Save time and resources while eliminating the risks caused by misconfigurations

Good policy hygiene relegates access to only what is necessary to meet the needs of the business: nothing more and nothing less. As discussed in a recent blog, poor policy hygiene creates vulnerable paths the bad actors can use to gain access. Centralizing your change management across all of your resources is key to preventing misconfigurations that can lead to costly breaches and outages. In this blog, we will discuss how FireMon meets these needs.

FireMon centralizes all of your security policy enforcement data into a single pane, a rule repository, and allows you to manage policies across all of your devices from ground to cloud. It integrates seamlessly with 100s of vendors, including Splunk, AWS, Swimlane, and Qualys, to consolidate policy management and visibility. With FireMon, you have one place to investigate a policy, which drastically increases the efficiency of your team.

When changes are made to your policy environment you should immediately ask, “Did I expect this change? Did I analyze the change for impact: security posture, compliance posture, business operations? Are we granting only what is necessary to meet the needs of the business?” Typically, access that’s granted is greater than what is necessary, which gives way to overly permissive rules. It is imperative these policies are managed to maintain a strong security posture. With FireMon’s change management workflow capabilities, you learn the full implications of every policy change prior to implementation and proactive “what-if” impact analysis recommendations prevent disruptions in service and security to keep your network running smoothly.

FireMon Change Management Key Features

Real-Time Change Monitoring

Real-time change monitoring is crucial to stay ahead of problems before they start. FireMon monitors policy changes across the entire environment, on any device: on premises or in the cloud. If a policy is changed, you’ll know about it—and our custom alerts mean you’ll find out about it in the way you want.

Efficient Change Workflows

Our workflows take the complicated, messy, and time-consuming processes of new rule creation and changes to existing policies then streamlines them both. FireMon evaluates each request for its impact across the environment. It identifies all the firewalls and other devices in its path to create a recommendation for how the rule should be created, what objects can be reused, and how to enforce it. All this is performed through a workflow process that dramatically reduces the time it takes to deploy rules and do it accurately.

Policy Change Automation

FireMon can fully automate the deployment of a policy change with our automation tools. Once a rule is ready to go, the changes can be made manually or the FireMon platform can deploy them automatically to the affected devices immediately or schedule them during approved change windows. Once sent, the changes can be fully implemented in a matter of minutes.

Additional features include:

Change Detection & Reporting

Isolate, document and, when necessary, alert on every ongoing change implemented throughout your existing firewall policies.

Change Comparison Views

Review every proposed rule change against your existing firewall policies to ensure consistency and prevent redundancy.

Text-Comparison

Evaluate every proposed text edit against your existing firewall policies to ensure consistency and prevent redundancy.

What-If Analysis

Perform proactive what-if impact analysis of any proposed changes to your existing firewall policies, prior to implementation.

Revision History

Create detailed documentation of all changes to your existing firewall policies to track, search and understand revisions.

Rule History

Aggregate detailed documentation of all rules applied within your existing firewall policies to maintain a comprehensive repository.

Rule Recommendations

Leverage full visibility across all of your existing firewall policies to inform ongoing change and ensure effective implementation.

Systems Integration

Utilize standards-based (BPMN 2.0) integration with your existing firewall policy workflow (e.g. ticketing) management processes.

Change Process Workflow

Employ fully customizable workflow process automation for all ongoing changes made to your existing firewall policies.

Change Auditing

Audit every change made to your existing firewall policies with full search and historical event logs.

Changing firewall rules and security policies isn’t a glamorous task, but the consequences of getting it wrong can be quite severe. FireMon is designed to make change management simple, accurate, and timely.