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FireMon Security Manager vs RedSeal comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary
 

Categories and Ranking

FireMon Security Manager
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.7
Number of Reviews
54
Ranking in other categories
Firewall Security Management (4th)
RedSeal
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
9
Ranking in other categories
Risk-Based Vulnerability Management (17th)
 

Featured Reviews

JeffReese - PeerSpot reviewer
Makes compliance much easier compared to doing it manually, and automates policy changes across environments
People have a tendency to just add rules to firewalls, but they don't go back and take rules away. Some of our customers have thousands of unused rules that have been sitting out there for over a year. In one report, FireMon tells us there are, say, 1,000 rules that can be taken out and it gives us the ability to disable those for a year and to track when we made our changes. After a year, we can go back and eliminate the rules, to bring the configuration down to an almost human-readable level. It also identifies risks in your environment and helps to prioritize fixes. It actually rates the risk level, meaning you look for the red and try to bring everything to green.
Sajid Mukhtar - PeerSpot reviewer
Provides a graphical overview of our network and is easy to deploy, but needs a user-friendly interface and a feature for compliance audit policy
Sometimes, it required us to refresh the configuration. When we integrated any of the configurations into the device, sometimes, it could not detect the exact picture of that device. So, we had to reset the device to see that if it was giving true-positive results or false-positive results. In some cases, we were not able to get true-positive results. There was some kind of bug in that version. Its interface is not user-friendly and needs to be improved. It takes time to understand the interface and various options. Skybox has quite a user-friendly interface. They could provide a feature for compliance audit policy if it is already not there. A compliance audit policy ensures that all configurations are based on the best practices standards, such as CIS benchmarks standard or other similar standards. It provides visibility about whether your device configuration is based on best practices or not. Usually, such a feature is provided by other solutions such as Meteor or Tenable Nessus.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The ease of use is the most valuable feature. There are a lot of products out there, but the ability to navigate through and use Firemon is very good."
"It provides us with a single pane of glass for our on-prem environment, to see configuration. We have not implemented into the cloud yet. We can search for an object group and see where it lives on any firewall in the enterprise or find security rules, no matter what firewall they're on."
"The firewall assessment feature is great."
"Compared to other applications, it is user-friendly. The appearance of the menus and titles is clear and they are easy to follow. Of course, it requires some experience through using it, to go through everything, but it is not very difficult. It is an easy application to use."
"The unused objects is another nice feature, where it digs a little bit deeper into comparing the logs that it sees versus the configurations that it sees... The unused objects feature will go through in a pretty detailed way and show us which ones aren't being used. Or, if they are used, it will show us how often they're used."
"The most valuable feature is the reporting capability because everything that we do is a result of our being able to query a report, based on our environment and our PCI compliance efforts."
"It gives us the ability to go to one place to look for potential firewall rules that are inappropriate, or which don't meet compliance. Instead of manually searching hundreds of firewalls for a policy, we can go to this one location and find the rules which are now out of compliance."
"FireMon is nice and provides 360-degree user views."
"RedSeal has different modules, such as the Analyzer module, which can be leveraged."
"This is the only solution in the world that gives you a digital resilience score."
"The most valuable features are network mapping and configuration."
"RedSeal integrates the network and gives us a visual or graphical overview of our network. If an organization is geographically dispersed, for instance, with one office in Canada and one office in the Philippines, the whole network, including all devices, is integrated into RedSeal, and you can see from where the traffic is going in and out."
 

Cons

"The initial setup can take some time, including connecting it and configuring it. It's not something that is easy for anybody to do. There is time and energy required because of the number of systems you have to configure to get it to work properly."
"We've had recurring issues managing FireMon's internal backups. Sometimes, the space allocated for the backup is full, and there is no process where it deletes files that are older than I certain date. It's just waiting for the storage to get full and then it's cleaned up. It isn't something that creates serious issues for us."
"FireMon could improve its end-user practices. As an end user, I am just trying to catch up on all the alerts. There are so many, and you still have to go through them and document what was found."
"Its reporting can be improved. I am the only one who works a lot with it, and I am having problems in terms of reporting. In the case of Palo Alto, I'm okay with it, but with some of the Cisco devices, such as routers, when I provide the reports to other teams for review, they always say that the hit count is incorrect. So, I was struggling for a long time to work with them. When working with other teams, they have a lot of questions about reporting, such as how it reports, and we are still struggling with that."
"Our firewalls have multiple paths through them and FireMon falls short a little bit because it's not Palo Alto-centric. I don't think FireMon has kept up with where Palo Alto is at. They started out being Check Point-centric for years and they've never really fully embraced the nuances others, like Palo Alto or Fortinet, have. They don't handle a lot of the capabilities and attributes that Palo Alto does yet. They're working on it. They're getting there."
"I think that having a more open system and providing documentation for it would be helpful for users like us. We are pretty adept and can navigate through the Linux software that the on-premises FireMon is based on. It would help us in the long run."
"Policy Planner requirements section is good, but could use some improvement to allow flexibility to enter different types of requests (modifying an existing policy, object or service group, for example) in a structured task format that can be auto-verified."
"The current health and monitoring of the devices is atrocious... Imagine you have a list of 200 devices, and you can grade each of those devices as either green, yellow, or red. However, there might be three different reasons for you to go to red, or eight different reasons to go to yellow, and all of those things could be combined... Out of all those categories, I only find one or two of them that are, perhaps, pertinent."
"One of the areas of concern is the GUI. It is important to our customers that the GUI looks beautiful. It's a Java Client, so you have a Java dependency."
"Sometimes, it required us to refresh the configuration. When we integrated any of the configurations into the device, sometimes, it could not detect the exact picture of that device. So, we had to reset the device to see that if it was giving true-positive results or false-positive results. In some cases, we were not able to get true-positive results. There was some kind of bug in that version. Its interface is not user-friendly and needs to be improved. It takes time to understand the interface and various options. Skybox has quite a user-friendly interface. They could provide a feature for compliance audit policy if it is already not there. A compliance audit policy ensures that all configurations are based on the best practices standards, such as CIS benchmarks standard or other similar standards. It provides visibility about whether your device configuration is based on best practices or not. Usually, such a feature is provided by other solutions such as Meteor or Tenable Nessus."
"There is room for improvement in integrating the OT security part and the private 5G security part in RedSeal."
"The dashboard should be improved to make correlating data easier to do."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Pricing model seems fair."
"FireMon is very expensive. I think that they charge a premium. In general, they are very pricey. Compared to their competitors, they cost a little more than the other solutions that we evaluated."
"Relative to what it offers, the price is fair."
"We don't license all of the devices in our network, so it does not provide us with a comprehensive visibility of all devices in a hybrid network at this time."
"The pricing is very good, very straightforward. It also came in cheaper than AlgoSec and Tufin."
"We pay for it yearly."
"It's a good value. From a licensing standpoint... it's very simple to understand, and gives us a good bang for the buck."
"The pricing was very good during our initial year, but they increased it this year a little bit. The price is okay. It is not cheap, but it is still average."
"The pricing is based on the number of endpoints and devices, and we have seen it range from mid-five figures to low six figures."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
19%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Energy/Utilities Company
6%
Government
22%
Computer Software Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about FireMon?
I like the Security Manager console where we can see any changes that have been made or pull the results of an assessment and control the policies that we implement.
What needs improvement with FireMon?
Although configuration is not the most difficult aspect of FireMon, a basic understanding of cloud computing and firewall principles is necessary for successful implementation. Therefore, simplifyi...
What is your primary use case for FireMon?
FireMon Security Manager is a highly intelligent and useful device that consolidates all our security policies, including those for Zscaler proxies, into a single console. This centralized view eli...
What needs improvement with RedSeal?
There is room for improvement in integrating the OT security part and the private 5G security part in RedSeal.
What is your primary use case for RedSeal?
The primary use cases for RedSeal are lifecycle management, vulnerabilities, and change management. Customers might look up or use these solutions for these areas.
 

Learn More

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Convey, MGM Resorts International, Southwest Airlines, Alkami, Costco, Aetna, IBM, Verizon, Wells Fargo
United States Postal Service, Pacific Gas and Electric Co., Interval International
Find out what your peers are saying about AlgoSec, Tufin, Palo Alto Networks and others in Firewall Security Management. Updated: December 2024.
824,067 professionals have used our research since 2012.