Case Study

A Path to Less Manual Work and More Consistent Firewall Policy

A global telecommunications company operates a complex network environment spanning on-premises firewalls and cloud infrastructure.

The Results

140+

Palo Alto Firewalls Managed Across the Environment

15-20

Firewall Change Requests Handled Daily

From Weeks

To Days To Implement Changes with FireMon

The Challenge

Organisational growth left the company with inherited firewall rules that were difficult to maintain, along with limited visibility into unused, redundant, shadowed and overly permissive access. The security team relied on manual reviews, with daily change requests taking days to implement. The team needed consistent policy standards and better context for evaluating changes.

The company set out to:

Gain centralised visibility into firewall rules and the access they permit.
Identify unnecessary access and standardise inherited policies against internal and vendor best practice.
Assess proposed changes for risk and existing rule coverage before approval.
Improve audit readiness and reduce manual effort in rule reviews and change workflows.

The Solution

The company selected FireMon following a proof of concept that demonstrated its core policy management use cases and accessible reporting. The initiative prioritises visibility, rule clean-up and policy standardisation, with workflow integration planned to support longer-term change governance.

FireMon Delivered

Security Manager provides centralised policy visibility, change tracking and configuration history to support reviews and audit evidence.
Policy Optimizer supports rule review and recertification, so teams can evaluate and retire unnecessary access.
Policy Planner supports standardised approval workflows and pre-change risk and compliance checks.
Rule analysis helps identify redundant, shadowed, unused and overly permissive rules for remediation.
Planned IT service management workflow integration would connect requests with contextual reviews, approvals and documented changes.

Results

Reduced unnecessary access through consistent review and removal of risky or obsolete rules.
Clearer visibility into the existing rule base to guide clean-up and policy standardisation.
Less manual effort and fewer avoidable errors through standardised change reviews.
Stronger audit readiness through policy reporting and documented change history.
A repeatable approach to policy governance as the environment expands.

“FireMon has given us a clearer view of our firewall policies and helped us focus our clean-up efforts. Our team has better context when reviewing changes, making it easier to apply consistent standards and make confident decisions about access.”

[Head of Security Architecture and Engineering], managing the selection and deployment of FireMon