AlgoSec Reviews

AlgoSec provides a secure connection between applications and helps customers maintain regulatory compliance.

The benefit depends on the type of client. Our banking customers are impressed with the compliance features, automatic policy installation, and FireFlow. They also realize performance improvements of approximately 20 percent. 

AlgoSec has simplified the work of security engineers. If I had to give that a grade, I would give it a nine out of ten. We used the solution to implement and manage micro-segmentation initiatives. Still, it has been limited since this is a private cloud version, and many of our customers use regular firewalls. 

We deal with customers with a mixture of environments, including private cloud, public cloud, and on-premises. Many of them have on-premises and private cloud environments. AlgoSec provides a single pane of glass for managing these mixed environments, making management more effortless. 

The most valuable feature of AlgoSec is integration because it needs the be integrated with vendors' firewalls and other security products. AlgoSec has intelligent policy tuners. 

It's easy to integrate AlgoSec with solutions from other vendors. It's currently integrated with the products of three or four vendors. We integrate AlgoSec with AppViz and other products to get complete visibility into our network policies, and FireFlow helps us manage risks from firewall change requests. It has reduced the time it takes to implement firewall rules by about 20%, according to the ROI calculator on the AlgoSec website. It varies, depending on the structure of the customer's environment. 

AlgoSec also helps us audit complex environments to ensure firewalls are in compliance. The benefit is marginal if there is only one firewall and a few policies, but it's significant when you have three firewall clusters and 60 devices. 

The documentation could be better. 

I've been using AlgoSec for six years.

AlgoSec is stable.

It's a scalable solution but there is room for improvement in that area. It has a high-availability structure, but some features need to be distributed using a collector, for example.

I rate AlgoSec's support eight out of ten. I don't use it much, but it has improved greatly in the last two years. 

Positive

Setting up AlgoSec isn't complicated. You can install it in half an hour, but the configuration time depends on the environment. Sometimes, it takes a day, but it could take up to a week to analyze the files, etc. We have a two-person team responsible for deployment and maintenance, but we also have partners. In all, we have about 10 technicians supporting our customers.

I don't know about pricing because I'm a technical guy. I can say the licensing model is straightforward and should be in the future. It isn't an issue for our customers. 

I rate AlgoSec an eight out of ten. I would recommend AlgoSec, depending on the client's structure and requirements. It's a good solution for regulatory compliance and analytics. 

We use AlgoSec to manage our firewalls and to manage our firewall ACL change workflow. We also use AlgoSec to get better visibility into our traffic flows, to optimize our firewalls rules, and to analyze risks.

AlgoSec has greatly improved the time and resources spent on creating and deploying our firewall rules. Our network and security teams can now smartly research our ACLs and implement them with confidence.

We found the traffic simulation query, active change, policy optimization, FireFlow, and map features to be especially helpful. All the other application features are valuable as well. We have yet to fully unleash its full potential.

The tech support and ticketing system could use some improvement and need more of a personal touch.

I have a North American wide multi-site network with a large amount, 100+ primary firewalls and hundreds of remote firewalls. We have loaded into AlgoSec most of these via CheckPoint CMA and Palo Alto Panorama. Currently, the primary use is log analysis as we are migrating from CP to PA and need to purge the unused rules during migration. 

It is helping with the migration as we don’t carry over empty rules and allows consolidation of rules. 

AFA analyze reports are the biggest use case to review the rules before migration and removing the unused rules for cleanup.

The Network Map is a feature that could use work, it is a big piece but is always a moving target with large routing tables in use and speed of use becomes an issue doing queries. 

In 2018.1 release the VIP always up is a great feature and a 3-way cluster is a good idea. 

We were a Tufin user but moved due to a POC with another asset we acquired which had AlgoSec and at the end we preferred AlgoSec. 

We needed to review unused rules and delete them. However, I also wanted to view my unused objects and NAT rules. Algosec met my needs. 

The product was able to present how many rules were redundant and how many shadow rules were in a gateway. Thanks to this visibility, I was able to do my rule optimization. Thus, my firewall rules were fewer, and fewer rules were checked when traffic passed through the firewall. In this way, it was possible for traffic to pass through the firewall faster.

The simulation can be improved. Networks and interfaces to which the firewall is connected are kept in a visual simulation. The rules could also show us the traffic on these networks in red and green. When we add a rule, we should be able to see what kind of traffic obstruction we can cause and what can be improved. In the next release, it would be fun to visually present the dashboard with animations.

The purpose of using the product was to attack and Analyse rule bases from a holistic perspective. The Firewall Analyzer has a rule base consolidator as well as a feature to make the rule base more permissive. It also helps to reduce rule base clutter, as well as legacy rules.

Traffic query helps us to quickly find rules that allow outbound access.

FireFlow is a useful ticketing system that integrates with many products.

We would like to use FireFlow's API to automate certain tickets that come through to leverage automation in our environment. 

An example is that we have a policy with 900 rules, which we were able to reduce to 500 rules. That's close to a 50 percent savings on the rule base.

We used the Unused rules function in Firewall Analyser to examine our rule base. This has drastic performance increases in our production firewalls.

Objects not used within rules can save even more when it comes to cleaning up rule bases. Where this is a very manual process without AlgoSec, engineers can have a level of automation by building useful reports to assist with clean up.

The most valuable feature is the Firewall Analyser, which has a number of fantastic features.

From a risk perspective, you can apply compliance Frameworks like ISO 27001 and PCI DSS against firewall rule bases to see if your rule base is compliant. If you are not then AlgoSec provides descriptive ways on how to adjust rules to make your rule base more compliant. 

Definitely, the policy-cleanup features are the main draw. Shadowed rules, rule duplication, rule consolidation, rules permitting too much access, and rule usage are very useful and help to clean up rule bases.

There are areas where auditing rule changes are not accurate. It is important to be accurate when using rule changes, as users need to be accountable for their changes; however, I cannot trust AlgoSec when rule changes come through on reports as they reflect incorrectly. I have taken this up with support and have never really had a resolution for this. 

I would like to see enhanced dashboards or build meaningful reports for executive consumption. 

AlgoSec is a fantastic product, and I would like to see more "granular" breakdowns of traffic on IPT traffic analysis for source and destination, as the way it does it currently does not allow me to self problems for rules with ANY in the destination.

We have been using AlgoSec for one and a half years.

The stability is good.

Scalability-wise, this product is good.

The technical support is always responsive and always willing to understand the issues. 

Our previous solution was not useful and did not have an intuitive interface. Support was also terrible.

The initial setup is straightforward. If you understand your infrastructure, it will be easy to deploy in a central location.

Our deployment was done through a vendor team and it took one week.

We haven't saved any money yet but we have improved the performance of certain devices.

I would suggest that you start with a VM, get a PoC with a temp license, and try it out. You will love it.

I would not like to disclose which other products, but I have used two other products that didn't even come close to AlgoSec's power.

Its a good production and good support, definitely worth it.

We primarily use AlgoSec for Firewall Security Management, Firewall Policy Automation, and Auditing. Our firewall estate environment is complex, multi-vendor, and across many sites, so we needed a product that would integrate seamlessly, encompassing all sites and platforms.

It's an ongoing process and we are constantly learning about new features of the product that would be beneficial in terms of helping secure, consolidate, and streamline our environment.

We are well on the road to achieving this with the help of their Professional Services team.

It has saved us much time, helping us work smarter and more efficiently with regards to policy/ruleset management, automation, and consolidation. This product has saved us numerous person-hours in terms of automation and consolidation.

The various elements of the product have allowed us to cover all aspects of Firewall Security Management, Firewall Policy Automation, and Auditing, which all help to leverage the product's full potential.

Having learned more about the product, going forward we believe it will allow us to benefit in additional areas of Firewall security management. 

We have found the Firewall analyzer to be most valuable in terms of policy ruleset management. However, policy ruleset management, automation, and auditing are all good features.

The complete and end-to-end visibility and analysis it provides of the policy rule base is invaluable and saves countless time and effort.

The automation possibilities the FireFlow product provides will also be very useful going forward in terms of time and effort saved, as well as reliability and efficiency.

Overall, the Firewall Analyzer is hugely beneficial in terms of policy ruleset management.

Nothing comes to mind in terms of things that need to be improved.

In terms of additional features in the next release, more integration with SD-WAN would be valuable.

I would also like to see more integration with Cloud security products and services but overall, the product compatibility and integration with multi-vendor and differing platforms/environments is pretty comprehensive. That said, with the fast-moving nature of SD-wan and Cloud Security, product features and enhancements will need to keep pace because clearly, Cloud Security is where the industry will be focusing. 

We have been using AlgoSec for nearly a year.

AlgoSec is as stable as can be expected.

It is highly scalable and more than meets the requirements for our environment.

They were very good, responsive, knowledgeable, and usually resolved issues quickly.

We did not use another product prior to AlgoSec for the same purpose.

The initial setup was fairly straightforward; however, with the usual initial setup niggles and teething issues.

The Professional Services team assisted us and had a very good level of expertise.

ROI is very well leveraged.

Setup cost and pricing were reasonable and the licensing was straightforward.

We didn't evaluate other products as we had a previous, much smaller deployment of AlgoSec that we were happy with.

Overall, I am happy with the product; it meets and even exceeds our expectations and ticks all the boxes in terms of reasons for purchasing it.

We use this solution for the management of firewalls on a client with a multi-vendor landscape and a low maturity level in terms of security operations and mechanisms. The AlgoSec tool supported the necessary transformation we were helping the client with, centralizing and simplifying the management of all firewalls in several sites across the globe.

AlgoSec is a powerful firewall management tool. I have supported a client implementing the firewall analyzer in an environment with several firewall vendors and poor management. The implementation went smoothly, with good support from the AlgoSec team. However, the configuration was tricky due to the maturity of the client and the ‘messy’ situation, and the internal know-how available regarding what was implemented on the multiple sites.

The most valuable feature is that the tool is capable of simplifying firewall management and configuration in an automated fashion. Additionally, the fact that it is also possible to implement a FW management workflow clearly supports the improvement of the 'way of working' and operation of the FW environment.

The network mapping interface could be improved in the next version. In a complex landscape, with several nodes/equipment, it can be somewhat more difficult to properly visualize the network map. It requires several zoom-in and zoom-out operations, and it is not so visually appealing. Nevertheless, it is still a valuable feature and was highly used by my team.

We evaluated other options before choosing this solution including Skybox and Palo Alto Panorama.

Do not underestimate the configuration effort, especially on a more complex landscape.

AlgoSec is used on a daily basis by both our IT and IS groups to manage BAU and FW change requests. It integrates with ServiceNow, PaloAlto, and our SIEM tool. It helps to perform FW cleanup, regulations requirement, FW migration projects, etc.

AlgoSec has helped me in the last three companies that I have worked for. I was working to do Firewall migration projects, FW cleanups of risky rules (FW policy optimization), process def between IT and IS, audit, SOC reports, GRC support, and Cloud support in both native and Hybrid environments that we use. 

The features that I have found most valuable are:

• Great visibility for High-risk firewall rules
• Mapping business risks
• Mapping risky applications
• Informative regulation reports for PCI-DSS, ISO 27001 and many more
• FW cleanup recommendation
• Easy logging capabilities with leading SIEM products in both LEEF and Syslog formats

I would like to see Bi-Directional API support in order to integrate with SOAR platforms that provide SOC automation and IRR.

Integration with CISO dashboards would be an improvement.

It would be nice to have support for IaaS, CASB, and DLP tools, which will allow full life cycle management of security incidents.

It would be nice to have an out of the box "best practices recommendation" with the relevant "what-ifs". 

This solution scaled to our entire enterprise in a seamless way.

We also used Tufin, but AlgoSec provided us better visibility and ease of use.

My advice is that you must do a POC and show value.

We did not evaluate options other than AlgoSec and Tufin.