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

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Jim Downey
Published August 01, 2024

In the Q3 2024 Forrester™ Wave on Bot Management Software report, Forrester named F5 a strong performer. F5 believes this ranking recognizes its progress in providing a strong SaaS-based offering for bot defense with self-configuration and rich reporting. The F5 SaaS offering adds to F5’s fully managed-service bot defense offering, which has long led the industry in efficacy.

F5 delivers a full WAAP stack

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.

F5 provides standout mobile app protection and privacy

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.

Reference customer praises F5's bot detection efficacy

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.

F5 Distributed Bot Defense receives more positive recognition

This Forrester ranking as a strong performer joins a recent list of recognition:

  • TrustRadius awarded F5 Distributed Cloud Bot Defense its 2024 Top Rated Award, recognition based on reviews and customer sentiment.
  • SecureIQLab ranked F5 a “Top Performer in Security Efficacy and Operational Efficiency” for Web Application and API Security, a category that includes bot management. F5 scored the highest possible score of 100% for bot mitigation.
  • KuppingerCole recognized F5 as an overall leader in Cloud Web and API Security in its Leadership Compass 2024, highlighting F5 Distributed Cloud Bot Defense for its use of machine learning.
  • Aite-Novarica ranked F5 Distributed Cloud Bot Defense as Best in Class for Bot Management Providers in the Aite-Novarica Bot Management Matrix.

F5 appreciates the Forrester recognition and will continue to develop F5 Distributed Cloud Bot defense to make it the most effective bot management service available to enterprises.

To learn more, download a complimentary copy of The Forrester Wave™: Bot Management Software, Q3 2024 report.