How to manage your multivendor firewalls like a pro

Auditing firewalls to keep regulators happy and tracking rule changes -- especially for businesses buying firewalls (compare products) from multiple vendors -- is a burden that a variety of third-party software can lighten dramatically.

Software from vendors AlgoSec Inc., Secure Passage LLC and Tufin Software Technologies Ltd. can report firewall statistics (compare security information-management products) to prove compliance with industry and government standards, and it can consolidate rules so firewalls run more efficiently, customers say.

"That's very different from what individual firewall vendors do," said Greg Young, an analyst at Gartner Inc. "[Third parties] respond more to audit compliance and the real-world regulatory compliance that companies need."

Young said individual firewall vendors have tools to configure and logs to record rules changes, but don't have the capability to simulate inserting new rules in existing rule sets to see their impact. AlgoSec, Secure Passage and Tufin are the only vendors he knows of that offer this type of functionality, and they do so only for the major firewall vendors, Check Point Software Technologies Ltd., Cisco Systems Inc. and Juniper Networks Inc.

Adam Forester, supervisor of network security at medical transaction processing firm Emdeon Business Services in Nashville, said he turned to Tufin because Check Point tools couldn't do as good a job optimizing his 100-plus firewalls.