In today's environment of multi-vendor hardware and software products, managing enterprise networks is a difficult task. This is especially true of managing firewalls, an organisation's only defence against hacking, Internet fraud and electronic intrusion.
Typically, an enterprise network is made up of a large number of firewalls, supervised by various administrators across multiple locations. With changes constantly being made throughout these complex environments in order to meet business and security requirements, the margin for error is high. Security administrators rely on a variety of administrative tools to implement configuration changes, often with limited analysis and reporting capabilities. This impacts on an organisation's ability to effectively manage its firewall environment.
According to Adrian Anema, Business Development Manager - Security, Blue Turtle Technologies, firewall administration mainly takes the form of repetitive, manual tasks that are susceptible to errors.
“Managing firewalls is a difficult task. Security administrators have to accurately document firewall rule base changes while ensuring that they comply with corporate security policy and regulatory requirements,” says Anema.
“What is needed is a solution that effectively brings the management process together in a streamlined and automated way, providing complete visibility to firewall operations. Ideally what is needed for success is a business automation and management solution that assists security administrators in effectively aligning day-to-day operations with business objectives. This solution should offer real-time alerts on all security changes and granular reporting.”
The benefits of effective management of firewalls are far-reaching and include the reduction of these manual tasks, and thus mistakes, optimised performance and use of infrastructure, compliance with corporate, regulatory and industry standards, as well as enforcement of vendor best practices and improved risk management.
Blue Turtle Technologies is a local distributor of Tufin SecureTrack, a leading firewall operations management solution that enables organisations to enhance security, reduce service outages and automate day-to-day tasks. SecureTrack, a Tufin Technologies product, features change management; security policy optimisation and cleanup; risk analysis and business continuity; firewall OS monitoring; cross-platform visual monitoring; and auditing and regulatory compliance.
SecureTrack analyses changes that are made and sends several types of real-time notifications, such as detailed e-mail reports, syslog messages and SNMP traps. SecureTrack's policy change reports provide real-time configuration and change management, and integrate with external security management frameworks.
“A solution such as SecureTrack is ideal in that it is automated and assists in auditing firewall logs to ensure that changes are correctly configured and security breaches are identified. The Tufin solution offers seamless operation and can be applied to environments with Fortinet, Check Point, Cisco, and Juniper firewalls,” concludes Anema.
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