Firewalls are foundational for network security but present significant challenges, particularly as networks become more complex and distributed. Modern firewalls now offer features beyond basic traffic filtering, such as intrusion detection, deep packet inspection, and application-level control. While these added features increase security, they also make firewalls more complex to configure, monitor, and manage.
Despite being used for decades, manual firewall management still plagues network and security teams. Firewalls are complex, time-consuming, and require significant resources to properly maintain.
Organizations are turning to centralized management systems and tools to simplify firewall management. These tools streamline tasks like rule optimization, logging, change management, and compliance reporting, but the complexities remain.
- Firewall installation is a big task. To provide secure access, firewalls must be installed properly, configuring rules and parameters that control network traffic and ensure only legitimate traffic is allowed through.
- Teams must continually run compliance assessments to review rules and configurations that identify firewall vulnerabilities or weaknesses and ensure they meet security and compliance policy requirements. These assessments also help optimize the rules to maximize their effectiveness.
- A never-ending list of rule changes requires an (often tedious) firewall change management process. Changes are not only frequent, but they require vetting, to ensure that new vulnerabilities are not going to be introduced. Keeping on top of these changes is critical to staying secure, but it requires significant time and many steps.
Managing firewalls manually not only takes significant time and resources but leaves a lot of room for errors. Introducing firewall automation into your organization helps reduce the manual workload, minimizing error and risk.
Using firewall automation
Automation offers a golden ticket to manage these complexities. Firewall automation makes sense for routine workflows like rule creation, change verification, recertification, and de-provisioning. Automation is powerful and, when done correctly, will greatly improve efficiencies, reduce costs, and improve security. Let’s examine an example.
A large financial services organization was trying to manage its vast global network. With several thousand branches spread all over Europe and millions of customers, its firewalls were critical to keeping its data secure. Although they already had several partners in place for staff augmentation and to help fill technical gaps, they still struggled to keep up.
They needed a solution that would:
- Give a better understanding of their security risks
- Identify and remediate vulnerabilities across the network
- Continuously review their firewall rules to confirm the perimeter is secure
- Speed up tedious change management process to reduce manual intervention on firewall rule changes
- Integrate with their ITSM ticketing system for a more seamless process
The solution: firewall policy automation
They worked with Skybox and did a complete audit of business-critical IT infrastructure. This allowed the organization greater visibility to manage operational risks more effectively. With Skybox Change Manager, they have a complete firewall change management process to automate large, complex single changes—some consisting of nearly 100 lines and over a dozen approval steps. They’ve streamlined processes which has led to significant improvements in efficiency and security and allowed their resources to focus on other priorities.
In the first three months of initial automation, the customer completed over 450 changes, saving an average of 5.5 man-hours each. Between groups, that adds up to nearly 180 working days saved in just one quarter! Not only are these processes now less error-prone, but over a year, this organization will save an estimated $500k in reduced third-party and labor expenses.
Skybox’s Change Manager solution, as part of the Security Policy Management suite, enables organizations to automate redundant, manual workflows to save time and reduce risk.
