AlgoSec Reviews

With a network like ours - more than 100 routing points with around 6 VRF on each - traffic simulation query is one of the most valuable feature on AFA.

For FireFlow, workflow customization and active change are the best features.

In BusinessFlow, the ability to simulate documented flow against configuration by AFA is the best feature to limit differences between documentation and production.

This product allowed us to identify unused rules more easily and doing this simplifies policies in our firewall. We now have documentation of our application with objects sync with real configuration. Our approval in change management has been improve through FireFlow and errors have been reduced through change advised and active change. We also save time by identifying earlier than usual routing issues associated to a change request.

A lot of areas have room for improvement!! This product is still young and in constant development. Interaction with a lot of vendors generates a lot of firewall options (specifically, a timer on services, application control, and so on...). This interaction also generates a lot of bugs in the product. Every new version contains about 10 to 20 bugs for our environment. This is partially explained by the fact it has to understand all of the architecture and specificity associated with all of the supported vendors.

A few of the bugs are:

• Services composed with something else other than TCP or UDP are not well-handled and not working in simulation queries. (For example, AH or ESP or EthernetOverIP.)
• Traffic with same objects in source and destination are not working.
• When NAS is used to store reports, we have had a lot of bugs associated with wrong URL encoding.
• Role assignment with multiple LDAP issues.
• Some file cleanup not working as expected.
• Active change is available for only a few vendors.
• BusinessFlow doesn't offer auditing regarding object management and with a lot of application and managers, it quickly becomes an issue with duplicated objects and so on.
• There are also gaps in access right management.

I have been using it nearly two years.

Every version came with its bug bundle... In two years, we opened 50 cases and about 40 of them escalated to development for resolution. This situation is also explained by complexity of our architecture.

I have not encountered any scalability issues. Each version usually improves performance and the amount of required disk space.

Technical support is 7/10; quick to give a new version solving the issue but long to identify the issue, even when it seems to be identified from the beginning.

For example, more than a month ago, we identified a wrong link associated to NAS configuration. We can clearly see that the wrong link was being generated, pointing from the NAS directly to the NAS repository, instead of a symlink. It took more than a month for support to accept this and to escalate the case to dev. After dev escalation, we are expecting a fix on Monday. So, it took four weeks to acknowledge the issue and two weeks to be fixed by development.

We did not previously use a different solution.

Initial setup is straightforward; some custom options can be tricky to set up, but will not be used by most customers.

Be careful with VRFs. One router with two VRFs consumes two licenses. So a new VRF configured on all routers will double the number of licenses required on routing elements.

We benchmarked Tufin before choosing AlgoSec. We chose AlgoSec over Tufin for its capacity to be more customized and its support for MPLS and VRF.

Offer me a job. ;) I will help you set it up.

More seriously, test it with caution through a POC to be sure that all your architecture specifics are addressed. If not all of them are addressed, ask for a commitment regarding support of missing features and ask for those commitments to be written down before ordering.

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.

AlgoSec is a global tool that has been purchased to get a centralized view of our infrastructure. This enables us to review our security posture and implement a compliance strategy.

AlgoSec is also used for in-depth firewall analysis and intelligent policy tuning and optimization. It helps in regulatory compliance metrics and overall firewall security optimization. It is currently used by the network security, audit, and internal control departments of organizations, giving overall insight/visibility and enhancing improved security across the enterprise.

It has been really helpful in automating changes. This helps us to reduce operational work drastically. The product has centralized visibility, unified management, and reporting across an entire hybrid environment. It can be deployed on-premises, in a private cloud, public cloud, and in SDN platforms. It automatically discovers applications and their connectivity flows, then associates connectivity with their underlying firewall rules.

AlgoSec's solutions are incredibly powerful, providing us with intelligent process improvement that has directly translated into the highest level of security and compliance for our internal network.

AlgoSec is one of the most complete security management solutions on the market. It manages security and compliance based on the applications that power our business. It is one product combining multiple tools. This makes a real difference compared to its competitors.

It helps us deploy new business applications quickly and securely. It ties cyber threats directly to critical business processes.

Using AlgoSec is a double benefit to us. By using this solution we can reduce the cost and the number of errors in our daily operation and also expand our offerings. 

It has reduced our audit preparation efforts and costs drastically and maintains continuous compliance.

AlgoSec delivers a rich set of change management workflows and enables zero-touch change processes if no risks are identified.

AlgoSec proactively analyzes all risks in the network security policy, across multi-vendor firewalls and cloud security groups.

AlgoSec is the only solution that supports the entire security policy management lifecycle from application connectivity discovery, through migration, maintenance, and decommissioning. Independent testing describes it as ‘one of the most complete security management solutions on the market’.

It seamlessly integrates with all leading brands of traditional and NGFWs, cloud security controls, routers, and load balancers.

The graphical user interface is much better than in other products.

The GUI has not been upgraded for a long time and could use updating.

We have been using AlgoSec for several years.

I'm sure we will use this solution for ten more years, at least, as long as it continues to do what is promised.

This product is ready to work within a next-generation infrastructure environment. It simplifies and automates network security policy management to make your enterprise more agile, more secure and more compliant – all the time.

Overall, this is a complete product that helps our organization on a daily basis.

The automation and orchestration of security-related change requests on our selected firewall (in our case Checkpoint) to decrease the time it takes to raise, manipulate, and execute change requests. This is all done with minimal interaction from our Firewall and IPS team, allowing them to more effectively use their time.

It has eased the process of streamlining our firewall configuration management considerably. Our firewall and IPS team now has the ability to budget their time and focus on other tasks, rather than dealing with repetitive change request functions. This has enabled the team to work much more efficiently and effectively.

The feature we found most useful is the automation of the change process within our organization for firewalls. This feature has reduced the number of mundane tasks the firewall and IPS team undertake on a regular basis. We have been able to increase the effectiveness of the team, allowing them to prioritize more complex and business-critical tasks in a faster manner.

In terms of integrations, we would like to see a greater number with the upcoming and next-generation tools (i.e. SOAR and a selection of other SIEMs). This has been a problem for us, as we are going through the process of enhancing our security and some of the products we are looking at are lacking built-in support (integration). 

The AlgoSec Firewall Analyzer was greatly used for firewall analysis, policy tuning, and optimization. The automated change management feature was very useful and integrates seamlessly into the change management process.

This solution helps in maintaining and providing regulatory compliance metrics and to optimize the overall security of the organization. It provides great visibility into your firewall rules, thereby allowing you to eliminate redundant or overlapping rules. It saves time by allowing administrators to test network traffic and pinpoint which rules are being triggered for a particular traffic flow.

The most valuable features to me were the following:

1. Testing network flows and optimizing firewall policies.
2. Obtaining regulatory and compliance metrics for audits.
3. Visualize complex networks using the topology maps.
4. Simple interface and ease of navigation.

The product has a lot of great features already. However, I would like the reporting to be more customizable, as per user and auditing needs.

It is a highly scalable solution as per my experience.

I haven't used any other solutions.

I do not have much information on the pricing, as I wasn't part of the actual procurement process. I was told that the pricing and licensing was comparatively fair.

I did a basic evaluation of FireMon, which had identical features to the AlgoSec Firewall Analyzer.

We use AlgoSec for firewall policy management.

The most valuable feature of AlgoSec is its firewall analyzer. AlgoSec also has a better interface.

AlgoSec's audit management is not good enough and can be improved. Also, AlgoSec should be made more scalable.

I have been using AlgoSec for around one year.

AlgoSec is a stable solution.

AlgoSec is not a scalable solution. Only I use AlgoSec in our company to do firewall management.

It is moderately easy to set up AlgoSec.

Two staff were involved in AlgoSec's deployment, which took around three hours.

Before choosing AlgoSec, we evaluated Tufin as an option. We chose AlgoSec because it has a better interface.

AlgoSec is a good firewall management tool for organizations with multiple firewall levels. If you only have two or three firewall levels, then AlgoSec is not worth investing in.

Overall, I rate AlgoSec an eight out of ten.

Our primary use for AlgoSec is to automate our firewall configuration. We use the AlgoSec system to remotely configure the firewalls, making our life easier.

We are in a multisite environment with plenty of firewalls for perimeter security and LAN segregation for specific proposes. This solution helped us to make the process more dynamic.

It has reduced the workload for the firewall team thanks to the API integration with our ticketing system, doing the standard type of request automatically. Before having it, we had to create a lot of standard rules that now can now be just pushed from the AlgoSec system.

The automation of the firewall rule deployment, working together with our ticketing system, is the most valuable feature of this solution. The needs as required by a user request are automatically validated and configured in the specified firewalls without any human action. This improves the firewall team's workload.

I would be nice to have a good tool for network map discovery in the GUI to make it more user friendly and be able to check and modify network maps in graphical and more intuitive way . This will improve our network overview for new deployments and troubleshooting. 

I have been using this solution for three years.

In three years, we have only had one issue with respect to stability.

When we had the issue they responded well.

We did not use another solution before AlgoSec.

We deployed this solution using our in-house team.

The reduction in workload reduces the cost in terms of human time.