State of Utah network security management breaks the service bottleneck

State government rapidly accelerates security policy changes while increasing security and compliance

Background

Utah is home to over three million people. It is one of America’s fastest-growing states and the fastest-growing economy by job growth in the nation. The Department of Technology Services (DTS) is the technology service provider for the executive branch of the State of Utah, providing services to Utah’s citizens. DTS supports the computing infrastructure for the state government, including 22,000 telephones, 20,000 desktop computers, 2,400 servers, 1,300 online services, monitors over 4 million visits to Utah.gov per month, and secures against more than 500 million daily IT intrusion attempts.

Challenge

Over forty firewall pairs and hundreds of other devices help the Department of Technology Services serve and secure the Utah government.“Before AlgoSec, it was very challenging for us to manage firewalls,” stated the department’s Director of Information Technology. Some of the challenges included:

• Firewall rule requests took up 70% of employees’ daily time.
• Agencies and staff frequently complained about slow response times, impacting their productivity while staff worked through a lengthy manual process to fulfill requests.
• Human errors slowed down the processes, requiring extra layers of quality assurance.
• Large rule request projects took several months to complete.
• Employee onboarding took several months. New employees could not independently support firewall request changes for the first few months after joining the team.

Solutions

The State of Utah was searching for a solution that provided:

• Automation of firewall management
• Actionable reports to ease compliance requirements
• Ease of deployment

Following an in-depth evaluation, the State of Utah selected AlgoSec’s security policy management solution.“We evaluated several other products but none of them really automated at the level that we wanted,” said the director of IT. “AlgoSec’s automation really stood out.”

The State of Utah chose to start with AlgoSec Horizon Security Analyzer (AFA) and AlgoSec Horizon FireFlow (AFF), two of the flagship products in the AlgoSec suite.AlgoSec Horizon Security Analyzer delivers visibility and analysis of complex network security policies across on-premise, cloud, and hybrid networks. It automates and simplifies security operations including troubleshooting, auditing, and risk analysis. Using Horizon Security Analyzer, the State of Utah can optimize the configuration of firewalls, and network infrastructure to ensure security and compliance. AlgoSec Horizon FireFlow enables security staff to automate the entire security policy change process from design and submission to proactive risk analysis, implementation, validation, and auditing. Its intelligent, automated workflows save time and improve security by eliminating manual errors and reducing risk.

Results

By using the AlgoSec Security Management solution, the State of Utah was able to accelerate their security policy management, provide better and faster service to state agencies, accelerate employee onboarding, and enhance network segmentation.Some of the benefits gained include:

• Fast and easy deployment – they were up and running within a few weeks.
• Faster turnaround to firewall requests from staff supporting agencies and priority initiatives.
• Reduced time to implement large rule request for projects, such as deployments, migrations, and decommissions — from months to minutes.
• Better knowledge sharing – hosting staff and extended staff outside of network operations get more accurate insights into firewalls and infrastructure topologies and traffic flows. This sped up troubleshooting and reduced superfluous requests covered by existing rules.
• Elimination of human error and rework thanks to policy automation.
• Accelerated employee onboarding – employees joining our network operations team are now able to fulfill firewall change requests within two weeks of starting work – down from 3 months – an 80% reduction.

“I’ve been able to jump in and use AlgoSec. It’s been really intuitive”, concluded the IT director. “I am very pleased with this product!”