F5 enters cloud services delivery arena with Silverline DDOS protection service

F5 Networks has introduced the Silverline cloud services delivery platform to Asia Pacific. Silverline will enable new hybrid solution capabilities to offer extended security, optimisation, and availability services from hosted and managed infrastructure, the company said, with the F5 Silverline distributed denial of service (DDoS) Protection service as its first offering. 

Source: F5 Networks. Emmanuel Bonnassie, Senior Vice President of Sales for Asia Pacific, describes current technology trends. He said that 94% of companies which say they want infrastructure as a service are actually talking about hybrid cloud environments, while 74% have hybrid cloud strategies. He added that 61% of technology purchases are now owned by lines of business. 

F5 Silverline expands the company’s F5 Synthesis architecture to enable application services within customers’ deployment model of choice, whether it is in traditional data centres on-premise, through a subscription as-a-service, fully on the cloud, or converged, as part of integrated ecosystem stacks.

“Today’s application-driven world demand organisations to cost-effectively and seamlessly deliver applications while fending off security threats by the minute. Specific IT components have become a secondary concern as the convenience of a unified services platform takes precedence,” said Emmanuel Bonnassie, Senior Vice President of Sales for Asia Pacific. 

“F5’s goal is to remove barriers to deploying and scaling application services. Our Silverline offerings will make core F5 technologies available as-a-service to help customers embrace hybrid deployments without forsaking the benefits they’ve seen in the data centre.”

Kunaciilan Nallappan, Director of Marketing, F5 Networks Singapore, shared that cyberattacks today are becoming more damaging as attacks seek to overwhelm the bandwidth pipe instead of just overwhelming a site. "The talk of the town is DDoS. DDoS enables the hacker, regardless of reason, to bring down a business, even bring down a country," he said. "The intensity of attacks and the sophistication of attacks have both increased." 

Nallappan explained that hackers can bring down a service through volumetric attacks, analogous to many people blocking the entrance to a bank, keeping legitimate customers out so that the bank can no longer serve anyone. There are also low-bandwidth attacks that act like inconsiderate banking customers, monopolising each bank teller's time with request after request so that he or she is unable to serve any other customer even though the bank is open for business. 

F5's Silverline DDoS Protection service is particularly effective because F5 understands how apps behave and how they can be compromised on the one hand, enabling such attacks to be prevented, Nallappan said. At the same time, technology through acquisition Defence.net on how attacks can occur and what to do about them enables F5 to offload a volumetric attack elsewhere, then sort (scrub) through the requests to let genuine requests through, Nallappan added, a practice called sandboxing. Continuing with the banking analogy, the crowds outside the bank are moved to a separate waiting area for screening, allowing the bank to remain open and letting genuine customers enter. Silverline services are also designed to be compatible with existing security management frameworks for ease of use, he said.

“F5 is the first application delivery networking company to offer a hybrid solution for DDoS protection. This type of hybrid solution, combining on-premises DDoS protection capabilities with a high-capacity cloud service, provides enterprises with robust capability to absorb and mitigate a complete spectrum of DDoS attacks,” said Bonnassie. “With security and attack mitigation concerns on the rise in the region, we wanted to ensure our customers are well-positioned to defend against DDoS attacks even as they increase in scale and complexity.” 

F5’s open and programmable architecture enables network security administrators to extend custom rules to mitigate zero-day attacks, works seamlessly with F5’s Application Delivery Controller solutions to create a complete DDoS protection solution. F5 provides tiered protection levels, based on customers’ unique needs and potential attack profiles: 

• Always On – The first line of defense, this subscription continuously stops bad traffic from reaching the network. 
• Always Available – This subscription provides primary protection on demand. It runs on stand-by and can be initiated as needed when under attack. 
• Ready Defense – This is secondary DDoS protection. The subscription provides additional capacity to bolster DDoS mitigation capabilities. 

F5 has made significant investments to strengthen its security support capabilitities for the DDoS service and in preparation for additional services. This includes the establishment of globally distributed scrubbing centres, one of which is based in Singapore. Part of F5’s global security operation centre (SOC) infrastructure, which includes SOCs in Frankfurt, Israel, and in the US, the centre analyses incoming traffic, identifies threats, and removes malicious traffic, ultimately returning clean traffic to the destination website with little to no impact to the end user or the network. Attack intelligence is also shared globally to strengthen defences worldwide. 

Bonnassie said Singapore is an ideal location for the centre because of the stable political and economic climate. The company may add more centres in Asia if data protection regulations require it. 

Social media firms Weebly and Livejournal have signed up for DDoS protection, and banking and finance, government, healthcare and e-commerce firms are expected to take an interest in the DDoS service, the F5 executives said.