Lonely Planet added firewall capabilities to its F5 equipment during a recent IT refresh about three months ago, Kennedy said. Protecting intellectual property and maintaining high uptime is critical for Lonely Planet, he said. The company in recent years has seen growing threat from denial-of-service attacks, malicious advertising and crawlers that scrape content from a website, he said.

Since all its traffic was going through the F5 device, F5 decided it would be more efficient to put firewall functionality directly in the box rather than out front, Kennedy said. "There's less to manage, and you save cap ex, which in a publishing environment is quite important."

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