Firewall Rule Recertification - An Application-Centric Approach

Asher Benbenisty
Director of Product Marketing

As part of your organization’s security policy management best practices, firewall rules must be reviewed and recertified regularly to ensure security, compliance and optimal firewall performance. Firewall rules which are out of date, unused or unnecessary should be removed, as firewall bloat creates gaps in your security posture, causes compliance violations, and impacts firewall performance.
Manual firewall rule recertification, however, is an error-prone and time-consuming process.

Please join our webinar by Asher Benbenisty, AlgoSec’s Director of Product Marketing, who will introduce an application-centric approach to firewall recertification, bringing a new, efficient, effective and automated method of recertifying firewall rules.

The webinar will:

Want to find out more about the importance of ruleset hygiene?
Watch this webinar today!

Relevant Resources
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An Application-Centric Approach to Firewall Rule Recertification: Challenges and Benefits

As part of your organization’s security policy management best practices, firewall rules need to be reviewed and recertified regularly to ensure security, compliance and optimal firewall performance. Firewall rules which are out of date, unused or unnecessary should be removed, as firewall bloat creates gaps in your security posture, causes compliance violations, and impacts firewall performance. In the past, firewall rule recertification was often performed manually; an error-prone and time-consuming process. The new application-centric approach to firewall recertification offers an efficient, effective and automated method of recertifying firewall rules.

firewall Rule re certification

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.

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.

Firewall analyzer

AlgoSec Firewall Analyzer - Complete Network Visibility for Your Network Security Policy Management

AlgoSec Firewall 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 Firewall Analyzer, security and operations teams can optimize the configuration of firewalls, routers, web proxies, and related network infrastructure to ensure security and compliance. With the AlgoSec AppViz add-on, all business applications are discovered, identified, and mapped, providing critical security information regarding the firewalls and firewall rules supporting each connectivity flow.

Provide Complete Visibility into Your Hybrid Network

AlgoSec Firewall Analyzer lets you:
  • Visualize complex networks with a dynamic network topology map
  • Automatically discover applications and services
  • Map, clean up, and optimize applications and firewall rulesets
  • Identify and Mitigate risks and associate them to business applications
  • Define and enforce network segmentation
  • Reduce firewall auditing time and costs by up to 80% with automated compliance reports

Instantly Visualize Your Network Security Policy

Firewall Analyzer automatically pulls information from a wide range of devices to generate an interactive network topology map of the entire heterogeneous network. Through this map you can understand the impact of network security policies on traffic, quickly troubleshoot connectivity issues, plan changes and perform “what-if” traffic queries. Visualization of network Security Policy

Automatically Discover Applications and Services

AlgoSec AutoDiscovery is an innovative technology that automatically identifies all your enterprise applications and services and their connectivity flows, and quickly generates an up-to- date connectivity map of your applications — without requiring any prior knowledge or manual configuration by your security, networking or applications experts. It provides full visibility of your network security environment, including firewalls and the firewall rules that determine network traffic.

Map, Clean Up, and Optimize Applications and their Associated Firewall Rulesets

Firewall rules support applications or processes that require network connectivity to and from specific servers, users and networks. Firewall Analyzer with AppViz automatically associates the relevant business applications that each firewall rule supports, enabling you to review the firewall rules quickly and easily. Firewall Analyzer then provides a wide range of actionable recommendations to help you clean up and optimize the security policy. With AppViz, you can tie firewall rule sets to the applications that connect to it, cleaning up rules that connect to unused or decommissioned applications. Firewall Analyzer can uncover unused, duplicate, overlapping or expired rules, consolidate and reorder rules, and tighten overly permissive “ANY” rules, without impacting business requirements.

Identify and Mitigate Risky Firewall Rules and Discover and Associate Vulnerabilities to Business Applications

Prioritize your risk based on what your business values most — the applications that power it. Firewall Analyzer discovers and prioritizes all risks and their associated rules and associated applications in your network security policy. Firewall Analyzer relies upon the broadest risk knowledge base, which includes industry regulations and best practices, as well as customized corporate policies, to ensure that all risks are uncovered. Automatically integrate and map vulnerabilities from the leading vulnerability scanners to their business applications and associated firewall rules — including servers and complex connectivity flows. This way, you know exactly which applications and which firewall rules introduce risk.

Easily Define and Enforce Network Segmentation

Firewall Analyzer makes it easy to define and enforce network segmentation throughout your network and across all leading firewall platforms. With Firewall Analyzer you can quickly confirm that your existing network security policy does not violate your network segmentation strategy or block critical business services, and meets compliance requirements.

Prepare for Your Next Audit in Hours, Not Weeks

Firewall Analyzer automatically generates pre-populated, audit-ready compliance reports for all leading industry regulations, including PCI DSS, HIPAA, SOX, NERC, FISMA, and ISO, as well as custom corporate policies, to reduce audit preparation efforts and costs by as much as 80%. About AlgoSec The leading provider of business-driven security management solutions, AlgoSec helps the world’s largest organizations align security with their business processes. With AlgoSec, users can discover, map and migrate business application connectivity, proactively analyze risk from the business perspective, tie cyber-attacks to business processes and intelligently automate network security changes with zero touch - across their cloud, SDN and on-premise networks. Over 1,800 enterprises, including 20 of the Fortune 50, have utilized AlgoSec’s solutions to make their organizations more agile, more secure and more compliant - all the time. Since its inception, AlgoSec has provided the industry’s only money-back guarantee.