Leading energy company embraces network security policy automation

Fortune 50-listed energy company cleans up hundreds of firewall rules, gains continuous compliance.

Background

The customer is one of the world’s leading integrated energy companies. Through its worldwide subsidiaries, the company is involved in virtually every facet of the energy industry. The company explores for, produces and transports crude oil and natural gas; refines, markets and distributes transportation fuels and lubricants; manufactures and sells petrochemicals and additives; generates power; and develops and deploys technologies that enhance business value in every aspect of the company’s operations. They are listed on the Fortune 50 and a component of the S&P 100.

The challenge

The customer has over 900 firewalls throughout the world, including in several remote sites. Some of their challenges included:

• Overly broad firewall policies
• Risky firewall rules
• Pressure from legal and compliance teams
• Manual processes and difficulty implementing automation
• Lack of visibility into security policies throughout the network

“Before AlgoSec, we didn’t manage our firewalls very well,” stated Jeremy Haynes, a Solution Architect at the energy company. “We did not have a good enforcement and validation tool to verify that policies were accurate and did not introduce unacceptable risk.”

The solution

The company was in the process of migrating from their previous firewall vendor to Palo Alto Networks. They used the opportunity for a fresh start to clean up and optimize their security policies. They were searching for a solution that provided:

• Automation of firewall policy management
• Identification of layer 7 (application-based) policies
• Innovative features that aligned with their strategic goals
• Strong support for Palo Alto Networks firewalls

Following an in-depth evaluation, the company selected AlgoSec’s Security Policy Management Solution, which includes AlgoSec Horizon Security Analyzer and AlgoSec Horizon FireFlow (AFF).

AlgoSec Horizon Security Analyzer ensures security and compliance by providing visibility and analysis into complex network security policies. AlgoSec Horizon FireFlow improves security and saves security staffs’ time by automating the entire security policy change process, eliminating manual errors, and reducing risk.

The results

By using the AlgoSec Security Management Solution, the company was able to clean up risky firewall policies, reduce misconfigurations, and dedicate more workers to business-driven innovation instead of security policy maintenance. Some benefits gained include:

• Compliance with internal requirements
• Ability to map out their network and maintain network segmentation
• Less time needed to maintain firewall policies
• Easier time managing hundreds of firewalls spread out worldwide

AlgoSec enabled their network segmentation initiatives. By mapping their network, and determining what zones should communicate with each other, they were able to fix existing policies that broke segmentation rules and not break segmentation policies in the future.

This helped ensure a state of continuous compliance. “AlgoSec gives us an easy to read and present view of firewall compliance. This helps our business units ensure their policies are clean. We can also demonstrate that the firewalls connected to our network, but owned by other business units, meet our standards,” according to Haynes.

They have over 1,700 change requests daily and therefore automation is crucial. “The ability to work with Ansible, ServiceNow, and Palo Alto gives us the ability to automate our firewall policy creation. It does so in a manner where we do not have to worry about a policy being created that may put our organization at risk,” continued Haynes.

AlgoSec helps the company to not only quickly deploy firewall policies but also ensure the security of the business. “We want to make sure our money-making capabilities can conduct their business with minimal impact and do their job. The ROI for us is our great assurance in the security of our firewall policies,” concluded Haynes.