FAQ
Firewall administrators must know how to properly and effectively manage firewalls to make sure that the IT infrastructure and the business are protected against external and internal unauthorized and potentially harmful network risks.
How do you make firewall policies effective?
Using a firewall is about creating and establishing intelligent and effective firewall policy decisions. Firewalls are more than capable of implementing policies by translating firewall rules established by the firewall administrator. Then again, as a firewall admin, you must understand the types of firewall rules that will make sense on your current infrastructure. Ordinarily the time investment needed with firewall optimization relies heavily on the initial setup, leaving firewall policy management fairly simple. Although it may take some time, ideas and testing to come up with a firewall security policy that best serves your business requirements, doing so will provide you better control over the security of your network.
How long does it take to implement security policy changes?
Depending on the firewall policy management tools you use, you can actually process security policy changes within minutes or hours. The good thing about using highly customizable and smart workflows is that it simplifies and automates the whole process of modifying your firewall policies from the first stage of planning to designing a practical risk analysis to implementation, validation and auditing.
How do you create a change management workflow?
Every change task category or configuration change category needs to have a workflow linked to it. Creating a workflow is required prior to creating a change category or change task category. Technically, you can generate a new workflow from scratch or you can opt to just copy an already existing workflow and create the necessary modifications.
How to manage firewall rules?
The firewall policy management interface enables network administrators to either enable or disable firewall policies with the purpose of creating or managing the firewall rules designed for outgoing, incoming and inter-zone traffic.
Firewall Policy Management Resources
Discover how AlgoSec can help your firewall policy management
Automating Firewall Change Control
In today’s IT environment, the only constant is change. Not only is change rampant, but it often occurs at breakneck speed. Rapid business growth from mergers and acquisitions, d...
Automating the Firewall Change Control Process
In this lesson, Prof. Wool examines the challenges of managing firewall change requests and provides tips on how to automate the entire workflow.
Firewall Policy Management
In this lesson, Prof. Wool examines the challenges of managing firewall change requests and provides tips on how to automate the entire workflow.
Automating Firewall Change Control
In today’s IT environment, the only constant is change. Not only is change rampant, but it often occurs at breakneck speed. Rapid business growth from mergers and acquisitions, d...
Firewall Management: 5 Challenges Every Company Must Address
Improperly managed firewalls create some of the greatest business risks in any organization.This whitepaper highlights 5 of these business challenges and provides tips and techniqu...
Firewalls Ablaze? Put Out Network Security Audit & Compliance Fires
The growing body of regulations and standards forces enterprises to put considerable emphasis on compliance verified by ad hoc and regular auditing of security policies and control...
Firewall Policy Management
The growing body of regulations and standards forces enterprises to put considerable emphasis on compliance verified by ad hoc and regular auditing of security policies and control...
How to Build Firewall Policies for East West Traffic
In this lesson Prof. Wool presents a step-by-step process for writing firewall policies for East-West traffic.
Private: How to Take the Fire Drill out of Making Firewall Changes
Firewall Policy Management
Additional Features
AlgoSec’s firewall policy management solution enable you to significantly increase visibility across your network environments: on-premise, SDN, public clouds, hybrid and multi-cloud
Most of the infrastructures are hidden, when crossing into the public cloud domain, such as storage, compute and network. This often causes restrictions when it comes to visibility tools and procedures. But AlgoSec’s firewall policy management tools make it a lot easier to manage and implement standard workload performance by understanding the topology to discover network flows.
Understanding the impact of network flows
Firewall policy management tools allow you to track and monitor the flow of applications and important services over all areas of the network and provide key insights into network bandwidth usage. This can also work out historical trends for proactively identifying security issues and capacity planning. An effective monitoring of network flows provides you confidence knowing that your network is secure.
Managing firewall policies across multi-cloud and hybrid environments
When it comes to multi-cloud and hybrid environments, network administrators need to recognize which network flows and security controls affects application connectivity as well as cloud-specific security controls including virtual and physical firewalls that protect cloud resources.
Extending the lifespan of hardware
Cluttered firewall policies and misconfigurations affect the firewall performance, forcing organizations to invest in costly hardware upgrades to counteract the degradation in performance. Optimize and clean up cluttered policies with actionable recommendations. Consolidate similar rules, discover and remove unused rules and objects, as well as shadowed, duplicate and expired rules - effectively increase existing hardware lifespan.
Maintaining security cloud compliance posture
It is essential to manage firewall policies that maintain security cloud compliance posture and establish uniform firewall policy across complex clouds and hybrid environments.
Handling multiple cloud-management portals
Managing various cloud security management consoles, each with its own unique language and GUI, can be a great hassle. With AlgoSec, handling multi-cloud platforms has become a lot easier, providing users with complete control over their cloud services using a single, unified console.
Enforcing cloud network security policy consistently
Consistency is the crucial design principle behind cloud security solutions. Imposing the cloud network security policy consistently is the defining assumption for an effective firewall policy management platform.
Firewall Policy Management Tips
Find unused rules
Enabling unused rules to be included in a policy goes against the central principle and may pose a risk to the organization. The AlgoSec firewall management solution makes it easy to find and identify unused rules within your firewall policy.
Locate hidden rules
Locating hidden rules represent a remarkable opportunity to clean up or manage a firewall policy because it can improve both the performance of the firewall and the implementation of the firewall administrators accountable for managing the firewall policy.
Policy search
Firewall policy search is based on the source and destination interfaces. The matching security policy will indicate which actions to apply to the network traffic which includes logging and security scanning.
Security analysis
Analyze security by analyzing firewall policies, firewall rules, firewall traffic logs and firewall change configurations. Detailed analysis of the security logs offers critical network vital intelligence about security breaches and attempted attacks like virus, trojans, and denial of service among others.
Risk analysis
A potential breach in security is made for every access request that is granted. The perfect way to prevent unauthorized access is to identify and analyze risk areas that are vulnerable. The integrated risk analysis provides real time information on vulnerabilities and risks to the network associated to your change configurations and security infrastructure.
Access path analysis
Identify and evaluate the implications of each available access path across the whole infrastructure to make sure proper implementation and asset protection. You can trace the path within the network to locate impacted device.
Service risk analysis
A comprehensive service risk analysis is essential to tackle security gaps proactively instead of waiting for a security threat to take place before responding to it.
Traffic flow analysis
With traffic flow analysis, you can monitor traffic within a specific firewall rule. You do not need to allow all traffic to traverse in all directions but instead, you can monitor it through the pragmatic behaviors on the network and enable network firewall administrators to recognize which firewall rules they can create and implement to allow only the necessary access.
Change detection reporting
Monitor firewall change configurations in the set of firewall rules including resets to the current firewall settings.
Rule re-certification
Instead of using manual firewall rule recertification, this app-centric approach to firewall recertification brings in a newer, more efficient and automated way of recertifying firewall rules.
Rule review
Ensure that the firewall rule set and configuration are in line with the business and the organization’s firewall compliance requirements.
Whitelist
Allow access to authorized users, sites or networks.