The Top 10 AlgoSec Blog Posts From 2018

Top 2018 AlgoSec Network Security Blog Posts

As the year draws to a close, we look back on the hurdles we’ve overcome, the successes we’ve celebrated and the developments that have changed the way we’ve worked over the last twelve months. There certainly wasn’t a shortage of challenges in cybersecurity this year, and we aimed to help the industry navigate growing complexities with our solutions and in our blogs.
It’s a good time then, to look at our top blogs of the year. Here’s our round up of our 10 most popular blogs from 2018.

1. Algosec Becomes #1 in its Category in IT Central Station

This guest blog from August 2018, written by Zisse Hanfling-Mueller from IT Central Station, discusses the value of product reviews from real enterprise users. We found that real enterprise users had rated our solution top in its category on IT Central Station, named “The Yelp of Enterprise Technology” by the Wall Street Journal. After AlgoSec users shared their product reviews, they agreed that our solutions save them time, give them control and visibility over their IT estate and provide numerous features that add value to their companies.
It’s good to see that months later, AlgoSec is still no.1!

2. What real users think about AlgoSec

Our second most popular blog includes more feedback from IT Central Station’s real users
As mentioned in the blog, unbiased, real-life customer feedback is extremely valuable, but not always easy to come by – which may be why these posts were so well read.
Here are a few quotes from feedback left by our users:
“AlgoSec continues to add capabilities that firewall vendors simply cannot provide.”
“We have reduced the attack surface of risky rules, improved our compliance scores, and streamlined our firewall change flow all thanks to AlgoSec Firewall Analyzer.”
“The product has been invaluable to our information security department.”
You can read the full overview of customer comments on the April blog post.

3. Cloudin’ with the Best – Microsoft and AlgoSec Join Hands on Cloud Security

In September, we announced our new collaboration with Microsoft Azure. When Microsoft officially launched its new Azure Firewall, we and Microsoft decided to join hands to approach our mutual customers together—to offer the best cloud security.
As Anner Kushnir explained in the blog, as a result of this collaboration you can easily and consistently manage multiple instances of Azure Firewalls across multiple regions and even multiple Azure accounts with AlgoSec and its cloud security management solution. You can also manage all your cloud Network Security Groups, as well as additional 3rd-party security devices and constructs—be they virtual firewalls deployed in Azure, security constructs in other clouds, or even firewalls, routers and SDN solutions in your on-premise network.

4. DevOps and AlgoBot – Power to the (App) people

As Anner Kushnir explained in this blog, DevOps is a very exciting practice/approach/movement/cult hat advocates automation, agility, and basically empowering the application developers to have full control (and responsibility) for their applications. It’s no surprise then that three posts out of the top ten focus on this area.
One of the areas in which application developers are still in the dark is network security and connectivity. Their application must connect to external resources and accept connections from remote clients, but the developers have little visibility and control over those connections. This is painful during the development cycles, when a new connectivity requirement is introduced, and the developer has no idea if this connectivity is currently allowed or not. This post explains how AlgoBot can solve the network connectivity gap.

5. DevOpsifying network connectivity: the Ansible-based option

At number five, we had our second most popular post on the subject of DevOps. The dream of agile application delivery with DevOps is painfully shattered as soon as the smallest firewall or network connectivity change is required. By deploying AlgoSec’s solutions, you can seamlessly address this gap, and truly enjoy the benefits of DevOps – and this blog told you how to do it using Ansible.

6.DevOpsifying Network Connectivity with the Algosec SDK for Python

Building on the topic of how to make network security DevOps-able, this blog explored how to achieve the same results if you use another orchestration and configuration management framework, or perhaps even some home-grown automation scripts. By following the same concepts, and with AlgoSec’s open-source Python SDK, you can do it without even having to read the API guides and all write that “glue” code yourself.

7. In the Spotlight – the High Cost of a Data Breach

From the initial discovery and through forensic investigation and remediation, a data breach places a huge amount of immediate strain on IT resources. Then, there are the follow-on costs: loss of business, reputational damage and the likelihood of fines levied by regulators. This blog broke down the potentially massive costs that can be associated with a data breach in light of Ponemon’s Cost of a Data Breach report.

8. Accelerating security management in your Cisco ACI fabric

In this blog, Asher Benbenisty explains the benefits that Cisco ACI can bring in moving to a virtualized, software-defined environment that enables and supports micro-segmentation – which makes it significantly easier to protect applications and data, by reducing the ability of hackers to move laterally across networks.
ACI’s micro-segmentation capabilities enable this to be taken even further, by allowing individual servers to be isolated virtually into secure zones inside your data center. However, these virtualized networks can get very complex, very quickly. And when complexity starts to mount up, there’s a real risk of human error creeping in. Asher explains how this can be managed with AlgoSec in this post from September.

9. Tips to help you segment your network inside your data center

Intelligent network segmentation is a key strategy for reducing the attack surface of data center networks – so it’s no surprise that this blog from Prof. Avishai Wool was a popular read. Avishai provided tips to help security teams simplify the task of deciding where to place the borders between segments. And after the blog, readers can watch Avishai’s video to see this all explained in detail.

10. Holistic management of your Cisco ACI deployments alongside other networks

Cisco ACI was another popular topic in 2018, and since it automates IT tasks, and accelerates data center application deployments, using a business-relevant software defined networking (SDN) policy model, it’s easy to see why. But an organization’s virtualized ACI fabric is likely to co-exist with both physical networks and cloud deployments.
And the applications which power the business are likely to span all those environments, which creates real challenges in managing application connectivity and security from end to end. In this blog, Asher Benbenisty described how to address these complexities and achieve holistic security management across your environment.