SC Magazine on AlgoSec: “one of the most complete security management systems we’ve seen”

There’s no better validation than an objective, independent 3^rd party review from such a well-respected publication as SC Magazine.  So we were understandably delighted to see SC Magazine’s annual Risk and Policy Management Group Product Review last week, which gave AlgoSec’s solution a 5-star ratings across the board.  In a head-to-head comparison against other security management tools, SC Magazine assessed the AlgoSec Security Policy Management solution based on ease-of-use, feature set, performance, documentation, support and value for money, and awarded it the maximum 5-star score in every single category.

In the ‘Quick Read’ section, reviewer Peter Stephenson described AlgoSec as a “very strong security management tool”, and “an excellent tool, especially for mid-to large-sized organizations. It has everything you need and is comfortably manageable”. Mr. Stephenson did not find any weaknesses in our solution.

As “one of the more interesting products we saw this month”, Mr Stephenson highlighted AlgoSec’s unique application-centric approach to network security.  Stephenson explained that AlgoSec shows “how the application connects with other applications and what the flow paths need to be to achieve the application’s mission”. The review noted that AlgoSec provides a connectivity map between applications and its endpoints that automatically alerts an analyst if there is a problem.

“Comfortable for business managers”

Next, the review highlighted the product’s ability to “generate remediation workflows and, in some cases, can provide automated firewall configuration change orders,” while also noting that the dashboards “have excellent drill-down and, in many cases, present their information in formats comfortable for business managers rather than technical personnel.”  We are particularly proud of this assessment, since we have invested heavily in ensuring that our solution delivers both strategic business value as well as technical benefits.

“Autodiscovery is an absolute requirement”

The review also focused on AlgoSec’s Autodiscovery capability – which is a clear competitive advantage. AutoDiscovery automatically discovers and maps all business applications, their traffic flows and interdependencies across enterprise networks to help organizations seamlessly migrate applications to new platforms, as well as help reduce the risk of misconfigurations.  In his overview Mr Stephenson noted that “We strongly believe that some form of auto-discovery is an absolute requirement for this type of product”.

“a big time-saver.”

The review identified AlgoSec’s secure decommissioning capabilities as a key value-added feature, stating it “can decommission an application without breaking the other applications with which it communicates” while highlighting that the reverse – new deployments – is also true. The review noted that with AlgoSec “new deployments or changes are almost fool-proof”, and “a big time-saver.”

“The reporting on this solution is excellent”

The review strongly praised AlgoSec’s reporting capabilities as excellent, stating that “It is well-formatted for meeting regulatory requirements and it provides everything needed by management, auditors and support engineers.”

Other product “tedious”, “old-school” and “unreliable”

In contrast to AlgoSec, an alternative product was called out as “tedious”, “old-school” and ‘unreliable’. Their review also mentioned that “a lot of manual setup and management is necessary”, and highlighted the lack of auto-discovery capabilities, and pre-configured policies for regulatory compliance, among other limitations.

This SC Magazine review provides a superb overview of the AlgoSec solution. It focuses on our business and application-centric approach, including auto discovery and its benefits – which is a significant competitive advantage, while highlighting some of our core competencies, such as application migration and decommissioning workflows, vulnerability and risk assessment, auditing and compliance reporting, automated network discovery, change management and rule recertification.

The review concludes by stating that “Overall, this is one of the most complete security management systems we’ve seen”.  We couldn’t have said it better ourselves. You can see the full review here.