Automate firewall management and compliance

This global sportswear brand needed an automated system for managing their firewall security policies, maintaining compliance, and ensuring they remained “audit-ready”. When it became clear that other solutions were too inflexible to meet their specific requirements, they chose Skybox Security Policy Management to help them raise their game. This household name is one of the largest sportswear manufacturers in Europe, with a mission to be the best sports brand in the world and a passion for using the power of sport to changes people’s lives for the good.

Ensure firewall access and rule compliance

With nearly 60,000 employees worldwide and a presence across Europe, the US, and Far East, the company’s infrastructure is underpinned by over 1,000 firewalls spanning a complex hybrid network. With such a large firewall estate, ensuring the firewall rule bases are correctly configured to meet the needs of the organization’s security and compliance policies and for optimum performance, is a major undertaking.

The company’s existing firewall management solution was not able to keep pace with their needs. It did not deliver the level of visibility of risk profile and criticality that was needed. It struggled to keep pace with new features from the major firewall vendors and above all, it was difficult to customize beyond the basic out-of-the-box features. So, the company decided to select a new firewall solution.

Optimize performance

The company chose Skybox Security’s Firewall Assurance and Change Manager to help them to implement procedures to manage firewall access, optimize performance and meet their compliance obligations.

Using Firewall Assurance the company can analyze firewall rule sets, platform configurations, and usage information for compliance reporting. They can perform rule-base optimization checks, policy and rule re-certification, and use this information to trigger change workflow processes.

Using Change Manager, the company can orchestrate and automate network and firewall change management processes, build workflows that automate the provisioning, deprovisioning, recertification, and normalization of application connectivity and firewall rules to enable connectivity.

Create automated workflows

Using these Skybox products, the company can analyze and optimize firewall rule bases, make improvements, assess risk and manage compliance.

The system supports a comprehensive set of workflows developed by the company in conjunction with their chosen implementation partner, for making firewall changes. The workflows enable them to submit requests, get them approved and get them implemented.

“Most importantly, we now have a firewall management and compliance solution that works the way we want,” according to the global sportswear brand.

The final stage of the implementation is the integration of Skybox’s Change Manager with the company’s chosen ITSM solution. With this in place, the company’s firewall management workflows will be fully automated ensuring they have a fully formed compliance solution that will keep them continually audit-ready.