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AlgoSec pros and cons

Vendor: AlgoSec
4.5 out of 5
Badge Ranked 1
1,900 followers
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Pros & Cons summary

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Prominent pros & cons

PROS

AlgoSec streamlines firewall management and rule implementation, significantly reducing time and effort required for these tasks.
It enhances security and compliance by providing clear visibility into firewall risks and enabling consistent checks against regulatory standards.
AlgoSec offers valuable features such as Firewall Analyzer and FireFlow, which improve operational efficiency and auditability.
It supports a multi-vendor environment, allowing for effective management of various firewall products within a single system.
AlgoSec automates rule deployment and optimizes existing policies, which helps in reducing unnecessary rules and improving overall network performance.

CONS

AlgoSec struggles with integration to cloud ITSM tools like ServiceNow.
Default standard support at Level 1 often involves merely recommending an upgrade to the latest version.
Automated analysis of application traffic with machine learning for rule set optimization is lacking.
Better integration with modules and troubleshooting methodologies is needed.
AlgoSec lacks comprehensive support for diverse firewall vendors like Sophos and SonicWall.
 

AlgoSec Pros review quotes

CW
Aug 9, 2021
The most valuable is helping us determine where our rules are too permissive. Based on previous human review of our rules, they are very cursory. We know why we do something, but we don't get into the details of whether the rule is nice and tight. What Firewall Analyzer lets us do is understand the risks presented by our rules. The tool does a calculation of all the traffic that could be allowed and we can match that to whether it should be allowed.
SE
Apr 21, 2021
The features that I like are the monitoring and the alerts. It provides real-time monitoring, or at least close to real-time. I think that is important. I like its way of organizing, also. It is pretty clear. I also like their reporting structure - the way we can use AlgoSec to clear a rule base, like covering and hiding rules.
AZ
May 12, 2021
It gives us 100% visibility into our network security policies. It has given us a couple of surprises. Over the years, the network that we are administrating has been subject to people who have an idea of how a network should be set up. That differs from technician to technician or engineer to engineer. So, we are finding little pockets of hidden little self-engineered configurations and the way things were done that nobody knew about. Once the engineer left, the knowledge of that setup disappeared. You don't know about those until something either goes wrong, or you get something like AlgoSec to discover it for you, and it says, "Hey, there is this going on over here."
Learn what your peers think about AlgoSec. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: November 2024.
816,406 professionals have used our research since 2012.
AM
Apr 25, 2021
There are some legacy customers still using AlgoSec. The benefit is the ease in management of firewalls and rules.
reviewer2059866 - PeerSpot reviewer
Dec 22, 2022
FireFlow is great. In a company that gets a large volume of requests to open firewall rules, it's helpful to have one place that summarizes the requests, enabling you to clearly understand why they need to be implemented and also implement them. Firewall Analyzer can help you identify missing routing or check information on the firewall without the need to log into a firewall or router to check the routing. We have all that access in three clicks.
VS
Jul 20, 2021
AlgoSec provides full visibility into the risk involved in firewall change requests as well. It definitely allows us to drill down to the level where we can see the actual policy rule that's affecting the risk ratings. If there are any changes in ratings, it'll show you exactly how to determine what's changed in the network that will affect it. It's been very clear and intuitive as far as that.
VZ
Apr 25, 2021
For us, as well as for our customers, firewall management and change management are the most important features.
reviewer1571316 - PeerSpot reviewer
Jun 4, 2021
AlgoSec gives us a high level of confidence that our ACLs and our risk components are actually in line with our expectations. Because we run a lot of our firewalls as an internal change control boundary, we rely on them heavily to segregate vendor networks. It gives us a high level of confidence that those third-party networks that ride on the backbone are segregated and appropriately defined.
MC
Apr 22, 2021
ActiveChange integrates with your change workflow and ticketing system. For example, a change request is made to open port 8080. Then, if the guy who was supposed to implement that change mistakenly opened port 80, then ActiveChange will say, "What was approved was 8080, but what you actually opened was 80." That actually helps to fix human errors. It helps to check everything that is being done. You can go through the analysis and see changes that were made, and AlgoSec is able to alert you immediately. Whenever there is a change, notifications are sent to the administrators because it gives you that real-time alerting and change.
reviewer1600197 - PeerSpot reviewer
Oct 8, 2022
Being able to analyze the environment and audit firewall configuration is most valuable. We are working here in the oil sector, and it's a critical environment. Every six months we have auditors coming from the main office and doing auditing for security. We are using AlgoSec Analyzer to help us to do the audit before the auditors come to our office and do the auditing of our security devices. So, it's helping us to do good work and analyze all security devices, including firewalls.
 

AlgoSec Cons review quotes

CW
Aug 9, 2021
We are using AlgoSec directly against our Cisco Firepower. At first, AlgoSec didn't work with Firepower. It didn't know how to read the logs. So, improvement has been made. Now, the feature that was available on the older generation firewall is available on the current one, but this is a problem which has already been dealt with.
SE
Apr 21, 2021
The only problem I have with AlgoSec is just its level of support, not with the product. Not with the organization or the documentation or anything else, but if I need any additional support, the only problem is the time it takes to get it.
AZ
May 12, 2021
The reports are lacking information when they come out. They will not pull the URL or application information from Cisco FTDs. I know this works for Palo Alto Firewalls, which we currently do not have. If they could improve the integration with Cisco FTDs as a whole, that would be immensely helpful.
Learn what your peers think about AlgoSec. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: November 2024.
816,406 professionals have used our research since 2012.
AM
Apr 25, 2021
It gives you the capability to make changes to hundreds of your firewalls at the same time, but big enterprises have change management policies. Change managers will never allow you to make changes to more than 10 devices at the same time, which is a feature in AlgoSec. Because, what if something goes wrong, then you have to roll back and figure out what caused the impact, e.g., which firewall did not work well. Doing that post-mortem becomes a difficult thing. So, change automation on a firewall is actually defeating the purpose of the change management policies in any organization. If you run a bank, you will not allow anyone to make changes at the same time from a single click for 10 firewalls. The bank will never allow this.
reviewer2059866 - PeerSpot reviewer
Dec 22, 2022
Our experience with support has been inconsistent. Sometimes, support is fast and clean; other times, not so much. Occasionally, they have taken a while to respond or provided an inadequate workaround instead of a solution.
VS
Jul 20, 2021
Some of the auditing functionality needs improvement. Our major focus is the firewall validation process and tracking and verifying that changes are implemented correctly. We are actually doing parts of the auditing process manually. And getting any one of the vendors to bring out a good auditing process has been very difficult.
VZ
Apr 25, 2021
We see a very high demand for using containers and Dockers and therefore there is a need for managing access control to these platforms. I checked AlgoSec’s roadmap and, for now, there are no plans for developing these features.
reviewer1571316 - PeerSpot reviewer
Jun 4, 2021
We have a fairly complex routing environment that AlgoSec struggled with having dual routers and first hop routing protocols. The initial period when we were doing an installation with their support desk was fairly challenging.
MC
Apr 22, 2021
Since COVID-19, a number of the technical support team members have been working from home or remotely. So, we haven't gotten support people right when we need them. Sometimes, it takes a couple of hours or even days for us to get that instant support that we used to get.
reviewer1600197 - PeerSpot reviewer
Oct 8, 2022
My only concern is related to how they count the number of licenses. We have active and standby devices. If someone adds the standby device by mistake and does an analysis, it consumes two licenses. They need to improve the way they are counting the number of licenses because someone can do analysis on a standby device by mistake. We need a way to fix or solve this issue.