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Safeguard Financial Transactions with F5 and AWS Application Security

Dave Morrissey Miniatura
Dave Morrissey
Published April 25, 2024

Digital tools ranging from mobile apps to virtual assistants have helped financial institutions attract and retain customers. Mobile apps are now the most common way customers manage their bank accounts,1 and nearly 80% of survey respondents said innovation and technological improvements are making it easier for all Americans to access financial services.2

Digital access has become common across the financial services industry, not just retail banking. J.D. Power found that more wealth management clients than ever are logging into wealth websites and apps, and the more often they do so, the higher their satisfaction.3 The study also found that customer satisfaction with mobile apps was higher than with websites.

Maintaining customer confidence with a trusted delivery network

While digital features help financial institutions stand out from the crowd, those digital services need to be fast, available, and secure to retain customer trust and satisfaction. Many financial services organizations now use Amazon CloudFront content delivery network (CDN) as an efficient and cost-effective way to distribute content with low latency and high data transfer speeds. Content is stored in CloudFront’s edge and regional caches—they’re only fetched from the origin servers when needed, reducing bandwidth consumption and improving performance. 

Amazon CloudFront provides:

  • Low-latency content delivery for websites and mobile apps
  • Faster performance and navigation
  • Faster and higher-volume transactions
  • The ability to use machine learning to improve services

Adding security to performance

While Amazon CloudFront provides the speed and reliable performance needed for financial applications, these apps also need protection against security threats and fraud. As part of the shared responsibility model, Amazon secures the infrastructure and operations of AWS services—but it is the AWS customer’s responsibility to secure their apps and data.

By partnering with AWS, F5 offers application and API security to secure your transactions. F5 has received the Amazon CloudFront Ready designation, part of the AWS Service Ready Program. This designation recognizes that F5® Distributed Cloud Bot Defense has demonstrated successful integration with Amazon CloudFront, including a connector that makes deploying advanced bot protection easy.

Block bots to reduce fraud

Protect your apps and content against malicious bots that commit fraud like credential stuffing and fake account creation. Financial services is a sector frequently targeted for account takeover (ATO) attacks. F5® Distributed Cloud Bot Defense offers the industry’s most accurate real-time bot traffic protection, using rich signal analysis, AI, and human domain expertise to distinguish bad bots from legitimate users.

Advanced analytics allow Distributed Cloud Bot Defense to provide maximum efficacy with a near-zero false positive rate. Not only does this reduce your risk of bot-driven fraud, but it can also reduce costs by eliminating unwanted traffic. Distributed Cloud Bot Defense isn’t fooled by rapidly retooling bots, and it employs advanced obfuscation to prevent reverse engineering that attackers use to evade defenses.

Complete protection for your applications

Distributed Cloud Bot Defense is part of F5® Distributed Cloud Web App and API Protection (WAAP), a SaaS-based solution to protect your apps and APIs anywhere they run. It includes a dynamic web application firewall (WAF), API security, and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack protection in addition to bot defense. With Distributed Cloud WAAP, you can bring consistent security to apps on AWS, on premises, or at the edge, all with a single management console.

To learn more about how F5 and AWS can help you provide a faster and more secure app experience for your customers, visit f5.com/aws.