Case Study

Centralized Visibility and Compliance Across a Fleet at Sea

A global cruise operator offering leisure travel and onboard hospitality.

The Results

30%

Less Time Spent Preparing Compliance Reports and Audit Evidence

160

Firewalls in Scope for Centralized Policy Visibility

20%

Less Manual Effort for Firewall Change Reviews and Approvals

The Challenge

Manual compliance reporting, limited change visibility, and legacy firewall rules made maintaining consistent security policies difficult across the company’s distributed environment’s at sea. Satellite connectivity required ships to manage their firewalls independently, leaving the network team without centralized oversight of policy changes, compliance, and risk.

As the fleet expanded, time-consuming audits, rule reviews, and manual change requests placed increasing demands on engineering resources.

The company sought to:

Gain a single, comprehensive view of firewall policies across maritime and shoreside environments.
Automate reporting for payment card industry (PCI) requirements and internal compliance standards.
Track who changed firewall policies, when, and where.
Identify unused, redundant, shadowed, and overly permissive rules.
Streamline firewall change requests and approvals without changing the existing distributed architecture.

The Solution

The company selected FireMon Security Manager, Policy Optimizer, and Policy Planner to bring centralized policy governance to its distributed Palo Alto firewall environment. The key requirement was architectural: provide consistent visibility, compliance reporting, and change oversight while allowing each ship to continue managing its firewalls independently.

FireMon Delivered

Centralized policy visibility and detailed firewall change tracking.
Automated compliance assessments and customizable audit reporting.
Policy analysis to identify unnecessary and overly permissive access.
Structured workflows for rule reviews, change requests, and approvals.
Access path analysis to validate connectivity and help avoid unnecessary firewall changes.

Results

Reduced time spent preparing audit evidence and compiling compliance reports.
Improved visibility and accountability across independently managed firewalls.
Accelerated rule reviews and cleanup to support stronger security policies.
Reduced manual effort in firewall change management.
Established consistent policy governance to support additional ships and firewall coverage.

“Our ships need to manage their firewalls independently, but we still need a consistent view of policy across the fleet. With FireMon, we can see what changed, focus our rule reviews, and spend less time pulling information together for audits.”

[Network Engineering Leader] managing the selection and deployment of FireMon