The Best Firewall Change Management Solutions

Organizations are under increasing pressure to demonstrate that security practices comply with industry best practices and regulatory requirements. One of such best practices is firewall change management.

The firewall change management process is among the most significant business challenges organizations face. Simple errors and oversights in the firewall change management process can create gaps in compliance with industry regulations, increase business risks, and open up an organization to cyber attacks. As a result, these change management processes come under scrutiny during internal, external, and partner regulatory audits.

Here is our list of the best Firewall Change Management solutions:

1. SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager (FREE TRIAL) Designed to provide easy-to-use network change and configuration management through a web-based console that offers easy access to firewall configuration data. Start a 30-day free trial.
2. ManageEngine Firewall Analyzer A enterprise-class, web-based, agentless software for change management, traffic analysis, security and bandwidth monitoring, compliance audit, and reporting for firewall and other network security tools.
3. Skybox Change Manager A centralized firewall management solution that manages and automates workflows for firewall rule creation, change verification, rule recertification, and de-provisioning across different firewall vendors and complex rulesets.
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. AlgoSec A firewall policy management company that enables organizations to automate and enforce security policies across firewalls, routers, virtual private networks (VPNs) and reduce risk and process change at zero touches.
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.

Beyond compliance requirements, firewalls change management is the best practice that every organization should embrace. Even if your organization doesn’t currently face any formal compliance requirements, the threat of data breach and loss of customer confidence resulting from bad security practices is not something any responsible organization should take lightly. It also helps prove you have been doing your due diligence in managing change and reviewing your security and policy controls, should you ever need to respond to a lawsuit that calls your security practices into question. In addition, they enable organizations to document the entire configuration and change management processes to demonstrate that security practices comply with regulatory requirements.

With the growing complexity of today’s network infrastructure, hundreds of firewalls from different vendors, thousands of routers and switches, and cloud infrastructure, the best approach to managing firewall changes before they get out of control is to use automated firewall management tools. Additionally, organizations need to have well-documented and reasonable firewall policies and procedures combined with automation controls. This article will review the six best firewall change management solutions; hopefully, this will guide you in choosing the right one for your business.

The Best Firewall Change Management Solutions

1. SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager (FREE TRIAL)

SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager (NCM) is designed to provide easy-to-use network change and configuration management through a web-based console that offers easy access to firewall configuration data. NCM simplifies managing network configurations by continuously monitoring device configurations and providing immediate notification of configuration changes to help resolve problems before they impact users.

Key Features:

• Simultaneously modify configurations across many multi-vendor firewalls through automated bulk-change management.
• Receive real-time network change notifications when firewall configurations change
• Detect firewall-config policy violations to ensure compliance with federal and corporate requirements
• Compare configurations and restore to a previously known stable state
• Automatically backup firewall configurations on a scheduled basis

The SolarWinds NCM includes a network audit tool that gives network admins real-time and historical insight into the unauthorized firewall and network configuration changes. It also allows them to identify inconsistent configuration changes, non-compliant devices, failed backups, and more. In addition, NCM can make bulk configuration changes automatically to firewalls and network devices, helping you save time and reduce errors associated with manual changes. You can use the platform to design change templates and create standardized configurations, or you can turn to its built-in workflows to review, approve, schedule, and push bulk configuration updates across hundreds or even thousands of devices in minutes.

NCM actively monitors device configurations and alerts you to changes, helping you discover who made the changes, when and where configuration changes occur. For example, which additions or deletions were made to a configuration. With NCM, you can build and manage reliable automated configuration backups for your firewall and other network devices. Once your network backups are completed, NCM automatically organizes them by device and version for easy search.

NCM 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 NCM installs on Windows Server and comes with a 30-day free trial.

SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager Download 30-day FREE Trial

 2. ManageEngine Firewall Analyzer 

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

Firewall Analyzer acts as a firewall configuration management tool in the following ways:

A. Firewall configuration change monitoring: Firewall Analyzer fetches the firewall configuration using CLI or API from your firewall devices and enables you to keep track of the changes being made to them. This feature ensures that all the configurations and subsequent changes made in the firewall device are regularly captured and stored in the database. In addition, firewall Analyzer’s configuration change management reports tell you who made what changes, when, and why to the firewall configuration. The following are the reports generated by this firewall configuration analysis tool.

• Running Configuration Changes Report: Report on the difference between any two running configuration changes
• Startup Configuration Changes Report: Changes between running (current) configuration and startup (default) configuration
• Current Startup-Running Conflict Report: Conflict in configurations between startup and running

B. Firewall configuration change alerts and reports: Firewall Analyzer collects and analyzes firewall device configurations and configuration changes, audits the security of devices, archives logs from network security devices, and generates alerts and reports when changes are made to the firewall device configuration in real-time and sends notifications to the security team via email and SMS. Reports include information about denied hosts, denied protocols, and top security events generated.

Firewall Analyzer is vendor-agnostic and supports almost all open source and commercial network firewalls such as Check Point, Cisco, Juniper, Fortinet, Palo Alto, and more.

Key Features:

• Change Management: With Change Management reports, you can receive instant notification of changes made and get a complete track of all changes made to your firewall configuration.
• Compliance Management: Automate PCI compliance audits with ready-to-use reports and verify your firewall security with security audit and device configuration analysis reports.
• Firewall Reports: This includes security and traffic reports to help you determine the network security posture.
• Firewall Policy Management: Allows you to analyze the usage and effectiveness of Firewall rules and fine-tune them for optimum performance.
• Network Security Management: Provides you with detailed information about all possible network attacks and security breaches in your network.
• Monitoring user internet activity: Automatically identify users in various categories such as streaming videos, file-sharing networks, or social networks.
• Log Analysis: Search the logs, and identify abnormal traffic patterns and security threats to improve network security posture.

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

3. Skybox Change Manager

Skybox Change Manager is a centralized firewall management solution that manages and automates workflows for firewall rule creation, change verification, rule recertification, and de-provisioning across different firewall vendors and complex rulesets, ensuring that the state of your network is always in line with security policy design and regulatory requirements. With Skybox Change Manager, you can aggregate all business, policy, and configuration requirements.

Skybox analyzes proposed firewall and access changes,  comparing actual changes to proposed changes to ensure they were made correctly. This helps to reduce security gaps or vulnerabilities.

Key Features:

• Automated change request provisioning: Change Manager workflows for firewall rule creation, recertification, and de-provisioning help minimize vulnerability exposures.
• Automated change request verification: Provides objective verification that implemented changes match the original change request to ensure all changes are authorized and made as intended.
• Automated risk assessment: Analyzes the security implications of proposed changes on existing protected assets.
• Rule recertification process automation: Automate workflows to review rules for recertification or de-provisioning to keep firewalls clean, secure, and compliant.
• Detects security and compliance problems using out–of–the–box or customized policies.
• 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.
• Clean up and optimize firewall rules.
• Normalize firewall rulesets for a consistent view across multiple vendors.
• Supports next-generation firewall access and rule compliance at the user and application level.

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.

4. Tufin SecureChange

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 for security standards such as PCI DSS, NERC, and SOX.

Tufin SecureChange is a product designed to provide end-to-end automation of network security changes, enabling teams to implement network changes faster by reducing human error and remediation efforts. In addition to automating network security changes, SecureChange also automates other aspects of the access lifecycle, including decommissioning of firewall rules and servers and cloning server policies. Furthermore, SecureChange offers an integrated risk assessment, compares change requests against your security/compliance policies and procedures to enforce compliance and prevent regulatory violations.

SecureChange offers full audit readiness via an automatic audit trail for network changes, including complete change accountability and audit-ready reports. Every workflow contains the history of all related tickets for full auditability. A free product evaluation and price quotation are available on request.

5. AlgoSec

AlgoSec is a firewall policy management company that enables organizations to automate and enforce security policies across firewalls, routers, virtual private networks (VPNs) and reduce risk and process change at zero touches. AlgoSec Security Policy Change Management is the product that enables organizations to process security policy changes. AlgoSec Security Policy Change Management streamlines and automates the entire security policy change process—from planning and design to risk analysis, implementation, validation, and auditing.

Key Features:

• Allows you to create and review firewall rules to support applications or processes that require network access to network, servers, and systems
• Clean and optimize your security policy by uncovering unused, duplicate, conflicting, or expired rules without impacting business requirements,
• Intelligently design rule changes and validate the correct implementation
• Process network security policy changes in minutes, not days
• Ensure changes adhere to internal and regulatory standards
• Proactively assess the risk of every proposed change
• Seamlessly integrate with existing ticketing systems
• Document changes and generate an audit trail
• Push policy changes directly to the device
• Automate the entire change process

AlgoSec continuously monitors all policy changes and ensures they correlate to a specific request to detect and prevent unauthorized, rogue changes. Every step of the change process is fully documented to track accountability and provide an audit trail for your auditors.

A personalized free demo and price quotes are available on request.

6. FireMon Security Manager

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, compatibility, and replacement. FireMon also provides policy change recommendations to increase security efficiency and eliminate misconfigurations caused by complexity and manual processes.

Key Features:

• Visibility and Control: Scalability and third-party integration provide real-time global policy management.
• Advanced Analysis: A suite of rule assessment tools that detect vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and traffic paths.
• Tracking and Audit Controls: Centralized rule repository and reporting for firewalls and other policy enforcement devices
• Policy Violation and Change Detection: Automatic compliance and business policy violation detection
• Customizable Reporting: Flexible compliance reports, security analytics, assessments, and dashboards to meet any business need.

FireMon Security Manager is the product that provides firewall and hybrid cloud network security policy management, helping organizations adapt to change, manage risk, and achieve continuous compliance. By standardizing and consolidating firewall, cloud security devices, and other network policy device rulesets into a single management console, Security Manager gives network teams visibility and control over even the most complex hybrid networks with ease.

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