Visibility & Compliance Automation for Global Satellite Communications Provider

The Challenge

This global satellite and wireless communications provider had grown significantly through organic expansion and acquisition, including a major subsidiary integration that effectively doubled the complexity of its network security environment. The result was a fragmented, multi-vendor firewall estate spanning the US and UK with no unified management platform and no scalable way to handle the volume of changes, compliance requirements, or audit demands the combined organization now faced.

The company sought to:

• Gain unified visibility across 900 firewalls spanning Fortinet, Palo Alto, Juniper, AWS, and GCP to enable consistent policy management at scale.
• Automate the 200+ monthly firewall changes burdening an already stretched team with manual processing and error risk.
• Clean up policy bloat inherited from two legacy environments, unused rules, any/any rules, and unknown risk exposure accumulated over years.
• Close compliance gaps across CMMC and internal standards with automated adherence checks, audit reporting, and pre-change risk flagging.

The Solution

The organization selected FireMon for its ability to answer every technical requirement surfaced during the POC, including native multi-vendor support across Fortinet, Palo Alto, Juniper, AWS, and GCP, and for the depth of its out-of-the-box and customizable compliance reporting. Competitors were considered but could not match FireMon’s unified platform breadth or its responsiveness to the organization’s specific use case requirements.

• Centralized visibility across all 900 firewalls in a single platform — with real-time change detection across every vendor, region, and management station.
• Intelligent change automation integrated with the organization’s existing ITSM platform, enabling firewall changes to be designed, validated, implemented, and logged without manual handoffs.
• Rule recertification workflows to systematically identify and eliminate unused rules, any/any rules, and high-risk policy configurations.
• Pre-change compliance assessment to flag policy violations before implementation, not after.
• Unified visibility across the US and UK environments, enabling both teams to operate from the same platform and providing leadership with enterprise-wide security posture reporting.

Results

• 40% reduction in unused rules and any/any rules, directly reducing the organization’s exposure to unknown risk and legacy policy bloat.
• Up to 60% of firewall changes automated.
• Real-time change detection across all centralized firewalls, enabling immediate review of any unauthorized or high-risk configuration changes.
• A single platform for visibility, compliance, risk management, and change automation.
• A scalable foundation for global expansion, with deployment to the 900-firewall estate across both the US and UK.