Continuous compliance and automated policy management

The challenge

After a failed audit, the company realised that their current approach to managing firewall security policies was not enough. The company lacked the visibility, automation and reporting capabilities necessary to detect and clean up redundant and non-compliant rules, leading to PCI and NIST compliance uncertainty as well as an overworked team.

The company sought to:

• Move on from using Microsoft Excel spreadsheets to prepare audit reports manually
• Achieve and maintain PCI and NIST compliance
• Gain a single, comprehensive view of policy across their multi-vendor environment
• Automate change management processes, clean up rule bases and improve reporting
• Eliminate error-prone and time-consuming manual processes
• Integrate with an ITSM solution to work with and track tickets

The solution

FireMon’s combination of compliance and change management tools delivered a comprehensive solution with real-time visibility, control and management capabilities for all network security devices across the company’s multi-vendor environment.

• Consolidated compliance management for Palo Alto and Check Point firewalls
• Out-of-the-box and customisable compliance assessments, automated rule documentation and reporting, as well as workflows for rule review and recertification
• Complete policy lifecycle management with audit trail tracking and automatic workflows to review existing rules regularly
• FireMon’s integration with ServiceNow provided context-aware change automation

Results

• 100% PCI and NIST compliance
• 100% visibility and control of their Palo Alto and Check Point firewalls
• 83% total time reduction for compliance tasks with automated compliance reporting
• Reduced risk by removing redundant, overlapping or unused rules
• Eliminated error-prone and time-consuming manual processes for rule set up and compliance reporting