The Best Firewall Optimization Tools

Firewall remains an indispensable tool in network security, serving as the first layer of defense, and filtering enormous amounts of traffic across the enterprise networks

However, firewall policies and configurations constantly change and modify today’s dynamic business environment. In this article, we will review the six best firewall change management solutions, hopefully, this will guide you in choosing the right one for your business.

Here is our list of the best Firewall Optimization tools:

1. SolarWinds Security Event Manager (FREE TRIAL) A network security tool that helps organizations detect unusual traffic patterns and network attacks and improve network security. Start a 30-day free trial.
2. AlgoSec Α firewall policy management company that enables organizations to automate and enforce security policies across firewalls, routers, and virtual private networks (VPNs).
3. ManageEngine Firewall Analyzer Αn enterprise-class, web-based, agentless software for firewall optimization, change management, traffic analysis, security, and bandwidth monitoring, compliance audit, and reporting for firewall and other network security tools.
4. Tufin A security policy management company that enables organizations to automate their security policy changes, risk management, provisioning, and compliance across multi-vendor, hybrid platforms while improving security and compliance.
5. Skybox Firewall Assurance A centralized firewall management solution that provides comprehensive automation of firewall optimization, compliance checks, and management tasks across different firewall vendors and complex rulesets.
6. FireMon A network security management tool that provides real-time visibility and control of security policy across on-premises and cloud environments and helps organizations maintain compliance and centralize security policy orchestration.

Over the years, these firewalls may accumulate thousands of rules, objects, and bloated rulesets. This adds complexity to the daily management and operation of the firewall. In addition, complex firewall configurations negatively impact its performance, resulting in decreased hardware lifespan.

With the growing complexity of today’s network infrastructure, hundreds of firewalls from different vendors, thousands of routers and switches, and private clouds, it’s nearly impossible to analyze and optimize firewall and router configurations manually. Existing manual approaches are too slow and error-prone to be effective.

This is where automated firewall optimization tools come into play. With a firewall optimization tool, you can automatically analyze firewall rulesets, logs, and routing information to provide organizations with actionable recommendations for cleaning and optimizing network security policies across heterogeneous networks.

The Best Firewall Optimization Tools

1. SolarWinds Network Firewall Security Management (FREE TRIAL)

The SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM) is a network security tool that helps organizations detect unusual traffic patterns and network attacks and improve network security. Apart from its traditional role, SEM can also operate as a Network Firewall Security Management tool, File Integrity Monitoring software, Cyber Threat Intelligence Framework, and a tool to Optimize Firewall Configuration to avoid downtime and security breaches.

The SolarWinds SEM includes a firewall security audit tool that allows network admins to generate firewall audit reports and demonstrate compliance with out-of-the-box templates. With the Firewall Security Audit Tool in SEM, you can easily log all network device activities in a central location, track and analyze suspicious network events, and simplify router and firewall security auditing and compliance.

SEM provides options for annual license subscription with included maintenance and support or perpetual licensing with first-year care and support. But don’t take my word for it—you can test drive it for free yourself to make sure it’s the right fit for you and your organization before making financial commitments.

SolarWinds Security Event Manager SEM installs on Windows Server and comes with a 30-day free trial.

SolarWinds Security Event Manager Download 30-day FREE Trial

2. AlgoSec 

AlgoSec is a firewall policy management company that enables organizations to automate and enforce security policies across firewalls, routers, and virtual private networks (VPNs).

AlgoSec Firewall Policy Cleanup & Optimization helps organizations clean up and optimize firewall policies and improve productivity by identifying redundant rules and reordering them for optimal performance.

With AlgoSec, you can:

• Review and tighten overly permissive rules with minimal impact on business requirements
• Improve policy hygiene, network performance, and the firewall hardware lifespan
• Recertify expired rules based on security and business needs
• Securely remove access for decommissioned applications
• Uncover and remove unused, duplicate, or conflicting rules
• Drastically reduce complexity across the firewall estate
• Consolidate or reorder rules for better performance
• Ensure a clean and optimized security policy

AlgoSec optimizes firewall policies by identifying, reordering, and cleaning up anomalous rules such as new, disabled, duplicated, redundant, time-inactive rules, including rules with a time clause, rules without logging, least used rules, and most used rules. AlgoSec continuously monitors all policy changes and ensures they correlate to a specific request to detect and prevent unauthorized, rogue changes. In addition, AlgoSec’s automated change management processes ensure that new rules are optimally designed and implemented so that you don’t generate more clutter over time. A personalized free demo and price quotes are available on request.

3. ManageEngine Firewall Analyzer 

ManageEngine Firewall Analyzer is an enterprise-class, web-based, agentless software for firewall optimization, change management, traffic analysis, security and bandwidth monitoring, compliance audit, and reporting for firewall and other network security tools.

Firewall Analyzer is a firewall policy planning and optimization tool that helps organizations to:

• Identify and rectify policy anomalies
• Reduce overly permissive rules
• Fine-tune the existing firewall policies

Firewall Analyzer provides a set of reports that helps deliver its policy planning and optimization capabilities. The reports are described as follows:

• Firewall Policy Optimization Report Allows security professionals to identify and rectify anomalies in their firewall policies. These reports empower security administrators to optimize procedures (Firewall rule management) and the performance of their firewalls to secure their networks from external IT attacks.
• Firewall Rule Suggestion Report This report helps identify overly permissive rules and provides suggestions on how to reduce them.
• Firewall Policy Fine-Tuning Report This report identifies permissive services for a specific rule and also provides suggestions on appropriate changes to the rule, including a list of used and unused objects linked to a particular rule; thus, you can easily plan firewall policies and fine-tune your rules by removing the unused objects.

Firewall Analyzer is available in three editions, as shown below. Firewall Analyzer can be deployed on Windows and Linux machines and provides options for subscription licensing for standard and professional editions and perpetual licensing for the enterprise edition. In addition, a 30-day fully functional free trial is available.

Table 1.0 | Comparison of ManageEngine Firewall Analyzer editions

4. Tufin

Tufin is a security policy management company that enables organizations to automate their security policy changes, risk management, provisioning, and compliance across multi-vendor, hybrid platforms while improving security and compliance. Tufin products help security teams to implement and maintain their security policy on all of their firewalls,  routers, and network switches and expedite the process of compliance audits.

The Suite consists of the following tools:

• SecureTrack SecureTrack is a comprehensive vendor-agnostic firewall operation, security policy management. Auditing and compliance solution for multi-vendor firewalls, next-generation firewalls, and cloud platforms.
• SecureChange SecureChange provides enterprise IT with continuous compliance with internal policies and industry regulations, such as PCI DSS and others. It also offers full audit readiness via an automatic audit trail for network changes, including complete change accountability and audit-ready reports.
• SecureApp An automated solution that enables organizations to define, update, monitor, and remove applications and services from the network.
• SecureCloud Enables security teams to gain visibility into their cloud security posture, establish security guardrails and achieve continuous compliance without compromising the business benefits of cloud computing.

Tufin firewall optimization allows you to automate your firewall optimization, simplify mundane firewall change management, and increase the operational efficiency of your team.

Other features and capabilities include: 

• Rule, server & application decommissioning: With Tufin, you can automatically identify new rules, regulations required to access a server, or rules needed for a given application and automatically remove these rules from your firewalls across all vendors.
• Server cloning: Automatically duplicate server access across your complex, fragmented network, as well as additional access permissions for new servers into your security policy.
• Recertification: Automate the recertification process to track, monitor, and manage the expiration of firewall rules.
• SecureTrack provides a central repository of all the firewalls rules and objects with an advanced search and filtering mechanism that makes firewall cleanup and optimization easy.
• Efficiently optimize rules to maintain security policies across a heterogeneous network.
• Improve your firewall management with automated clean-up, decommissioning, and recertification.
• Automatically identify, locate, and remove obsolete or unused rules or sets of rules.

Tufin licensing model depends on the number of firewalls and applications. A free product evaluation and price quotation are available on request.

5. Skybox Firewall Assurance

Skybox Firewall Assurance is a centralized firewall management solution that provides comprehensive automation of firewall optimization, compliance checks, and management tasks across different firewall vendors and complex rulesets, ensuring that the state of your network is always in line with security policy design regulatory requirements.

Key features and capabilities include: 

• Rule-based optimization: Firewall Assurance has all you need to ensure clean, optimized, and compliant security controls and network devices.
• Firewall rule usage optimization: Identify unused, shadowed, redundant rules, and overly permissive rules, including rules that can be simplified to improve firewall security and performance.
• Simplify rule-recertification and speed up troubleshooting.
• Firewall access and rule compliance: Ensures and demonstrates proper configuration of network devices and security controls following CIS hardening guidelines and a wide range of compliance standards, including PCI, NERC, NIST, FISMA, HIPAA, SOX, and GDPR.
• Know when access policy violations, rule conflicts, and misconfigurations occur and identify vulnerabilities on firewalls themselves.
• Tracks change for continuous firewall monitoring and support Skybox Change Manager workflows for rule creation, recertification, and de-provisioning.
• Normalize firewall rulesets for a consistent view across multiple vendors.
• Supports next-generation firewall access and rule compliance at the user and application level.

With Firewall Assurance, you can find and eliminate redundantly, shadowed, or overly permissive firewall rules; conduct rule usage analysis, optimize rules, and complete faster ruleset audits.

An online demo is freely available to enable you to test drive the product. You can purchase the product via a channel partner in your region or country.

6. FireMon

FireMon is a network security management tool that provides real-time visibility and control of security policy across on-premises and cloud environments and helps organizations maintain compliance and centralize security policy orchestration. FireMon solves three main challenges in firewalls: cleanup/optimization, compatibility, and replacement.

FireMon Policy Optimizer is the tool that automates the management, audit, policy change review process, and clean-up efforts to optimize firewall performance. Policy Optimizer also automates the lifecycle of network security policies with flexible workflows for firewall rule review, recertification, modification, and removal. In addition, it facilitates agility through policy recommendations you can quickly validate with stakeholders and act upon.

Other features and capabilities include:

• FireMon’s Policy Optimizer keeps firewalls clean by automating your review process and decommissioning access that could lead to a compliance failure.
• Policy Optimizer provides a communications hub that facilitates information sharing among stakeholders involved with the firewall rules such as security teams, policy owners, application admins, and business teams to validate rules, check for compliance, and recertify.
• FireMon provides detailed information regarding each reviewed rule with the option to approve or reject the current rule configuration. Improve performance by removing rules that impede firewall performance and cause service interruptions.
• A centralized rule repository provides a consolidated view of all policies to simplify reporting and revision control while streamlining audits.
• Policy standardization and cleanup normalize policies across vendors to identify errors, leak paths, and the rules you no longer need
• Policy change automation accelerates rule creation and changes with real-time misconfiguration and policy violation prevention.

FireMon can be easily integrated with other enterprise security platforms such as SOAR, SIEM, DevOps, ITSM, and more to enhance your compliance and risk mitigation efforts. A free online demo is available on request.