Security vendor FireEye is partnering with F5, a specialist in the application delivery controller (ADC) market and also a security hardware vendor, to provide integrated solutions. Fireeye has been one of the rising stars in this sector, but has been casting about for allies. FireEye announced a security services partnership with HP earlier this year, as well as a threat intelligence-sharing partnership with firewall/security appliance vendor Check Point.
But not everyone thinks this is good news: citing fears about increased competition, Piper's analyst has downgraded FireEye, and cut his target by $23 to $37 saying: "Our downgrade is primarily due to increasing competition, though we are also concerned with conflict within the channel and recent executive turnover."
Rivals Palo Alto Networks, Cisco, and others have rolled out threat-prevention products and services over the last year that take aim at FireEye. The company is still generally seen as a technology leader with regards to solutions protecting networks and endpoints from malware and zero-day threats, and in probing attacks that have already occurred.
The joint deal with F5 solutions combine application delivery and content security functions, including "network segmentation and policy management, protocol conformance, DDoS mitigation, SSL inspection, advanced threat protection, intrusion prevention, threat intelligence, forensics, and analytics." FireEye/F5 also promise to provide better visibility into encrypted traffic, and to leverage the health-monitoring and load-balancing features of F5's BIG-IP platform.
“Our partnership with F5 addresses critical business issues for our customers – matching IT growth and security to support the business,” said Steve Pataky, vice president of worldwide channels and alliances at FireEye. “We’ve consistently seen a complementary delivery cycle with F5, and now we can provide seamless joint customer engagement, as well as the support and reach necessary to protect more organisations around the world.”
Enterprise IT departments are challenged with supporting cloud-based applications and mobile environments while maintaining network reliability, security, and speed. The partnership between FireEye and F5 will feature the integration of key application delivery technologies with advanced threat management platforms to accelerate application deployment, performance, and security.
Customers will also benefit from Performance, scale and high availability in heavy network traffic environments by using the health monitoring and load-balancing capabilities of the BIG-IP platform. This enables customers to scale and protect against advanced threats in the most demanding application environments.