The primary use case was the firewall policy cleaning and optimisation, plus compliance control and some change auditing.
Works at POST Luxembourg
Provides a good optimization function that matches our needs related to other vendors
What is our primary use case?
How has it helped my organization?
AlgoSec provides a good optimization function that matches our needs related to other vendors. It allows us to clean useless rules and objects.
What is most valuable?
We are only using Firewall Analyzer, which is really good compared to other vendors. The other features (FireFlow and BusinessFlow) still aren't mature, and their licensing is expensive.
What needs improvement?
The production needs to be smarter and maybe have some AI capabilities to provide better firewall optimization and workflow integration.
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AlgoSec
November 2024
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814,763 professionals have used our research since 2012.
For how long have I used the solution?
One to three years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The solution is more stable than in the past.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
The report takes time, and the virtual appliance is a resource consumer.
How are customer service and support?
The documentation is clear. The support is available but restricted to some requests that need advance service (not free).
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
Yes, AlgoSec provides a better solution for the firewall rule optimization that matches our production need.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup was simple, and only firewall integration could take time due to some complex interaction.
What about the implementation team?
The implementation was in-house; the product is still simple to manage.
What was our ROI?
Reduced the firewall load due to a good rule table and then extended the firewall life cycle.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Compare with other products to see which one matches the best their needs.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
Tufin, Skybox.
What other advice do I have?
No.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Network Design/Network Security Administrator at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
It has made implementing regulatory requirements like PCI DSS and ISO easier. It makes me more security aware.
What is most valuable?
- Firewall analyzer
- Fireflow
How has it helped my organization?
It has made implementing regulatory requirements like PCI DSS and ISO easier. It makes me more security aware.
What needs improvement?
It would be nice to have it integrate with the existing change management portal.
For how long have I used the solution?
I've used it for one year.
What was my experience with deployment of the solution?
No issues encountered.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
No issues encountered.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
No issues encountered.
How are customer service and technical support?
Customer Service:
It's good.
Technical Support:It's good.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
I used Cisco Security Monitoring Analysis and Response System before it was retired.
How was the initial setup?
It was straightforward.
What about the implementation team?
We implemented it through a vendor, TransMarket.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
I think the product is too expensive.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
No other options were evaluated.
What other advice do I have?
It is a good product but I think it is expensive.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Buyer's Guide
AlgoSec
November 2024
Learn what your peers think about AlgoSec. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: November 2024.
814,763 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Programme Manager
It is used for change management and to intercept dangerous changes to firewall rules.
Pros and Cons
- "Multi-vendor feature in a multi-vendor environment is a must. Ensures changes adhere to internal and regulatory standards."
- "We don't dare push the new policy automatically, We don't have confidence in this feature."
What is our primary use case?
I mainly use AlgoSec for policy change management and to intercept dangerous changes to firewall rules.
How has it helped my organization?
In the past, policy changes were applied, but not always with the correct approval. Because of this, we ended up with huge holes in the rule base.
What is most valuable?
Multi-vendor feature in a multi-vendor environment is a must. Ensures changes adhere to internal and regulatory standards.
What needs improvement?
Today, we don't dare push the new policy automatically, We don't have confidence in this feature.
For how long have I used the solution?
One to three years.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
No.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
Yes, Tufin.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Senior Network Security Specialist at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
We now have baseline and rules checking.
Pros and Cons
- "We now have baseline and rules checking."
- "It would be nice if it was more variable when checking virtual domain baseline in the same way as Fortigate's firewalls do."
What is most valuable?
- Templates
- For baselines PCI-DSS
How has it helped my organization?
We now have baseline and rules checking.
What needs improvement?
It would be nice if it was more variable when checking virtual domain baseline in the same way as Fortigate's firewalls do.
For how long have I used the solution?
I've used it for one and a half years.
What was my experience with deployment of the solution?
We had issues with the clusters.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
It's slow to synchronize a database that is not synchronized.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
No issues encountered.
How are customer service and technical support?
Customer Service:
It's good.
Technical Support:It's good.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
No previous solution was used.
How was the initial setup?
There were some issues when setting up the cluster and getting it to synchronize properly.
What about the implementation team?
I did it myself.
What other advice do I have?
You need to be able to script and have skills using Linux.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Associate Consultant- Cybersecurity & GRC services at HCL Technologies
Assists with identifying traffic flow issues within a short span of time
AlgoSec assists with identifying traffic flow and related issues within a short span of time. The operational value it provides us helps in increasing our efforts towards different issues, thus increasing our scope of work.
We haven't observed any technical issues with AlgoSec and the support provided is as per the expectations. Overall, we are satisfied with AlgoSec products and services.
I would like to see an improvement to the technical support which is provided by AlgoSec.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Presales Manager at SEFISA
FireFlow helped with documenting all the processes in our rule implementations
Pros and Cons
- "It is very useful for PCI DSS compliance."
- "FireFlow helped with documenting all the processes in our rule implementations."
- "FireFlow was a bit tricky to configure with its customized flows."
- "The reporting could be a bit better."
What is our primary use case?
Check Point platform with over 14 clusters.
How has it helped my organization?
It is very useful for PCI DSS compliance.
FireFlow has been a winning product, as it helped with documenting all the processes in our rule implementations.
What is most valuable?
Rule optimization is one of the features that we have used the most, as firewalls were running for a while with no prior process rules created for them and no follow up being done.
What needs improvement?
- The reporting could be a bit better.
- FireFlow was a bit tricky to configure with its customized flows. Maybe the latest release will resolve this.
For how long have I used the solution?
Three to five years.
How was the initial setup?
Deployment was fairly easy. There were no issues.
What about the implementation team?
Everything was done using in-house resources.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Security Consultant at Securelink
We took advantage of the the system's ability to add intelligence in all stages of a change.
Good and bad experience - A case study of the use of AlgoSec FireFlow.
The Good:
· Cut turnaround time on firewall rule changes from weeks to days.
· Improved network visibility via policy discovery, map and traffic simulations.
· Increased accuracy of firewall changes with improved network security.
· Highly improved traceability and accountability in the firewall change process.
· It is easy to customise AlgoSec FireFlow to a quality system.
The Bad:
· Lots of time was used to build and maintain the topology database (the network map). This is the foundation for the magic to happen. If the topology is wrong, the path discovery and automatic selection of Firewalls in path / in scope for the change can be incorrect.
· A decommissioning feature is missing in FireFlow, separate unused rules can be found and decommissioned via the AlgoSec Analyzer, but the FireFlow product does not have a feature for decommissioning of a complete FireFlow ticket.
· The system has a so called roll-back feature, but this is implemented very simply just by a restore of the complete configuration. In practice, this feature is not useful. If a FireFlow ticket is implemented, and it is discovered that some of the data in the ticket was wrong, it is not possible to roll-back the mistakenly implemented firewall rules. The cleanup is a manual task that can be time consuming.
Challenges in this case story:
To reach the goal and have the above highlighted business impact, several challenges were faced during the first year of deployment.
One of the best lessons is that the AlgoSec FireFlow system is only accurate if the network topology is complete and accurate. We would have to spend a lot of time tweaking the network topology to make it accurate.
Another challenge was software bugs. AlgoSec technical assistance center was keen to help fix the software defects, but still it was time consuming at times when software defects were disturbing normal operation.
Results
Firewalls need constantly maintained rule changes and security assessment in order to adapt to the ever changing business and threats. We see our decommissioned business applications, new factories or sites that are build, etc.
This altogether brings a heavy workload on the security department.
Now the firewall maintenance tasks scale with existing staff.
Firewall rule changes take days and not weeks.
The most significant benefits we achieved were:
· All firewall rules match exactly the planned action
· All stages of a change are now accountable in the history/audit trail of the change
· No time spent on already working change requests
· Full visibility into the network path of traffic
The intelligence provided by the AlgoSec system, and easy accessible security controls are significant, reducing the time spent in the periodic security assessments carried out.
in the AlgoSec product:
Over the last couple of years we have had several missing features in the product that prevented us from reaching the full extent of automation from a start. However, most of the missing capabilities are today in the product.
Remaining is a better support for decommissioning of firewall rules and applications. This is high on our wish list.
Challenge
As responsible for the network infrastructure and security on more than 95 firewalls. The network infrastructure and security must follow the same strict regulated quality guidelines as the main business area itself.
The most central aspects of strict regulated quality are:
Traceability: the ability to reconstruct the development history of the products.
Accountability: the ability to resolve who has contributed what to the development and when.
Firewall change management in this environment is time consuming and cumbersome.
Each firewall change took several weeks with high cost. Many firewall rules were build unnecessarily wide due to complexity in network.
Many changes were performed for already working traffic. Human errors in creation of firewall rules put the total security at risk. The validation process was cumbersome and error prone.
Solution
We succeeded in automating the flow in the change process with full traceability and accountability. AlgoSec FireFlow was integrated with the surrounding quality system using the great customisation capabilities, and is now used as the main change management system for all infrastructure changes to Switch, Router and Firewalls in the production network.
We took advantage of the AlgoSec system's ability to add intelligence in all stages of a change.
This raised the accuracy of firewall changes.
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: I have been working as a contractor for the Customer for 2 Years building and using the AlgoSec FireFlow
My company originally sold the solution to the Customer, however my role has been operation and maintenance at Customer site each day for the last 2 Years
Works at a tech company with 51-200 employees
Reduces time and costs of firewall change management, risk mitigation, and compliance audits.
What is most valuable?
- Intelligent policy tuning helps to reduce risk and improve device performance
- Traffic simulation query on a specific device
How has it helped my organization?
AlgoSec reduces time and costs of firewall change management, risk mitigation, and compliance audits.
What needs improvement?
AlgoSec should support these features:
- Expired time should be one of the components of firewall rules, not only source, destination
For example: Now, in Algosec Fireflow, when creating a change request, there are only 3 component: Source, Destination and Service. I want to have expired date of the traffic
- Detect duplicate objects in different firewalls
Now, Algosec can only detect duplicate object within one firewall. I want to detect in different firewalls
For example: firewall 1 has objet A with IP address 1.1.1.1, firewall 2 has object B with also IP address 1.1.1.1. I want Alogsec to detect this duplication
- Show IP address of object in a report, query result
Now, in report, query results, Algosec only displays name of the objects. I want to display IP address of these objects
For how long have I used the solution?
3 years.
What was my experience with deployment of the solution?
No, we haven't encountered any issues.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
No, AlgoSec is stable.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
No, AlgoSec fit our size and is scalable.
How are customer service and technical support?
Customer Service:
Very good.
Technical Support:Good.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
No.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup was simple.
What about the implementation team?
Via a partner, they're very good.
What was our ROI?
We haven't calculated ROI yet, but AlgoSec saves us labor and a lot of time.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
Tufin, we selected AlgoSec because it provide some useful features that other solution didn't have.
What other advice do I have?
AlgoSec is very helpful for our organization.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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Updated: November 2024
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