FireMon Security Manager Reviews

It was used for firewall change review. For our company, it became an invaluable tool for auditing purposes.

It allowed us to track every change made to the firewall. We were able to see who made the changes, when the changes were made, and exactly what was modified.

We monitored multiple firewalls. In the version we used, we had to check the changes made on each firewall individually. We didn’t see a condensed list of changes across our environment.

I used it for 1.5 yrs.

We encountered minor issues with FireMon and its collection of data from Palo Alto firewalls. It required a small amount of additional time with system engineers on our side and on FireMon’s side to complete the deployment.

The customer service was excellent.

At the time we were using the product, it did seem like the tech support staff was very limited in size. I am sure they have grown more since we used this product.

We used another product (Tufin). For us, we needed to make a change because they lacked the ability to support Palo Alto (at that time). FireMon was a better fit with that firewall.

The initial setup was straightforward. Minimal support was required to complete it.

We implemented it through an in-house team. We required minimal assistance from the vendor.

There are very few products that can do what FireMon can. I would definitely recommend it if there is a need to review firewall changes.

Security Manager (SM) and Risk Analyzer (RA) are the most valuable features to me. SM assesses a network's security posture in terms of deployed policies, redundant policies, duplicate policies, etc. RA takes a snapshot of everything connected to and within the network down to the end points. It recommends security policies that would improve and further secure the network from potential threats etc.

The product is extremely helpful in policy analysis and improvement. RA was exceptional is identifying risk exposure areas.

Although there is nothing 'wrong' in FireMon's support for other vendors, with the advent of SDN, NGFW, etc., I think FireMon will have to cover more layer 3 devices from different vendors. Again, their current database covers almost all of the major vendors: Cisco, Juniper, Fortinet, etc. However, there is always room for growth in this particular area.

I have used this solution since 2012.

We have not encountered any issues with stability so far.

We have not encountered any issues with scalability so far.

Their technical support is superior.

Pricing and licensing is structured well and FireMon was very helpful in meeting the target budget for this project.

We looked at AlgoSec before choosing FireMon.

• Firewall cleanup - the best and most efficient way to clean the firewall from unused, redundant, shadowed rules that create unnecessary risks and impacts the firewalls performance overtime. Also, it helps with the PCI compliance.
• Rule use analysis.

• Improved change workflow
• Optimized my firewalls
• Meet PCI compliance
• Enhanced security

Needs more functional basic workflow for the Policy Planner for those who do not need a fully customized workflow.

One year.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

I've found technical support to be a 9/10.

Straightforward.

Add infrastructure devices to the firewalls and negotiate an overall discount that way. Needed to get insight into configurations.

Tufin and AlgoSec were evaluated as well.

The customized workflow is worth it. If you are considering to migrate to new firewalls, implement FireMon because it will make your migration much easier. Also, cleaning up some slow firewalls will help you extend its life.

The Configuration Change Management feature was something we were interested in as it helped us to identify who made the change, when and why. Also, the workflow was easy to set up to ease operations.

The second important feature I liked was determining unused rules - rules placed incorrectly in the ACL - this helped us to reduce the load on the firewalls, thus we didn’t have to buy a new firewall due to high CPU or memory consumption. With the help of FireMon, we fine-tuned the rules and were able to save money for buying a new firewall.

As mentioned, we were able to ease the operations and set up a workflow that allowed the firewall and other network-related requests to go through a formal approval process. This helped to track who, when and why the request was done.

Also, removing redundant rules and placing the rules at the correct place helped lower CPU and memory consumption.

I would have preferred fewer updates, as there were quite a few updates made every now and then. Secondly, the Risk Management Module didn’t work well until you have the all of the subnets mapped. This can be improved.

I used it for two years.

I didn’t really encounter any deployment issues. However, sometimes the GUI used to crash when it tried to populate the device map; we had a lot of devices. At times, the map displayed fine, even though it took some time to show up; and at other times, the GUI crashed. This should be fixed.

Technical support was fine; they have good technical people. However, support can be improved, if they become more responsive.

I did not previously use a different solution.

Initial setup was fine; you just need to map certificates between the sensor and the Application Server, which was something different. It can be sorted out through some other methods as well. I don’t exactly remember, but we faced one issue and to resolve it, we had to install the certificates again to get it working.

Implementation was done by the vendor team.

Although I have left the company, I heard that since the license renewal cost was too high, management decided not to renew it. The vendor should reduce the license renewal cost.

I personally did not test any other alternative, but I heard management evaluated Skybox as well; they eventually chose FireMon. It was a management decision, so I don’t know why others were rejected.

Check the renewal cost, and determine whether the Risk Management Module is mature enough and whether GUI crash issues have been fixed or not. Maybe for small companies, it comes up fine, but for large environments, it might cause issues.

Security Manager: It effectively manages the complexity and change associated with today’s network security infrastructure and has a good hold in the market.

It’s very helpful during our firewall and network devices audit, and also beneficial when backup is required of network security devices.

I am desperately looking forward to seeing FireMon considered as a good backup solution for network security devices, which can store up to the last 10 incremental backups. This way, the business can grow with multiple solutions to customer.

I have been using it for five years.

I have not really encountered any deployment, stability or scalability issues. Installation and upgrade are quite simple and easy.

Technical support is satisfactory.

Previously we were using AlgoSec, but it requires to be updated from time to time. Also, it wasn’t found to be a fruitful solution and has a lot of room for improvement.

We recently installed FireMon on VMware architecture and it was very smooth and without issues.

Implementation was easy and documents are available in FireMon Center, so the in-house support team implemented it without any issues.

Per-device license is little costly, but with such good features it’s understandable.

It is a good solution for audit trails and end-user visibility.

We can check the compliance of each firewall, check the KPI of each firewall to determine the security posture of the network, monitor changes done on the firewalls and provide overview of all the rules, either unused, duplicate or risky rules.

We now have clear visibility of our firewall, clear auditing of each firewall rule and changes, and of course, it helps us comply with governing bodies.

They should add SMB firewall support and not only the big players.

I have used it for one year.

I did not encounter any stability issues.

I did not encounter any scalability issues.

Technical support is 9/10.

Initial setup was straightforward and it was easy to follow the installation steps.

It has great pricing with big discounts.

Prepare the necessary details and make sure you configure the needed firewall according to their guide for a smooth implementation.

It’s provided us with proactive security intelligence so we can act before we have a security breach.

FireMon allows us to monitor and assess our network, giving continuous visibility into and control over firewall infrastructure, network security policies and underlying IT risk.

The reporting needs some improvement to ensure that we are provided with consistent data accross each firewall device on the network.

I’ve been using it for two years.

There were no issues with the deployment.

We had no issues with the performance.

It's been able to scale for our needs.

8/10

This is my first time using a solution like this.

It’s quite straightforward.

We had it implemented by a vendor team.

Optimizing and cleaning firewall rules and objects to maintain the security of the firewall and other devices.

Not experienced yet with the product. We are still doing our evaluations and having other discussions with different vendors to understand product capabilities.

The Policy Optimizer and Firewall Manager for different brands of firewall. 

Continuous firewall policy improvement should available out-of-the-box for firewall operation. We are also looking for more integration with SIEM and other tools.

The version is an important choice for the product.