AlgoSec Reviews

The most common use cases include:

• Performing audits on an annual basis with the help of information security
• Remediating risky rules by trusting them or remediating them at the firewall level
• Unused rules and disabled rules are addressed on a regular basis
• All firewall changes are monitored through AlgoSec with the help of change notifications
• Improving compliance and risk management and connections revolving around the network Layer 3
• Locating objects and addressing any issues on a much quicker basis

We were able to improve the security ratings of our firewalls. It helped us with annual audits, change notifications, rule assessments, and visibility in general.

It improved compliance and risk management and connections revolving around the network Layer 3.

We can get all the firewall-related data with a single click and effectively work on synchronizing with all the firewall gateways including the management server.

It helps us with firewall audits on an annual basis with the help of information security.

We remediate risky rules by trusting them or remediating them at the firewall level.

We address the unused rules and disabled rules on a regular basis.

All firewall changes are monitored through AlgoSec with the help of change notifications.

It improved compliance and risk management and connections revolving around the network Layer 3.

It helps locate objects and address any issues on a much quicker basis.

RFEs are kept open for too long. We had requested a couple of features, including the ability to trust implicit rules, and IPT doesn't run on IPSEC-enabled firewalls (Cisco to be specific). We had reported these issues for over four years now and still we do not see any resolution.

There is no visibility for the changes made to the NAT rule policies.

Adding objects or object groups on the firewall also do not generate a change notification.

There is no visibility for changes made to the secondary standby firewall if the firewalls are added as a cluster.

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

We did not previously use a different solution.

We did not evaluate other options. 

We use the solution for firewall management (with AFA - AlgoSec Firewall Analyzer) and application network visibility (with AppViz).  

We are running multiple firewalls and hundreds of users who request firewall connectivity.  

When it comes to a large organization with many vendors/partners, our firewalls are more easily managed using the AlgoSec AFA component.  The ease of use, visibility, compliance, and efficiency is unmatched in the industry. 

We have used AlgoSec AFA to have more visibility into the network and know what firewalls to activate. 

AlgoSec AFA has great search tools and firewall cleanup functionality. 

The Algsec AppViz is a newer Algosec element that we will use to improve application security and visibility in our complex network.

The firewall management tool and AppViz for application visibility and security in the network are great. 

The user-friendliness, visibility, compliance and efficiency are unparalleled in the industry. We have more visibility into the network and now we know what firewalls to activate. 

AlgoSec AFA has great search tools.

The firewall cleanup functionality is helpful. 

We also enjoyed the use of AlgoCare which speeds up the ticket troubleshooting process with AlgoSec Support.

I would say that the cases opened with AlgoSec could be solved faster or escalated sooner to the senior engineers/2nd or 3rd tier. AlgoSec Support is very good at responding very fast (faster than the required SLA) and very timely. Their engineers are based either in India or Israel. Each region has its sales person and technical engineer person.  

Another pet peeve is that there are hotfixes for new issues or bugs at least once a month, if not more frequently.  Overall, AlgoSec is trying to improve its case-resolution support team and process, and we are optimistic that our issues or bugs will be fixed much timelier.

We've used the solution for over three years.

It is a very stable product.

The solution is very scalable.

Customer service and support are very prompt, always complying with SLAs. However, the time to resolution can be improved.

Neutral

We did not use a different solution previously.

The initial setup is very straightforward, and the online documentation and AlgoSec engineer support are more than adequate.

We set up the solution in-house.

I am not privy to the financial benefits or ROI for this product.

I am not privy to the cost of the product, as I am a Network Specialist.

The AlgoSec solution was selected before I joined the organization.

I am working with AlgoSec for supporting my end clients and partners. AlgoSec has different functionalities. The primary use case of this solution is firewall policy management which helps most of the enterprise's customers to manage their L3 devices and multiple firewalls in their environment at a single console and audit firewall configuration from time to time. AlgoSec provides full visibility into the risk involved in firewall change requests. The network topology table helps to understand where the traffic flows through and where it's interconnected.

The comprehensive visibility of network security allows users to understand the dependencies between different policies. In the firewall analyzer, we can easily visualize and analyze all the devices within the network. To check the connectivity between the two devices, you can use the source's IPs and destination.

We can build the whole network topology using Algosec easily and provide optimization with all networks.

The verification of policies on all integrated firewalls with a minimal time period. 

The solution helps visualize and manage the hybrid network. 

Auto Discover applications and services are great. 

It simplifies security policy management. 

The product enhances visibility and control. 

Compliance automation and network topology are great. 

You can connect applications to security policy rules. 

Everything can be micro-segmented successfully.

We can easily identify risky rules. 

End-to-end security management is simple in that we can automate every change. 

It has effortless cloud management and can detect firewall configuration changes to spot unusual activities.

AlgoSec provides very good support to their clients. There are no complaints. That said, these items can be improved:

• Support can be improved as there are time delays for resolutions
• In the current version of AngloSec analyzer, we can not delete the object from all firewalls and need to do the task manually
• We need more effective topology diagram
• There are challenges in connecting the different security vendors
• User creation and assigning roles are a little bit difficult
• While upgrading we have to upload package files which can be downloaded from the Algosec website yet the downloading takes time

The stability is excellent.

The product performs well in the environment.

We did not previously use a different solution.

Licensing is based on a subscription model and the costs associated are worth it.

We did not evaluate other options.

We have implemented the AlgoSec ASMS solution with the AFA Firewalls analyzer, AFF Fireflow, and AppViz application security,

We are using all these modules to have a more tightened and secure environment. The AFA we are using is it to optimize and clean the firewalls' rules and to comply with the cybersecurity policies and standards. 

The Fireflow is integrated with the ticketing system to simplify and facilitate the opening of tickets process and document it for later reference.

The AppViz module is used to secure and optimize access to the applications in a secure way.

The solution has allowed us to:
• Easily prove compliance during internal or external audits
• Has reduced resources needed to manage firewall changes

With the AlgoSec firewall analyzer, it now takes us half the time to deploy firewall changes and policy optimization.

The AFA also provided us with the flexibility and intelligence that reduces human error and risk.

It allows the security compliance team to focus more on providing a better level of security and compliant devices than on the process and changes.

AlgoSec Firewall Analyzer offers great security policy visibility and the analysis has changed the firewalls management and operation, including firewall rulesets cleaning, optimization, tuning, and ensuring compliance with the company and PCI-DSS requirements.

Also, the fact that this firewall management solution will reduce the resources needed to manage the firewall changes the management processes and audits.

It leads to a quick response to any type of audit whether it's an internal audit or an external audit.

Releasing hot fixes or patches is late compared to other security products.

Also, the integration with the Cisco FTD security group tagging is still not supported, so we cannot get the rules with SGT-ACL, and still there is no clear roadmap to support such a feature.

The user interface can be more friendly. They could work on enhancing it by adding step-by-step guides in the GUI of the AlgoSec AFA.

It's better to give some priority to the integration with other security systems and enhance this capability.

I've used the solution for about two years.

I did not use another solution previously.

I did not evaluate other options. 

We use it for planning firewall changes and traffic simulation queries.

We use AFA (AlgoSec Firewall Analyzer) and FireFlow. Our network environment is mostly on-premises.

It has improved the way our organization functions in that, for our change process, we now require all changes to be planned using AlgoSec so that the security team has visibility into the changes and we're aware of any risks. We also are using the covered rules and risky-rule detection to improve our security posture.

We haven't fully implemented the processes, so we haven't measured any reduction in human error as a result of using the solution, but subjectively, it has reduced human error.

It has also helped to simplify the jobs of our security engineers.

The most valuable features for us are the functionality it provides for our two main use cases: planning firewall changes and traffic simulation queries.

We haven't used it yet to prepare for audits and ensure our firewalls are in compliance, but I think it will be very helpful for that. That's one of the main reasons we bought it.

We are using it with a couple of Cisco technologies and we're also sending events out to our Microsoft Sentinel workspace. We have a couple of other security technologies in there as well. AlgoSec integrates well with the Cisco ACI environment and with our Firepowers, our FTDs. There are still some bugs but it generally works well.

The overall visibility it gives us into our network security policies is pretty good but it has some bugs and shortcomings. It doesn't support all features on our firewalls. For instance, planning changes, which include net rules, doesn't work. It didn't integrate so well with the ACI network. It doesn't work with all firewall rules or with net rules on our firewalls.

For about 70 percent of firewall changes it does show us the risks, while for 30 percent of the changes, we can't plan because of these bugs and shortcomings.

I have been using AlgoSec for about a year.

The stability is good.

We've had no problems in terms of scalability.

I'm sure we will continue to add firewalls to it and we want to do more with the FireFlow.

Their technical support is good but it can be slow.

Neutral

The initial setup was straightforward.

We have about 10 engineers using it, and just one person who looks after it, maintenance-wise.

We used their personal services to help us set it up. We had an onboarding package. It wasn't me doing the configuration but it seemed straightforward with their support.

Our experience with them was good overall. We had some frustrations and surprises in the early days with the product not being completely compatible with our environment. But over the last year, they've been fixing the bugs which is making it much more usable. When we started, it had a lot of problems with our environment. We were only able to plan something like 40 percent of the changes, and the traffic simulations weren't working with our network environment. But now, we're up to close to 70 percent.

It took about nine months before it was properly integrated and enough of the bugs had been fixed for it to be helpful.

We are not measuring the effort saved or the errors avoided, but we think it's a good investment.

Initially, it was more expensive, but we managed to negotiate the price. It's about average now.

In addition to the standard fees, we bought the Jumpstart package to help us configure it.

We looked into Tufin. We chose AlgoSec because of its support for Cisco ACI. Tufin was just releasing that and we felt that AlgoSec was a more mature product.

At the moment, it hasn't reduced the time it takes to implement firewall rules in our organization. It's being used to improve the quality of the changes we make and improve visibility. But we haven't fully implemented the FireFlow features. That's our problem, rather than the tool. We just haven't finished implementing it.

We're only using AlgoSec for on-premises, but we do have environments in the cloud and we plan to use it for those in the future. It would help us manage these multiple environments in a single pane of glass, but for the moment we aren't using it in that way. However, we do have a number of firewalls that we have onboarded from acquisitions, so we are not just using it for our data centers. We're using it for smaller acquisitions' firewalls as well to understand the security posture of companies that we are purchasing.

My advice would be to make sure that the solution is completely compatible with whatever infrastructure you have. We should have spent more time evaluating its support for our infrastructure to avoid some of the problems or surprises we had when we implemented it.

We have around 200 firewalls that we manage through AlgoSec. We use it for automation purposes in certain cases. We have 10 to 12 team members who use AlgoSec.

We have around 100 plus on-premises devices. However, we are moving over to the cloud. At present, we mainly have Microsoft Azure, and we are going to deploy AWS and Google Cloud soon.

We use AlgoSec FireFlow as well. 

The amount of time spent on doing simple tasks, such as adding a particular rule or giving access to a particular person, or doing the same repetitive task has been reduced. We don't have to manually look into duplicate rules or look into traffic that is not getting hits. It will be automatically taken into consideration by AlgoSec, and the information will be given to us so that we can take action on that part. It saved us a lot of time.

When the staff is doing the same repetitive task all the time, there will be errors. AlgoSec helped to reduce human error and misconfigurations to a great extent.

One of the features that I like about AlgoSec is the topology table. It helps us understand where the traffic flows through, where it gets interconnected, and how the traffic flows from our device to the other device.

The other good feature that I have come across is that it suggests best practices. For example, we had a case where there was a legacy rule that was a wide-open rule. AlgoSec identified what IP traffic got hit and based on that suggested allowing those particular IPs instead of maintaining a wide-open rule.

In terms of the overall visibility that AlgoSec gives into our network security policies, I like the best practice assessment in terms of compliance. It helps us deal with wide-open rules and duplicates, and provides suggestions on how the rules can be written, restructured, and reordered.

AlgoSec reduced the time it takes to implement firewall rules. Also when it is upgraded, which we are in the process of doing, when a user tries to raise a ticket, that ticket will be associated with AlgoSec FireFlow. Then, the user will be able to access it themselves.

We work with multiple security vendors, but not all vendors integrate with AlgoSec. As a result, our team has both AlgoSec and Tufin. In terms of integrations, it's going well so far.

AlgoSec helped to simplify the job of our security engineers. For example, a new user who tries to gain access will have to raise a case, and automation will take that into consideration. It helped us to disable rules that are not being utilized, merge any duplicate rules, and reorder rules based on traffic hits to have a good flow. Any rule works from top to bottom, and AlgoSec will place the major items at the top. These helped to reduce latency as well.

Certain firewalls don't integrate with AlgoSec, and it would be great if this bug could be fixed.

AlgoSec looks into compliance and is helpful. However, it would be nice to have validations that can run before the changes are posted and implemented. Now, if something goes wrong the user would need to reach out to us, and then we would have to troubleshoot. Instead of that, if there are validations for simple tasks, it would be great.

I've also heard from our AlgoSec vendor about a feature that is coming up in the future. With the topology table, we can see the interconnected devices to understand the traffic flow. I was told that with this new feature, if we find a blockage, maybe on a firewall, that we would be able to go to that firewall and allow traffic through a specific rule. This would be done just by right-clicking on that particular device and getting the change implemented through automation. This would be a helpful feature.

I've been using AlgoSec for about a year.

The stability has been okay so far. There are a few bugs, but no device is perfect.

We previously used FireMon and switched to AlgoSec because we were not satisfied with it. FireMon was good but was not user-friendly.

I recommend AlgoSec because it has good features and is more user-friendly than FireMon. AlgoSec has fewer options in terms of tabs, so you'll be able to navigate and explore everything. From a technical point of view, AlgoSec is good for a newcomer. Therefore, I would give AlgoSec an overall rating of eight on a scale from one to ten.

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 AFA (AlgoSec Firewall Analyzer). We use the solution to configure the firewall rules automatically. 

We have two data centers where we use Check Point and Palo Alto and about 30 percent of our operation is on AWS and about another 30 percent is on Azure.

Before AlgoSec, an analyst had to configure the rules one by one but now, when rules are needed, they are configured automatically.

Another benefit is that it has reduced the time it takes to implement firewall rules. That's why we bought it. We used to have two or three people just configuring rules and now we only have one. It has saved us two FTEs. I'm also completing requests faster. Before, I used to take three, four, or even five days to do one request, but now it's half a day or less.

It helps us maintain compliance very well because everything is automated, meaning that everything should be right. When there are humans doing things, there can be mistakes.

Another reason we chose AlgoSec was that it integrates well with multiple solutions. We have Check Point and Palo Alto, and it's better using AlgoSec to automate things.

Rule configuration is the most valuable feature.

It also provides very good visibility into the risk involved in firewall change requests and that is very important to us.

I've been using AlsoSec for about a year or a little bit more.

The stability of the solution is good. I never have problems with it.

Their tech support is okay.

Positive

This is our first automation solution. We went with AlgoSec after asking partners and other companies and everybody said, "Use AlgoSec."

Deploying it is easy. We spent some time on it because, in the beginning, we didn't have a lot of guys to work on AlgoSec. But when we designated one guy to do it, it took him about two weeks or three weeks.

It's worth the cost. But it's not just the cost. I'm faster than I was and that's what matters to me.

The pricing could be better.