Making the Business Case for Firewall Policy Management: Part 3 of 4

If you manage your organization’s network, you have most assuredly had one of those days… where network traffic isn’t flowing properly or even worse where there is an outage (see GoDaddy Stops – Why Network Security Management is So Important). Without the proper visibility and tools, the time to troubleshoot these issues can be lengthy – at a time when the business needs answers “ASAP”.

It is critical to be able to quickly respond to and remediate connectivity issues. Enterprises and MSPs cannot afford to suffer connectivity issues or “downtime” because if transactions can’t be processed, business grinds to a halt and money isn’t made. Additionally, there is also a cost to the personnel hours spent identifying the cause of the problem and remediating the issue.

With growing network complexity (i.e., multiple-firewall, multiple-vendor environments; traditional firewalls, next-generation firewalls, routers, and other security and network devices), troubleshooting network connectivity issues when they arise is very challenging.

Firewall policy management automation gives administrators the ability to easily run queries to identify the cause of the connectivity issue. AFA provides root cause queries for multi-firewall, multi-vendor environments that enable administrators to immediately find the specific firewalls, rules and objects within rules and other objects that are causing connectivity issues/blocking traffic. We’ve spoken with customers who have been able to on average reduce the time taken to debug an issue by more than 50% of what it took previously.

So you do the math… less time spent by resources and less time to get back online…. cha-ching!