Firewall policy management: Automate firewall rule changes

Every enterprise network needs to have effective firewall management tools to make sure the entire IT infrastructure is secured against unauthorized and potentially harmful traffic from outside the network. Improve your firewall policy management with tested and proven firewall policy management tools and mitigate network issues with an effective firewall management software.

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.

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.