As organizations continue to expand their digital footprints, it’s essential to secure their infrastructure to avoid the exposure of sensitive data and financial losses. While the firewall investment is a costly one, it is imperative that enterprises have a policy management tool to help maximize your security investments, manage compliance, manage policy related risk, and quickly and accurately make rule changes. That being said, accumulating the funds and convincing your team that your organization needs a solution that will provide ROI isn’t an easy task. This is why here at FireMon we’ve done the hard work for you and have outlined how to make these needs clear to your team to help accelerate the project through the approval process. We’ve seen this business justification approach help many organizations build the case to invest in an NSPM solution which we have outlined in this blog for our readers. 

Here are some steps to get you started: 

1. Identify the problem
   To build a strong business case for FireMon, you will need to identify the problems that you need solved. Start by looking at your organization’s current network security infrastructure. Are there any gaps in your security measures? Are there any redundancies or inefficiencies in your firewall management processes? Are you able to effectively monitor and control your firewalls? Are processes taking longer than they need to? Are you doing work that could be sped up by automation? These are some of the questions that can help you identify the problem.
2. Define the solution
   Once you’ve identified the problem, you need to define the solution. FireMon provides a centralized platform for firewall management, allowing organizations to gain complete visibility into their network security infrastructure. FireMon also provides advanced analytics and reporting tools that can help organizations identify and mitigate security risks quickly.
3. Outline the benefits
   After defining the solution, it’s important to outline the benefits of implementing FireMon, including: 
   1. Decrease Operational Costs: Our customers have experienced steep cost savings by automating the day-to-day management of their network security policies with FireMon, allowing valuable resources to focus on other important projects. Some statistics we’ve gathered from our customers to help your business case: 
      • $1.8M estimated operational savings a year 
      • 450% reduction in annual operational costs 
      • $450K reduction in staffing costs
   2. Reduce Time Spent on Manual Tasks: We enable customers to increase the time spent on strategic projects while simultaneously decreasing the time spent on manual reviews and updates. Our customers no longer spend thousands of hours on manual firewall changes, months to analyze and review their current rule base or weeks to prepare compliance reports. Our customers have also found: 
      • 90% reduction in managing day to day policies 
      • 97% reduced time to review and make a safe firewall rule change from 90 minutes to 3 minutes 
      • 75% decreased change process time with FireMon’s automation capabilities
   3. Reduce Security Related Risks: FireMon’s complete visibility offering into all on premises and cloud firewalls has vastly reduced security risks caused by misconfigurations, leak paths, and human error. Our single pane of glass approach allows our customers to see all of their firewall rules, when changes are made and by whom, and scans for policy related vulnerabilities. FireMon customers have benefited from: 
      • $1.2M saved in prevention of future breaches
      • $500K estimated savings in case of a breach or downtime event
      • $400K saved for every hour a system is offline due to an attack
4. Calculate the ROI
   Once you’ve outlined the benefits of implementing FireMon, you’ll want to calculate the ROI. In order to determine the financial benefit implementing an NSPM solution like FireMon you will need to gather the following information:
   1. Calculating ROI for Audits & Compliance  
      • Number of firewalls in your environment 
      • Amount of time spent manually auditing each firewall 
      • Average weighted cost of staff responsible for manually auditing firewalls
        Once you’ve gathered this information, you can begin your ROI calculations by: 
      • Multiply the number of firewalls by the number of hours spent on each firewall 
      • Multiply the weighted cost of staff responsible for performing these manual tasks by the total number of hours spent working on each firewall
   2. Calculating ROI for Change Management 
      • Number of firewalls in your environment 
      • Number of changes on average made to each firewall over the course of a week/month 
      • Amount of time spent manually processing each firewall change 
      • Average weighted cost of staff responsible for performing tasks
        Once you’ve gathered this information, you can begin your ROI calculations by: 
      • Multiply the number of firewalls by the number of hours spent processing changes on each firewall 
      • Multiply the weighted cost of staff responsible for performing the audit by the total number of hours spent implementing changes on each firewall
   3. Calculating ROI for Risk Reduction
      While it is difficult to quantify in terms of ROI, a security incident like a breach can be extremely costly. With the average cost of a data breach in 2022 being 4.35M and an average breach cost savings of 2.10M at organizations that use risk quantification techniques versus those that don’t (IBM Security: Cost of a Data Breach Report, 2022), the cost savings your organization would accrue from implementing a risk reduction solution is a no-brainer. 
      • Annualized rate of risk occurrence  
      • Expected monetary loss for single event 
      • Reduction in probability of risk occurrence with the implemented control 
      • Cost of the risk reduction solution
        Once you’ve gathered this information, you can begin your ROI calculations by: 
      • Multiply your annualized rate of risk occurrence by expected monetary loss for a single event by reduction in probability of risk occurrence with the implemented control 
      • Subtract the number you gathered from step 5 by the cost of the risk reduction solution  
      • Divide the number gathered from step 6 by the cost of the risk reduction solution
        
        Here is a great example of how you can determine the ROI for Risk Reduction from The Center for Internet Security 
        1. Annualized rate of occurrence = 5 per year
        2. Expected monetary loss for a single vent $35,000 
        3. Reduction in probability of risk occurrence with implemented control = -85% 
        4. Cost of the risk reduction solution = $25,000 
           1. Reduction in risk: 5 x $35,000 x 0.85 = $148,750 
           2. ROI: ($148,750 – $25,000) / $25,000 = 4.95 
           3. Savings per year: $25,000 x 4.95 = $123,750
5. Present the business case
   Finally, it’s time to present the business case. When presenting the business case, be sure to focus on the benefits of implementing FireMon and how it can help address the identified problem. Use data and metrics to support your case, including the ROI calculations you’ve discovered in step 4.  

Hopefully with this information gathered and your business justification pitched, your team will clearly understand how they would benefit by investing in an NSPM solution like FireMon. If you are looking to build a business case with the help of an NSPM expert, contact FireMon for a complimentary call to help create your proposal and ROI analysis.