The setup is straightforward so is rated an eight out of ten. 

The initial setup of F5 BIG-IP AFM difficulty depends on the experience of the person doing it. I have experience with the solution, it was not too difficult for me to implement. The process of implantation can be done in five minutes.

I rate the initial setup of F5 BIG-IP AFM an eight out of ten.

It is pretty straightforward. The duration depends on our typical deployment scenarios. Usually, it takes about three months from the time our projects are fully approved and all the way down to deployment. So, from initial installation to releasing the production, our deployment scenarios take three months.

Its maintenance is easy and simple. For maintenance, we need a staff of one.

The solution's initial setup is straightforward.

The installation could be moderately complex, involving the implementation of new traffic flows and applications into the network for protection. Deployment for Advanced Firewall Manager for one application takes approximately one week. However, the technical configuration itself, focused on proactive platform setup and protection, can typically be accomplished in about a day. 
Deploying Advanced Firewall Manager usually involves around five people, covering security, network, application, support, and project teams.

The initial setup of the F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM) is of a medium level of difficulty. There are technical elements that are required to set it up.

The initial setup has no complexity.

I think com configuration of (AFM) is comparatively little better than LTM because one is that Sentry is not very feature rich. And because of that reasons, configurations are comparatively easier because when you deploy it as a plain, when you need a firewall or firewall or IPS. So it's it's not very difficult as such.

I wasn't directly involved in the initial setup. When I arrived at the company, I was more on the operations side of things. 

The initial setup is illogical, which makes it difficult. 

Basically, as a user, you are expecting something,  it's not easy to achieve that since logic is way, way different than any other firewall. That's the only reason why it can be hard to configure. Once you understand how the solution is processing the traffic, it becomes extremely easy.

The deployment only takes four days. 

I didn't have any cases where the AFM was the only module or where we started deployment of the solution from scratch. We always used it as an additional service on an existing platform. Therefore, you have F5 already deployed with, let's say, Access Policy Manager or maybe an advanced firewall verification firewall; that's an extra service where we are enabling one more functionality regarding that AFM. 

The first step is configuring the virtual service that moves the traffic and configuring the policies, rate limits, protection, and similar things. After that, we validate the configuration and eventually fine-tune everything before putting it into production.

The deployment pretty can be done by one man, no more than that. It's not that complex of a solution. It's a basic layer for the firewall and nothing more than that. In the cases where you have 3,000 policies, that could be time-consuming; however, in the end, one person can do it without any issues.

It requires, not maintenance in general terms, where you have something to patch or something to do with that. However, if change requests are considered, every now and then, you will have to allow some different things and maybe reconfigure some existing policies to include something that was not included or needed before. That's common practice.

In most cases, after that initial deployment and knowledge transfer, the customer itself is able to manage the solution.

The initial setup of F5 BIG-IP AFM in a complex environment was simple. However, the full deployment took us approximately one year.

The initial setup was very easy. 

The product is easy to deploy. A basic configuration takes around two days to complete fine-tuning and policy setup. The deployment consists of two steps including deploying it in monitoring mode including observing traffic without blocking. The second step is to verify and observe traffic patterns and then switch to system mode to block malicious traffic. It being a continuous process, takes some more time for analysis.

The initial setup was straightforward. It's not too complex. We were very careful to not cause an outage. The implementation strategy was to keep it in transference mode to observe it for a while before we pushed it through to preventive mode.

The initial setup is very straightforward. It's not complex. It just takes a few steps and you are finished.

Deployment times vary according to the customer. It needs to be heavily configured. You need to look and you need to observe the behavior of the traffic before you can start configuring everything. It can take time.

In terms of deployment, a powerful deployment actually needs a minimum of two people and one of them needs to speak with the developers because the developers are protecting the source. They will help you to understand the requirements. After the assessment of the requirements, the users can deploy and test the solution.

Maintenence also varies by customer, however, once it is configured, unless you are adding extra servers or adjusting things, there doesn't need to be any maintenance. You can just leave it alone for the most part, so you will only need one person to check on it.

The product is easy to install. It's straightforward. In fact, the first time I deployed F5, it was my very first experience doing an installation of the product. It was my very first experience using F5 and I deployed it for an Enterprise customer and it was successful. That was my first time using it and it was successful. If you follow the guidelines that they give you, it says "do this, do that," and it is very very easy. 

There have been applications that I have installed with terrible navigation. You can't move from point A to point B, C, and D. Or by the time you get to D you can't get back to A. F5 just works. It is easy to navigate and install.

The initial setup is straightforward. We didn't run into complexities when setting it up.

The initial setup was complex.

Some of the rules were not easy to do and it can take a fair amount of time to deploy.