AlgoSec Reviews

The primary use for this solution is to clean-up and fine-tune firewall rules.

I found that for policy optimization it does a great job. It handles covered rules, duplicate rules, and consolidated rules.

The most valuable feature is the ability to reorder rules because of the enhancement of firewall CPU performance when they are applied.

I would like an intelligent tuner where it could help update rules with the application ID.

We used AlgoSec during a migration between firewall vendors. We needed a tool that could help evaluate the effectiveness of our existing rule base and inventory network objects.

Running AlgoSec helped us clean up years worth of obsolete rules and objects. This left us with a clean and up-to-date policy on our new firewalls.

• Policy risk mitigation identifies and helps tighten risky rules rendering the policy more secure. 
• The change management feature is great for environments with multiple firewall engineers.

The only thing I had slight issues with is the web UI which is a bit tricky to navigate. It can be difficult to find what you're looking for without having to click around for a bit, but once you get to know where things are, it's not bad.

This is the first solution of this kind I have used.

Setup is a breeze.

I did not evaluate any other solutions.

No.

The majority of customer use cases are around rule optimisation, workflow management, and risk/compliance. 

Our customers are able to optimise and clean the rule sets on our FW estate and streamline the change management process whilst adhering to compliance, governance, and risk requirements.

• Firewall Analyser due to its initial ability to cleanse and provide efficiencies to legacy estates. 
• FireFlow continues to drive customer efficiencies, allowing an organisation to keep up with the pace of change.  
• We see the value of BusinessFlow for organisations involved in digital transformation projects migrating to public/private/hybrid cloud models.

Further integration with ACI and NSX will be key to our customers' requirements moving forward, as customers adopt new, innovative environments.

Not applicable.

Our customers are receiving quick ROI using the AlgoSec platform when compared to the FTE costs for using legacy manual processes.

Licensing is offered as a subscription and as a perpetual model.

Pricing is easy to grasp.

We looked at Tufin and Skybox. AlgoSec was the only vendor who had the full suite of products which met the customer and business demands. BusinessFlow was (still is) the game changer.

The product could be improved by adding additional tools for troubleshooting, not only for the firewall, but for other devices like switch and dynamic routing display. Also, it would be good if it could retrieve all information regarding Cisco Nexus switches and devices.

It would be interesting if the product could automate the switch configuration and create a dynamic map of the entire network.

In the VMware platform, sometimes the application is frozen and we have to reload the machine.

Not at all.

The technical services personnel are very confident and provide good assistance.

No previous solution was used.

The initial setup process is excellent.

The in-house implementation was good for FireFlow.

We've been using Algosec as our reference tool to clean our policies from old unused rules and objects and to assess rules that are categorized as risky so that we can fix those risks.

Firewall Analyzer from Algosec is our main tool for Firewall auditing and it makes our external auditors very confident on the way our policies are managed.

Fireflow from Algosec also helps us identifying which firewalls are on the way from source to destination when we need to open flows and it saves us a lot of time. We are still on our path to implement full automation of firewall policy creation with Algosec's Fireflow but the goal is to achieve it soon.

Since we deployed Algosec our Firewall policies which didn't have much maintenance over more than 15 years had their policies reduced to less than half the rules by using Algosec's Firewall Analyzer to remove unused rules, unused objects withing rules, compacting several firewall rules in one rule, etc.

We were also able with Firewall Analyzer to get risk reports of our firewall policies and start tackling them to close them or at least to be aware of its existance.

Firewall Analyzer is amazon in Policy Optimization and we feel we are much more secure since we have this product. If we add a rule that poses a risk we get an alert from Firewall Analyzer which is very important to us.

We are also starting to use Fireflow and our goal is to have the policy creation automated soon. For now we are already able to identify which firewalls are on the path between point A and point B and we are on the path to full automation which will reduce a lot the workload of our team.

The feature we find the most valuable is the Firewall Analyzer for the firewall policy audits and to show external auditors we have a process to identify risks and to tackle them. It's also very important for policy clean maintenance. 

This helps us know which devices are between the source and destination on the flows that we need to open for the business. The audit tools are also very important to us because we can easily have everything that needs to be presented to the security auditors.

We are in the process of implementing FireFlow for full automation which will save us time for more important things we need to to on daily basis that are not creating firewall rules. We aim to achieve the full automation soon.

In our case it would be very important to improve support to Dell switches and also some Juniper switches, which we have a lot of in our company network. This has been our difficulty for the full automation on the Fireflow. If all our network devices were Cisco I'm sure we would have the network map complete very easily and the full automation working with much less effort.

We already asked Algosec for the support of the switches we have that are not natively supported for the future versions and we expect that we are lucky enough for them to be supported on the next releases, although there are some ways of working around non-natively supported switches to complete the network map.

We have been using Algosec solution for more than 5 years now.

We never had issues so far in terms of stability.

The solution is very scalable and allows you to add all the firewalls and devices you need.

It is also scalable on the licensing as you can start by buying only the Firewall Analyzer license with which you can start onboarding all the devices and completing the network diagram so that Algosec's has the whole picture and know all the paths from network A to B.

After that you are ready to start using FireFlow and you can buy the license only when you are ready to start deploying it.

Sometimes it takes more time than expected to have answers for support tickets, but in general the customer service is good.

Positive

Not in our case.

The initial setup has been easy. The only difficult thing was the part in which we needed to onboard non natively supported switches. That part is a bit more complex.

We implemented with a mix of external company and in-house. The external team was helpful and had a good expertise level.

The time we save on our daily operations is very important. We could reduce the team size with this tool as we had a trainee almost fully working on opening flows.

It also allows us to detect risks on firewall rules and fix them, keeping the company network safe.

The price for the solution is not cheap but if you use it fully it will compensate in terms of securitization and in terms of time gained on the daily operations. It is also very helpful if your company is audited on the security part.

We heard about Tufin and Algosec, and after going through the specs we decided to go on a POC with Algosec and ended up buying it as it fitted our needs. We followed our Firewall integrator advice, who also recommended Algosec for our Firewall's park which is basically Fortinet and Check Point.

We recommend trying fully automation in a controlled environment before widely deploying it to the production firewalls. It's important to gain confidence on the product.

We have a large setup of multi-vendor firewalls with large in numbers of policies and rules. Handling rules and policy visibility manually are very difficult for clients multi platform firewalls. AlgoSec AFA has eased day-to-day operation, firewalls rules optimization, clean-up for unused policies and reporting, and visibility on policy and rules. All of this improves the firewall performance.

AlgoSec FireFlow workflow change tracking in environment makes it easy to have a central repository also multiple stakeholder approved change management.   

The AFA workflow has helped us to manage firewall rules implementation using multiple stakeholders' approval with an end-to-end lifecycle of change management and tracking. 

Reporting helps us with deliverables, areas of focus for improvement, and much more. Algosec AFA is useful for policy optimization and clean-up and can measure capacity management. 

AFA provides greatly extended support for firewall rule review for risky rules, optimization, and clean-up for unused rules. 

Firewall rule automation for implementation also makes support easy for support firewall administrators.

AlgoSec currently has two useful features: AFA and AFF. 

The AFA workflow helped us to manage firewall rules implementation using multiple stakeholders' approval with an end-to-end lifecycle of change management and tracking. 

Algosec AFA is useful for policy optimization, cleanup, and measuring capacity management. 

AFA provides greatly extended support for firewall rule review for risky rules, optimization, and clean-up for unused rules. Firewall rule automation for implementation also makes support easy for support firewall administrators.

There could be certain improvements such as supporting secure email. We have some cases where the client SMTP /POP email system is discarded, which is very important factor change notifications.

Fireflow workflow rule/change implementation for time-based rules is not currently supported. 

These improvements in upcoming code will definitely help with end-to-end firewall rule implementation. 

NAT rule implementations were in the roadmap. We are expecting this soon. 

Certain optimization of AFA/AFF SMS resources would ease daily operations.

I've used the solution for four years.

While stability is good, further improvement is needed.

The scalability is good.

Technical support is good.

Positive

We did not use a different solution previously.

Some changes in setup are ongoing as we are growing.

I am a vendor partner of AlgoSec.

The licensing is commendable.

We evaluated a few other options before positioning this solution. 

The solution could use improved support.

I am part of the team providing managed security solutions and we have a number of clients that have a lot of network and security devices in their environment.

We use AlgoSec primarily to provide solutions to our clients in terms of how we can help tighten their security and optimize network performance.

AlgoSec Firewall Analyser makes this easily possible and with the help of AlgoSec's readily available reports, we are able to provide to all our clients the security and compliance report.

Before AlgoSec, our firewall rules got pretty big over time and it came to the point where it was barely manageable. Duplicate rules and objects were everywhere and there was nothing we could do about it. Performing a manual clean-up was a nightmare and near to impossible.

AlgoSec Firewall Analyser improves the firewall rules dramatically by identifying rules and objects that are not needed and consolidates rules and rule re-ordering.

It also helped our team to optimize performance and further secure the network by identifying risky rules.

I always find the policy optimization by identifying duplicate objects, shadowed rules, and unused objects pretty useful. By eliminating all these duplicate objects, unused rules, and unused objects, firewalls and other security devices will use fewer resources to process certain tasks/requests.

This will benefit both the security engineer managing the security devices and the client as they will spend less time in dealing with optimization and therefore can focus more on other important matters.

AlgoSec firewall analyzer is already an awesome product but there are still some areas that definitely need improving.

For instance, the risky rules reporting should have more information available in the risky rules report - especially when you export the data into a .CSV format. .CSV format being a text-based visualization, some information and formatting cause the reports to lose meaning and only become just another character in the file since it cannot port over some properties (like severity represented by colors).

I've used the solution for more than ten years.

We did not use a different solution previously.

The setup is pretty easy and the cost is really worth it.

We did not evaluate other options. 

• To change management of the rules
• History of changes
• Risk analysis and evolution of the risk factors over time.

• Transparency over the actions made in the rulebase by the different firewall operators
• Documentation of the rules.

The traffic simulation query helps to understand which rules match or don't match for a specific traffic pattern, helping troubleshoot application issues.

We use the "rules change notification" feature to inform the different firewall managers when someone made a change. The actual change comes in a PDF file attached to the e-mail, while it would be faster to have it directly embedded in the notification mail.

Depending on your network topology, the traffic simulator might have some hard time tracing the traffic path between your devices correctly. This has already been improved in the past but could still be enhanced.

The solution is very stable. Some caution is required when you do major upgrades on your firewalls to ensure that AlgoSec can still work with the new software release of the firewall.

The setup is very easy, as it comes as a virtual appliance you deploy in your own virtual environment. The setup is straightforward, and you can very quickly add your firewalls and start tracking changes, query the traffic simulator, and so on.