FireEye, F5 Team Up For Application Delivery, Security Offering

FireEye and F5 Networks have partnered to make application delivery more secure, a move they say will help partners go to market with a more streamlined offering.

The partnership brings together F5's application delivery infrastructure capabilities and FireEye's threat protection. The joint offering will work by F5 taking in the SSL traffic, decrypting it, and then passing it to FireEye for threat detection and remediation before allowing the traffic to enter the customer's network.

Features include network segmentation and policy management, protocol conformance, DDoS mitigation, SSL inspection, advanced threat protection, intrusion prevention, threat intelligence, forensics and analytics.

[Related: Verizon 2015 Security Report Names Top 3 Verticals For Data Breaches]

In a complicated landscape for security solutions, Keith McManigal, regional vice president for channel sales at Seattle-based F5, said the joint offering will make it easier for partners to sell, implement and bring value to customers.

"A lot of our customers are looking to our partners who are security expert partners and they are going to them as subject matter experts to help them separate out the wheat from the chaff," McManigal said. "If we can show between FireEye and F5 that we have a solution that can solve those business problems ... it's a really good value proposition."

Todd Weber, vice president of partner research and strategy at Optiv Security, said the solution provider is seeing demand from customers for joint offerings that give them a "larger return on their technology investments."

"Organizations have limited resources and time, so they need to achieve better controls with less effort and have the various security technologies working together instead of being closed silo systems focused on one or two attack vectors," Weber said in an email to CRN.

The partnership is good for solution providers such as Optiv because it puts the company in position to provide the expertise to implement and maintain application security solutions, he said

"The need for detailed visibility on all data communications within an enterprise is becoming a focused strategy for enterprise security monitoring and operations. With that need, the ability for security teams to decrypt SSL traffic and other encrypted protocols is a key tenet of that strategy," Weber said.

Milpitas, Calif.-based FireEye and F5 have a number of common distributor and solution provider partners, according to F5's McManigal. The companies already have approached many of the partners that are now selling the solutions side by side, talking about the benefits of a joint offering, he said.

"I would say that we're going to get deeper with the ones that already work with our solutions and adding specific targeted partners where it makes sense," McManigal said.

The two companies also will be adding enablement for partners around the joint solution, including training, use cases and presentations, he said.

PUBLISHED OCT. 7, 2015