World Firewall Management Solutions Market
Frost & Sullivan, May 2009, Pages: 74
Regulatory Compliance and the Need for Efficient Corporate Governance
Due to the sensitive nature and potential ramification of information being lost, local, state, and federal governments have enacted legislation and regulations to protect computerized information. Examples of such regulations include the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX), the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), and the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS) requirements. These require local, state, and federal agencies and private organizations to establish security measures that protect information that is stored and exchanged electronically. These regulations ensure that information remains confidential between both parties and is free from alteration, and that it is accessible to parties that have legitimate access to the information. These measures have opened opportunities for all firewall management solution vendors to present a comprehensive solution that enables the IT department to be in compliance with the various regulatory standards. The firewall management solutions report on any security breach in general and on regulatory breaches in specific. Also, the management solution has the ability to create detailed reports verifying that the organization is meeting the standards and is compliant with the regulations.
Cost Reduction in Firewall Management
Firewalls are one of the basic security solutions that an organization implement in order to enforce a security policy on incoming and outgoing information traffic. The firewalls that protect the organization are made of rules that create a "Net" that blocks information threads that might harm the organization, while enabling other information threads to move in and out the information system of the organization. In time, the number of rules in the firewalls grow from dozens to several dozens, hundreds, and sometimes thousands. The IT department adds rules to block security breaches on one hand and adds or removes rules to enable business continuity on the other. This results in a large number of rules that are impossible to manage manually.
Firewall management solutions enable the IT staff to have complete control over the firewall rules and provide the tools to manage the firewall with maximum efficiency. IT staff use to manually look for security breaches, redundant rules, and rules that block business continuity. This resulted in major costs due to man hours needed to "clean up" the firewall, but with poor results as it is hardly impossible to clean a firewall that has hundreds of rules, in an efficient manner. The firewall management solutions that are in the market are a major cost saver for the IT department. This is due to the overall view that the solution gives to the IT staff on the firewall at all times, alerting on rules that create security breaches on the one hand and also suggesting removing rules that are redundant and might be adding performance costs. In addition, the ability to issue reports on demand is a major advantage in terms of cost reduction, as issuing a compliance or annual report is a costly process that requires time as well as professional expertise.
Minimizing Security Breaches due to Firewall Configurations
As one of the first lines of defense, the firewalls that protect the organization need to be configured as per the security policy that the organization wants to enforce, while enabling business continuity for the organization. The firewalls need to enforce up-to-date policies and regulations to prevent any security breach in the organizations.
As the regulations and policies change over time, there is a need to add or remove rules from the firewalls frequently and that results in a large number of rules in the firewall. There are many cases where old rules affect the outcome of new rules that are implemented and new rules that close one security gap while opening another.
Firewall management solutions come to solve this issue by giving an overview on all the firewalls and the rules inside them. This helps the IT personnel to manage and understand the flow of data elements in the firewall. In addition, the firewall management solutions prevent the IT personnel from placing a rule that will create a security breach, by simulating the outcome of that rule. The management solutions create a report that states the security breaches in the system and suggests rules to deal with these breaches as well. These and more functionality of the firewall management systems upgrade the level of security in the organization and thereby minimize the possibility of a security breach.
Maximum Enforcement of the Organizations' Security Policy
Every organization has a security policy that needs to be implemented in order to enforce the policy on the employees and every other entity that gives and takes information from the organization. One of the tools that the IT department has to enforce the security policy is the firewall. The firewall can allow and deny access to the information system, as well as control the usage of different applications and software and other attributes that help the IT department in enforcing the security policy. The firewall management solutions assists in finding the different gaps between the security policy that is dictated by the organization and the actual enforcement done by the firewall. The firewall manager marks rules that are not under the policy and suggests new rules that will close "holes" in the security policy.
Maintaining High Firewall Performance Levels
One of the drawbacks of a firewall that has a lot of rules is slower performance rate. This is due to the need of the data package running in the firewall to go through all the rules in the firewall. The firewall management solutions look for rules that are redundant and are not active, meaning those rules do not contribute to the security or business processes of the organization. The IT department can then "clean up" the firewalls and as a result the performance, that is the speed of the data packages that go through the firewalls, is increased.
