Taking Control of Network Security Policy

In this guest blog, Jeff Yager from IT Central Station describes how AlgoSec is perceived by real users and shares how the solution meets their expectations for visibility and monitoring.

Business-driven visibility

A network and security engineer at a comms service provider agreed, saying, “The complete and end-to-end visibility and analysis [AlgoSec] provides of the policy rule base is invaluable and saves countless time and effort.” On a related front, according to Srdjan, a senior technical and integration designer at a major retailer, AlgoSec provides a much easier way to process first call resolutions (FCRs) and get visibility into traffic. He said, “With previous vendors, we had to guess what was going on with our traffic and we were not able to act accordingly. Now, we have all sorts of analyses and reports. This makes our decision process, firewall cleanup, and troubleshooting much easier.”

Organizations large and small find it imperative to align security with their business processes. AlgoSec provides unified visibility of security across public clouds, software-defined and on-premises networks, including business applications and their connectivity flows. For Mark G., an IT security manager at a sports company, the solution handles rule-based analysis. He said, “AlgoSec provides great unified visibility into all policy packages in one place. We are tracking insecure changes and getting better visibility into network security environment – either on-prem, cloud or mixed.”

Notifications are what stood out to Mustafa K., a network security engineer at a financial services firm. He is now easily able to track changes in policies with AlgoSec, noting that “with every change, it automatically sends an email to the IT audit team and increases our visibility of changes in every policy.”

Security policy and network analysis

AlgoSec’s Firewall Analyzer delivers visibility and analysis of security policies, and enables users to discover, identify, and map business applications across their entire hybrid network by instantly visualizing the entire security topology – in the cloud, on-premises, and everything in between. “It is definitely helpful to see the details of duplicate rules on the firewall,” said Shubham S., a senior technical consultant at a tech services company. He gets a lot of visibility from Firewall Analyzer. As he explained, “It can define the connectivity and routing. The solution provides us with full visibility into the risk involved in firewall change requests.”

A user at a retailer with more than 500 firewalls required automation and reported that “this was the best product in terms of the flexibility and visibility that we needed to manage [the firewalls] across different regions. We can modify policy according to our maintenance schedule and time zones.” A network & collaboration engineer at a financial services firm likewise added that “we now have more visibility into our firewall and security environment using a single pane of glass. We have a better audit of what our network and security engineers are doing on each device and are now able to see how much we are compliant with our baseline.”

Arieh S., a director of information security operations at a multinational manufacturing company, also used Tufin, but prefers AlgoSec, which “provides us better visibility for high-risk firewall rules and ease of use.”

“If you are looking for a tool that will provide you clear visibility into all the changes in your network and help people prepare well with compliance, then AlgoSec is the tool for you,” stated Miracle C., a security analyst at a security firm. He added, “Don’t think twice; AlgoSec is the tool for any company that wants clear analysis into their network and policy management.”

Monitoring and alerts

Other IT Central Station members enjoy AlgoSec’s monitoring and alerts features. Sulochana E., a senior systems engineer at an IT firm, said, “[AlgoSec] provides real-time monitoring, or at least close to real time. I think that is important. I also like its way of organizing. It is pretty clear. I also like their reporting structure – the way we can use AlgoSec to clear a rule base, like covering and hiding rules.”

For example, if one of his customers is concerned about different standards, like ISO or PZI levels, they can all do the same compliance from AlgoSec. He added, “We can even track the change monitoring and mitigate their risks with it. You can customize the workflows based on their environment. I find those features interesting in AlgoSec.”

AlgoSec helps in terms of firewall monitoring. That was the use case that mattered for Alberto S., a senior networking engineer at a manufacturing company. He said, “Automatic alerts are sent to the security team so we can react quicker in case something goes wrong or a threat is detected going through the firewall. This is made possible using the simple reports.”

Sulochana E. concluded by adding that “AlgoSec has helped to simplify the job of security engineers because you can always monitor your risks and know that your particular configurations are up-to-date, so it reduces the effort of the security engineers.”

To learn more about what IT Central Station members think about AlgoSec, visit our reviews page.

To schedule your personal AlgoSec demo or speak to an AlgoSec security expert, click here.