Making changes to firewall policies can be difficult and time-consuming. FireMon® Security Manager's Policy Planner can reduce the effort required to make firewall changes while ensuring that the right changes are made.

Policy Planner is a web-based system for collecting firewall change tickets, recommending rule changes, and allowing for audit validation. Policy Planner enables IT security organizations to gain significant efficiency by automating the change process and giving firewall administrators tools to make accurate and compliant rulebase changes.

Rule Recommendation

Security Manager's Rule Recommendation analyzes the current behavior of the rule set and can instantaneously determine the necessary change. Common scenarios that Rule Recommendation can assist with are:

• No Change Necessary – Often, the firewall's standard policy allows for the necessary business services, but standard processes include submitting requirements to the security team. When the access already exists, Security Manager can help abbreviate the change process by identifying that no change is required prior to any engineering effort.
• Similar Access Exists – New rules can be the knee-jerk reaction to any new request. That can lead to a surplus of rules which can increase the complexity of the policy. Rule Recommendation finds rules that allow similar access to the new request so small modifications can be made.

Change Ticket Audit and Verification

Firewall change requests can be difficult things to audit and validate. In most organizations, the change control data is locked in a workflow system without reference to the implementation.

Using Policy Planner, managers and auditors can, in a single report, validate that the requested access was appropriately engineered, approved by security, and implemented as approved.

Once verified, change ticket information from Policy Planner flows back into Security Manager and is tagged to the rule that was modified, creating a full lifecycle of rule history.