Security Needs Management

I am in London this week, attending the InfoSec Europe show. Being on the show floor, I have had the opportunity to speak with a number of people from a wide range of companies. Irrespective of title or industry there is one constant: security needs management. In each of these conversations, as we share what solutions FireMon provides, the responses vary, but the sentiment is the same: FireMon is something we need.

A very good example of this was a conversation I had with a services company about their pain points. Managing over 500 firewalls, they know there are significant issues that need to be addressed. In their words: With such a complex environment, we know there are issues that we need identify and remediate. We believe we could consolidate our security infrastructure by up to 40% if only we knew what each firewall is truly doing.

There are a lot of capabilities in the FireMon solution, but one of the core building blocks of the system is its analysis capabilities to provide visibility into firewall behavior. To Identify technical issues, like ineffective rules or functional issues and rules that are unused. Firemon’s ability to analyze traffic behavior through the firewall to understand how it is being used. Finally our ability to perform all functions of policy analysis from basic behavior searching to complex virtual testing. These are the tools necessary to shine a light on firewall configuration, to understand how it behaves and how it can be improved.

The specific needs vary from customer to customer, but the general message is consistent: security needs management.