FireMon has introduced FireMon Intelligent Policy Automation (IPA), its vision for a new standard in firewall change automation that takes into account the impact on compliance and security to reduce the manual effort and unnecessary security risk associated with today’s complex implementations. To date, customers leveraging the IPA framework have reduced the time to complete a change by more than 90%, while maintaining their security posture or even lowering the level of risk.
FireMon Intelligent Policy Automation (IPA) is a lifecycle policy management framework that helps customers make the right changes as fast as responsible, rather than as fast as possible. The framework provides context around access requests to help system administrators and network engineers determine and implement the change that best enables the business without introducing new risk.
“Today, security and operations teams are inundated with change requests – many of which are still handled manually – and meeting SLAs often comes at the expense of security,” said Matt Dean, Vice President of Product Management for FireMon. “Current automation solutions can help, but without awareness of the impact to compliance and security, they’re only speeding up implementation of incorrect changes, which negates the effort and introduces risk.”
Crucially, FireMon’s Intelligent Policy Automation, through its standards-based workflow engine, injects automation and analysis at every stage of the change process, ensuring that engineers are able to design and approve the correct change quickly. The framework is devised so that simple, low-risk access requests get through the process swiftly while providing engineers with the time and analysis required to properly assess the impact of the more complex ones.
Key functionality includes:
- Pre-impact change analysis – based on fully customizable control assessments
- Workflow customization – workflows built to meet the unique needs of the enterprise
- Lifecycle management – including integrated policy review workflows
“A key piece to raising an organisation’s security posture is proper management of its network components and security technology,” said Michael Callahan, CMO, FireMon. “Intelligent Policy Automation provides context and brain power to implementing policy changes, so it not only helps in shortening the time it takes to make them, but engineers can also be confident that the changes are accurate the first time around and don’t open up any security holes.”
