F5 Silverline: There's a New Sheriff, er, Service in Town!

There are several excellent articles already in the DevCentral coffers covering the Silverline services offered by F5. But it’s security week, and before we deep dive into the services architectures this week, I’d like to take a few minutes of your time to do a brief recap of what Silverline is and why it matters. Let’s start with the why.

I visited Gettysburg, PA with my family last week, site of the bloodiest battle in the US Civil War. We did the audio tour, visiting most of the 1st and 2nd day battlefield locations and listening to the history that unfolded there. Actually being on those hills, it was easier to understand the narrative of why the union retreated so quickly on day 1. It wasn’t a retreat in the sense they were staving off defeat, even for another day. In reality, they were repositioning their forces to better fend off the attacks of their enemy in the anticipated following waves from General Lee’s army. Taking the strategic high ground is vitally important, and proved (alongside many other strategic decisions) part of the winning strategy in the outcome of that battle.

And so it is with protecting your applications. Sometimes you need to reposition your defenses and take the strategic high ground to the win the battles against all the threats out there in modern warfare. Even if your perimeter has yet to shift (but it will eventually,) the enemy has gone global. There isn’t a corner of cyberspace where you can’t be attacked from. That’s the why.

So where does F5 Silverline fit? To start, it is a suite of cloud-based application services that deploys some of the strategic defenses from solely defending the perimeter to engaging in battle on other fronts. This is akin to General Meade redeploying brigades around the Gettysburg battlefront to meet the enemies where they were. By transitioning some of the defenses away from the perimeter, you can keep the attacks away from your precious assets, while still keeping those lines of defenses established at home. So what does F5 Silverline offer?

F5 Silverline DDoS Protection

Your infrastructure at the perimeter may well protect your applications. But can your plumbing handle the volume? This is the million dollar question you must ask yourself. And this is precisely why the F5 Silverline DDoS Protection is well-suited to your needs. It scrubs the bad actors flames and arrows of outrageous fortune so you don’t have to, as if you could with 300 GB of malicious traffic trying to fit down your 10G pipes! THE David Holmes highlighted the problem this solution overcomes in this article.

F5 Silverline Web Application Firewall

Application Security Manager is a fantastic offering on the BIG-IP platform. You might have it in-house already, or you might have a cloud-based application you need to protect and are in the hunt for a web application firewall. Either way, this managed service takes the load off your shoulders and places it squarely on the thick shoulders of our excellent security operations center. John covered the F5 Silverline WAF quite well last year, it would be well worth your time to dig in.

F5 Silverline Threat Intelligence

You guessed it. This is the new sheriff in town! Did your knees buckle when I threw that curveball? I’m sure after DDoS and WAF you were thinking “yeah, I know about this stuff, tell me something new!” Well, effective today, F5 Silverline adds threat intelligence to the suite of services! This is additive to either of the DDoS/WAF services, it is not a standalone service. Lori released a fantastic overview of the new service this morning over on F5.com, so make sure you check it out.