Over the years your firewalls have accumulated thousands of rules and objects, and many of these rules are now out-of-date or obsolete. Bloated rulesets not only add complexity to daily tasks such as change management, troubleshooting and auditing, they can also impact the performance of your firewall appliances, resulting in decreased hardware lifespan and increased TCO. Safely removing rules, however, is not easy as it may cause application outages. And periodic rule recertification projects are time-consuming and complex – with multiple teams trying to understand why rules were created in the first place.
Optimize your security policy and eliminate clutter
AlgoSec allows you to effortlessly optimize your firewall policy and keep it clean and lean. Its actionable reports identify and help you remove the bloat and clutter from your policy, while AlgoSec’s automated change management processes ensure that new rules are optimally designed and implemented so that you don’t generate more clutter over time.
With AlgoSec you can:
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- Uncover and remove unused, duplicate or conflicting rules
- Consolidate or reorder rules for better performance
- Tighten overly permissive rules (e.g. “Any/Any”) without impacting business requirements
- Recertify expired rules based on security and business needs
- Maintain policy hygiene by intelligently designing each rule change
- Securely remove access for decommissioned applications
The Business Impact:
- Ensure a clean and optimized security policy
- Drastically reduce complexity across the firewall estate
- Streamline the audit preparation processes
- Ensure continuous compliance
- Avoid outages and prevent cyber-attacks
- Improve network performance and extend the firewall hardware lifespan
Relevant Resources
Cleaning up your Firewall Clutter
Key strategies and techniques to help optimize and cleanup firewall rules and policies and improve productivity with AlgoSec
Tips for Firewall Rule Recertification
In this lesson, Prof. Wool examines some tips for including firewall rule recertification as part of your change management process, including questions you should be asking and be able to answer as well as guidance on how to effectively recertify firewall rules.
AlgoSec AppViz – Rule Recertification
In this video you’ll learn how AlgoSec enables to efficiently and effectively manage the firewall rule recertification process through an application-centric approach. Following this approach, organizations must first identify all relevant business applications each rule supports, enabling you to review the firewall rules quickly and easily.
Rule Recertification
In this video you’ll learn how AlgoSec enables to efficiently and effectively manage the firewall rule recertification process through an application-centric approach. Following this approach, organizations must first identify all relevant business applications each rule supports, enabling you to review the firewall rules quickly and easily. If an application still exists and has not been modified, its rules still apply and can be recertified. If, however, the application no longer exists, the firewall rules should be removed.
BM&FBOVESPA Case Study
BM&FBOVESPA invests in security policy management to improve operational efficiencies
Firewall Rule Recertification
In the past, the only way to recertify a rule was to manually review the comments field of each firewall rule. At a minimum, the comment should include the name of the original rule requester and the rule’s purpose. Due to the manual nature of the process, it is prone to errors and difficult to maintain.