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    • Firewall Policy Challenges

    As a firewall admin, the challenges associated with firewall rules, firewall compliances, firewall policies and firewall changes secure your business networks and systems are not centered only around the firewall technology itself, but also on how the firewall configuration is integrated with your business security policies.

    With the growing number of applications and devices, network ecosystems have become so complicated that a simple oversight on a precarious firewall may render the entire network offline and endanger the security of the business to various forms of cyber-attacks.

    Poorly implemented firewall policy management solutions can result in substantial business risks and often by the time it is revealed, the damage has already been done; take for example:

    • Redundant firewall rules that result in illegal network access and cyber-attacks
    • Differences in firewall compliances that are part of government and industry regulations
    • Inappropriate firewall rule modifications that interrupt business applications

    When it comes to firewall change management, simple oversights and blunders can cause problems that will expose the network to security risks.

    Additionally, the complexity of today’s networks, devices, applications and the tasks performed within the management solution, require a strong firewall policy management solution in place.

    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

    Whitepaper

    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, development of new and de-commissioning of old applications, new users, micro-segmentation, cloud migrations and more make for a dynamic environment that poses new security challenges all the time.

    Whiteboard Video

    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.

    Blog Post

    Are Firewalls Still Relevant to Security?

    “The firewall is dead”, “Data is the new perimeter”, “Cloud will make the firewall obsolete” – these are just some of the quotes you hear now and again within the information security community…

    Whitepaper

    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, development of new and de-commissioning of old applications, new users, micro-segmentation, cloud migrations and more make for a dynamic environment that poses new security challenges all the time.

    Whitepaper

    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 techniques on how to mitigate them.

    Webinar

    Firewalls Ablaze? Put Out Network Security Audit & Compliance Fires

    Blog Post

    Five Common Firewall Configuration Mistakes – and How to Avoid Them

    As security threats become more and more advanced, configuring your firewall correctly has never been more important. While many IT professionals spend much of their time worrying about new and emerging firewall vulnerabilities, yet according to Gartner research…

    Whiteboard Video

    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.

    Webinar

    How to Take the Fire Drill out of Making Firewall Changes

    Blog Post

    How a Little ‘n’ can Threaten Your Entire Business

    According Gartner, through 2020, 99% of firewall breaches will be caused by firewall misconfigurations, not firewall flaws. And IBM Security Services’ 2014 Cyber Security Intelligence Index, reported that misconfigurations are the most commonly recorded form of human error…

    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    Change detection reporting

    Monitor firewall change configurations in the set of firewall rules including resets to the current firewall settings.

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    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.

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    Rule review

    Ensure that the firewall rule set and configuration are in line with the business and the organization’s firewall compliance requirements.

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    Whitelist

    Allow access to authorized users, sites or networks.