and Network Security

The Internet has become increasingly complex, leaving many enterprises vulnerable to malicious

attacks. Organizations are faced with trying to protect their infrastructure against network security attacks, as well as attacks that are specific to the application layer. Every year, security breaches cost companies millions of dollars in revenue, productivity, and lost reputations.

Organizations have traditionally responded to these threats by enhancing network security through the use of firewalls. However, this relatively narrow scope has proven insufficient. Although traditional firewalls may protect an organization against network attacks, they are incapable of defending against the new breed of attacks targeting the application layer. Organizations are looking for more dependable, scalable solutions to broaden their security reach

and increase their protection levels. F5’s BIG-IP® Local Traffic Manager (LTM), an Application

Delivery Networking solution, gives organizations the tools they need to achieve comprehensive

security both at the network and at the application layers.

This white paper describes how the BIG-IP platform family provides a holistic and integrated approach to securing your network and applications against potential application-level and network-level threats and attacks. With BIG-IP LTM and/or Application Security Manager (ASM), you can realize the following benefits:

• Robust Application Security – Enforce, fortify, accelerate, and secure the delivery of your applications and web services. With features like ASM’s positive security model, content scrubbing, cookie and session management and protection, application and content filtering, and powerful encryption, organizations can implement comprehensive application security, providing a coordinated and unified line of defense that lowers TCO and improves ROI.

• Powerful Network Security – Enforce, fortify, and implement security policies for your networking infrastructure. With features like DoS and SYN attack prevention, packet filtering, and protocol sanitization, organizations can protect themselves against the heaviest of attacks and control the information traversing in and out of their site.

• Increased ROI – Maximize application availability for trouble-free maintenance and reduced administration overhead. By offloading SSL and critical security functions (processor and server intensive operations), you do not have to buy expensive hardware to support your applications. The result is up to 30% savings on hardware costs with increased application performance. Rate Shaping enables you to allocate bandwidth according to your business policies, saving money and realizing a better ROI.

• High availability – Through the use of advanced health-checking capabilities, BIG-IP LTM

can recognize when a resource is unavailable or underperforming and redirect traffic to another resource. With BIG-IP LTM, all of your applications can achieve mission-critical availability (99.999% uptime), while reducing operational complexity and costs.

• Extensible integration – iControl is the industry's first open Application Programming Interface (API) for a comprehensive suite of application traffic management products. Made available as a free SDK, iControl overcomes integration challenges, making it quick and easy to create and automate intercommunication between third-party applications and the network via F5's products.