Tufin Orchestration Suite Reviews

We deployed a proof of concept. We added most of our firewall base to Tufin, although not all. We checked and tested Check Point, Palo Alto, Juniper, Cisco routers, Juniper routers, and F5 load balancers. Mostly we grabbed one instance of each of our technology devices, added it to Tufin, and tried different things. We tried SecureTrack and some basic SecureChange to try to automate our firewall partitions, the firewall "tickets." We presented a form to users to enter the source, destination, service, etc. This was our PoC.

Right now, we're in the process of purchasing Tufin.

With path analysis, you can specify a source, a destination, and a port and it will tell you whether it's blocked or not, and where; which firewall is doing the blocking or the allowing, or whatever. That part is very useful. When you have feedback from the user and you have your source, destination, and port, instead of trying to search on the Check Point console or the Panorama console or the Juniper console to figure out where that packet being dropped, you go to Tufin, put it in and, in 30 seconds, you have your answer. 

It saves time on each ticket. Instead of playing around for 15 or 20 minutes, it's down to 30 seconds. Any first-line of support can go to Tufin, put in the source, destination, and port and they can at least know what to look for, who to involve to further troubleshoot the issue. It's a first-step investigation that saves time.

It also helps us ensure that our security policies are followed across our entire hybrid network.

SecureChange is the most interesting part. It all comes down to having the user request firewall access and SecureChange, based on workflows, takes care of it, sending two or three emails to the business approvers. With one click, you can automate a firewall rule. We have many problems like, I imagine, the whole industry, with delays in implementing firewall rules.

SecureTrack provides all these regulations, PCI kinds of things, so you can try to match all your security policies and firewall configuration to the standard. 

There is also a feature to optimize firewall policies that will delete duplicate objects and rearrange the rules so the machine will function faster.

In addition, the change impact analysis capabilities allow you to do automatic checks of whatever rules you are implementing.

Finally, the change workflow process is flexible and customizable. I was really impressed with it. It's pretty easy. You can add automatic validation steps. Depending on the security matrix, you can pre-allow whatever flow you want. You can do your change analysis automatically or risk analysis automatically; whichever steps you want. It's pretty cool.

The visibility that Tufin provides us with is improvable. The interface is like a 1990s kind of thing. It's a little ugly. There are many things that you cannot tweak, little things like the column width and how you display the information. You end up exporting everything to an Excel file and doing your work there. They tried to put too much stuff on the screen. It's a little difficult to find what we want. It's a design issue, it's not a functionality issue.

The web interface is really like going back in time 20 years. You have to move columns back and forth and make them big to see the whole text in them. If you hover over a name, it won't show the content. You have to click on it and open it. It's a bit cumbersome.

The documentation site is horrible as well. It has a tree structure, and you really get lost quite easily. If you have the patience to browse through that hell of documentation, you will find what you need, but it is hell to browse and search. The information is there, it's just difficult to filter and search it. Documentation is one thing they can improve on.

I haven't found any issues with the stability. In the beginning, it was our problem, our mistake, because we configured the box with eight gigs of RAM. Then we checked and, obviously, we needed 16. After enlarging it to 16, there was no issue whatsoever. It was pretty responsive. Obviously, it was only one user, me, doing things, but I didn't find any issues performance-wise or stability-wise.

We don't have that big of an environment. We added some 20 pairs of firewalls and another 20 or 30 routers, and one F5. I don't think we have scaled Tufin sufficiently to put it under some stress. Our DC is pretty small, we don't have many devices.

Tufin's technical support is excellent. In my old job, I also implemented Tufin, and I was in touch with their Israeli people, the technicians; they're really good. They really know their stuff. In Spain, for southern Europe, they have a couple of people. The technician there is excellent, and the commercial guy is fun. It's the perfect combination.

The setup was straightforward, absolutely. The only problem we had was with Check Point, but I think it's a Check Point problem, not a Tufin problem. Check Point is horribly configured. Managing it is hell. You have to define the OPSEC server with a user name and password, and you have to create the same thing on the provider one. They have to be same user but have different passwords. It's a little difficult. You have to pay close attention so you don't make a mistake. But I think that's a Check Point issue, not a Tufin issue.

The whole Tufin deployment took us about four months, with SecureChange, etc.

Up to the point with Check Point, it was easy. We created a read-only user for our infrastructure, and once we had connectivity from the Tufin box to all the devices, it was pretty simple. It was just IP address of the device, username, password, and go. Except Check Point. We needed to spend a day or two on that.

In terms of our implementation strategy, we wanted to test each of our technology manufacturers: F5, Check Point, Palo Alto, etc. We left our main public-facing networks out of the equation for the PoC. Whenever we implement the whole thing, we will include those. We made SecureTrack work well. We will define our security matrix correctly with all our networks, as granular as we would like it to be. Once we have that, we will go to SecureChange. So it's SecureTrack, do a good security matrix and, once we're confident with that, we'll go to SecureChange.

For deployment, it was just myself and the people who deployed the VM, with the help of Tufin's team. I'm the only one who was involved in maintaining it.

Tufin's team helped us mainly with the Check Point stuff when we ran into some problems.

In a PoC it's difficult to see ROI. Seeing how the tool performs, I think we will see a return on investment, of course.

It's not that expensive, except for Security Groups. For us, just the Security Groups were about half of the total price. The total was about €500,000 a year, of which €200,000 was for Security Groups. For the rest, it's not that expensive, given all the benefits we will get and all the time we will save.

We could only test AlgoSec for a little while. Our group is part of a larger group of products. When we were doing our PoC for AlgoSec, we were told to stop. The decision was made to move to Tufin because it has group-wise technology, chosen for the acclimation of firewall policies.

AlgoSec is much prettier, it's much simpler, and has a cleaner interface. Functionality-wise, it's pretty similar, from what I read in the AlgoSec documentation. Tufin has a few extra features, but AlgoSec is much cleaner, it's prettier.

Going with Tufin was not a technical decision, it was "politics." The largest group uses Tufin, so other group members have to use Tufin as well. It's mandatory.

Don't bother with the web interface, calm down, don't worry, everything will be fine. They will improve it. The rest of it, I don't have any issues. They're technically prepared, the tool does its thing. The only two things I would be patient with are the web interface and that documentation which is not really well organized. Besides that, it's pretty easy. It's pretty easy to configure and, once you start using it, you will see the potential. AlgoSec, Skybox, and all those tools probably have the potential as well. But Tufin is easy enough for everybody.

What we don't use, and what we are not planning to use, is the third module, the SecureApp. We haven't played with it and we're not planning on using it, for the moment.

In terms of using Tufin to automatically check if change requests will violate any security policy rules, we would love to do that. What we didn't do is build the security matrix. That part is the one that takes a lot of time to build. You have to work with the security team and all the players involved. Because we did not design the security matrix, we couldn't match a firewall rule with the security matrix and say, "Okay", or "Not okay," and do some automation there.

What we did is prepare a form for a firewall petition, and some automatic steps. For instance, in the first step, you enter the request and it sends an email to a business approver. Depending on whether that firewall or that flow is predefined as allowed or not, you can skip that step and go to the next step. We did a little bit of logic with the change-request form. It worked pretty well for us.

The purchasing process takes a little bit of time because of all the different groups involved. But we're planning on implementing it and to finish around next summer, 2020; to have both SecureTrack and SecureChange up and running.

As for compliance, we don't have many requirements. Of course, we are bound to some ISO certifications, because it's the car industry, but we don't have any specific PCI. We don't sell cars over the internet, so we don't have to do that.

When it comes to Tufin's cloud-native security features, what we have is our landing zone in AWS - a VPN tunnel from on-premise to Amazon, with Transit VPC. We have a couple of Palo Altos, securing the track from on-premise to the cloud. And we added those Palo Altos to Tufin. We needed to tweak and include some virtual devices in Tufin so the routing would be okay. But that was quite easy. It was well-documented as well.

The only problem is that we got our quotation from our supplier, and the Security Groups are extremely expensive. They bill you $1,200 dollars per Security Group per year, which is really high. We're not that big, we may have 100 or 150 Security Groups. That's would be about $200,000 just to manage Security Groups. We were put off by that. From the start, we won't have the Security Group feature. We think it's too expensive.

As for increasing our usage of Tufin, we'll go day by day and see how it responds to our requirements. SecureTrack at the beginning, then SecureChange. Maybe, if everything goes well, we will think about SecureApp. It's not in the scope at the moment, but maybe we will implement it.

I would rate Tufin a seven out of ten. It will get better once they get their act together with the documentation and the interface.

The primary use case is processing change requests.

While our organization has implemented SecureChange and SecureTrack, we are not using either tool rather extensively. Therefore, we are trying to put together a plan for the organization to adopt these tools more firmly.

The idea is to be using SecureChange as the primary portal for entering change requests on both the perimeter and shop floor network firewalls. The way we are approaching this is to do a pilot first among a few sites, then bringing it out to a larger group once we feel more comfortable with how the pilot went.

The pilot will probably last for a couple weeks. After that, we will roll it out in buckets or groups to the rest of the sites. Then, the primary use case will be using tool for change management and SecureChange, while SecureTrack will be used by our security monitoring group who is tracking for threats.

My engagement to date and going forward will be to assist in the planning of the rollout and helping with the rollout. I make sure teams and users who will be using this tool are actually using it, including processes from: 

• Submitting a firewall change request.
• Price or rule requests.
• Opening a port.
• Firewall maintenance or maintenance processes, e.g., rule cleanup.

The additional visibility into network path analysis is really helpful. The ability to provide assistance with role clean up will be helpful as well.

Part of the work that one of our firewall implementation teams is doing is a justification process right now. I think that a clean up is included as part of that effort.

One of the things that we really like is the ability to customize work flow. It seems like there are ways to make a workflow robust and capture multiple different types of things that you would want to do when you are maintaining a set of shop floor network firewall rules. These include things decommissioning a server and performing a common rule maintenance process, like a recertification process. 

The linkage between SecureTrack and SecureChange is nice. The way that you can identify a rule in SecureTrack that needs to be recertified, then create a ticket in SecureChange, which can essentially implement that, and complete the recertification process for workflow. This helps us keep organized, in a big way, a complex, large set of network firewall rules. Otherwise, there is no way for us to track who the business approver or owner is for each of those rules and when the last time each of the rules was looked at. In terms of keeping this set of rules clean, it goes a long way in helping with that.

I had been impressed with the depth of capabilities within SecureTrack, particularly, in terms of generating insights for a user and firewall operator. With SecureTrack, I've been impressed with the level of flexibility with workflow design and its ability to generate different work streams and flows through the tool that are customized for our organization processes.

One of the things that came up this week was the ability to decommission a server, which we thought was interesting. We had a workshop recently that talked about all the things that need to be thought about when managing firewalls. People said, "A lot of times, things get forgotten when you are decommissioning a server." E.g., making sure rules are taken away and taking out the rule set. The fact that there is an automated workload for that can be helpful.

From the training that I've done at the conference, I like the ability to visualize the network paths between different endpoints and servers. I thought that was cool.

I have been impressed with the range of capabilities. The ability to connect with other services and software solutions via APIs is very impressive. In terms of breadth of market coverage, that seems pretty robust.

I would like a USP that was a little like an interface and a bit more intuitive. It seems like the 2.0 version did that better. 

I know when I was performing a search, like in the policy query area, some of those options as your typing could be better defined. That was one thing that came up. I would like it if there was some way to provide real-time feedback or context for each option as you are typing in search fields and search parameters.

Even somebody with relatively little experience like I have should be able to come in and have more intuition towards how to operate the solution. That would be a bit more helpful. There are things that could be explained a little better for somebody brand new to this system, which could be helpful, especially if it was in real-time while you were working in the system. Having the ability in real-time to be able to understand search query suggestions would be helpful.

A limitation right now for compressed firewalls is the limited ability to see above a site level in terms of the Topology Mapping in the policy display. While Tufin's actively working on a solution, or at least they have this in the queue, from being able to view this on a higher level and how all of our site networks are connected, this ability would be useful, as we expect to have these compressed firewalls in place for quite some time.

The Tufin products seem very long-term oriented. The ability to be customized seems good. It seems like there is a good roadmap for what features need to be added.

We did a USP upload earlier this week into SecureTrack, and the upload process was okay. Some of the definitions around the columns and the formatting could be more clearly defined.

The scalability seems good. It is overwhelming to think about how to define a USP potentially for the amount of networks that we have for shop floor firewalls. However, in terms of scalability, it seems like once the information is in there, it can operate well and help speed up change requests.

I don't think we've worked a lot with the technical support teams yet.

It was clear that no one was managing the shop floor network firewalls. 

Right now, there are no tools to do that. As we are hardening and locking down firewalls, the requirement to maintain and manage them becomes increasingly more challenging.

I don't think there was any tool before Tufin. The rules were historically stored in CSM and operated out of CSM. Before that, there wasn't any other way to perform a regular analysis and maintenance of firewall rules in this way from a security and policy perspective.

The initial setup seemed like it required a lot of effort. I wasn't super close to the project during the initial setup. Now that I've gone through the training it seems a little less overwhelming.

For the initial setup, I was only involved slightly on the SecureChange side. The API integration process with BMC Remedy seems difficult. I don't know if that is a result of the way the SecureChange application is designed, or if it's a result of a challenging resource environment for focusing on the implementation and the integration of it with Remedy. But, it seems like a challenging effort.

We used WTT for the deployment. My coworker, Dorothy, had a good experience with them. They were engaged before I joined the project.

The rollout was accomplished largely with an in-house team. The vendor that we purchased it through provided a little bit of support, but very minimal. Then, there is the team who is doing implementation with a lot of the firewall rule changes. Booz Allen has been helping a lot with the rollout, as well. I have been helping to design the rollout and adoption.

For our current implementation, which is temporary, once we move the cleanup process from this implementation team to the permanent team that is when I will be performing the work. That is when I'll be a bit more involved.

The company a good comparison of the different tools. I don't know if they were working with Booz Allen at the time, but Booz Allen seems to feel pretty strongly about the quality of Tufin and their user experience. It does seem like Tufin has reputation regarding its user interface that it is more friendly than other competitors.

I am aware of two other competitors who were possibly considered.

There is a plan for clean up as part of our regular process. There is a process drafted and an intention to do that.

It seems flexible and customizable. The bigger question is whether it will integrate into our existing process effort for change management. There is an existing risk assessment process that sort of fits up into our Remedy change request process, so now we have to think about how does the Tufin change management portal and SecureChange fit into that as well.

Once the USP is defined and we feel comfortable with that, we plan to use the solution to automatically check if a change request will violate any security policy. However, we are not doing that yet.

The program that I am supporting is not engaged in any of the firewalls affecting the cloud, so I didn't have a lot of context with that.

Once we have it up and running, this solution should help reduce the time that it takes to make changes and our engineers should spend less time on manual processes.

I did training at Tufin two weeks ago.

We are a reseller and solution provider. We have this product running in our lab, and what differentiates us is that we are able to take our client's use cases and execute them in our environment. 

This solution has helped our clients because it allows them to leverage the tools so that they can actually reduce their overall expenses for the environment. The push is operational, and they've been able to eliminate a number of contractors, thus saving quite a bit of money by using the automation capabilities of Orchestration.

The full Orchestration Suite is what we've been primarily driving because many of our customers want to move into automation, or at least some aspects of it.

The audit portion of this solution has made a really big difference for us. Also, the flexibility of change has allowed us to really drive the product into the marketplace for a large clientele.

This solution provides great visibility, for both our customers from a primary firewall perspective, as well as for the other solutions that they tie into. For example, it gives us an ability to view what’s going on with full plant environments in various parts of the world.

The change workflow process is extremely customizable. We really like it from the standpoint that we can push it from department to department for approvals. It’s not contained within a single solution set, but rather, it moves across the silos of an organization for the approval process.

This solution has helped our clients to meet compliance mandates across the globe, including, for example, GDPR and SOX requirements.

We would like to see more in terms of integration with other application types within the context, such as next-generation firewalls or next-generation threat devices that are out there. It's not just about firewalls anymore. A lot of convergence is happening at that enforcement point, so we'd like to see a little bit more attention on that. Examples would be integration with IPS, Application Control, Anti-Bot, and Anti-Malware.

We have found that this solution is quite stable. We do have some RFPs in to increase performance capabilities, but from our perspective, it's quite stable. If this were not true then our largest companies would not be buying the product.

This solution is extremely scalable, globally across thousands of firewalls, switches, and proxy devices. We look for scalability in a product. We have a small portfolio of solution providers, Tufin being one of them, and we choose them based on their scalability. There are other factors, but scalability is critical for us.

Technical support for this solution is good. We don't really use it too much because of our strong engineering team, but it's always been very responsive. We are sending two more engineers to the Cleveland area office next month.

We chose this solution a long time ago. We've been a partner for almost nine years. Because they spun off and many of the individuals who were part of the envelopment of products within the security space, like Ruby, came out of the Check Point environment. We're a very, very strong Check Point enterprise player, so we feel that anybody who understands product development and product distribution across large environments has to be a key for us.

We really weren't interested in products from other resellers, or we weren't interested in products from auditors. We were interested in products from people who knew how to develop products for the marketplace. So that's been a key for us. The other piece is the ability to scale, and then finally, the ability to automate with that scalability. We just don't find others as scalable as Tufin is.

The initial setup of this solution is straightforward. Obviously, with its flexibility, you really have to know what you're doing. In order to be able to leverage the product, it requires some expertise.

ROI is a little bit hard to measure in the security space, so our focus is on reducing TCO. For example, one of our clients was able to eliminate fifteen contractors that they had on an annual basis. This was a cost savings of $1,200,000 USD for the first year. Ultimately, we want to reduce TCO as much as possible.

Licensing is available in both perpetual and subscription models, and it appears to be good for our scalable environments. We have also needed to work with what we call small enforcement point pricing, which we'll probably get more into as people expand.

We do not yet have a great deal of experience with the cloud side of this solution. However, we're actually moving into our first contract around that and we'll be digging in deep. We find it, at least from our lab environment, highly successful, whether it's AWS or Azure, and we're looking at the Kubernetes side of things as well. So far, so good, from a lab perspective, but we will be rolling out our first, into a full Cloud environment for one of our global clientele.

For our clientele, this solution has, without question, saved them time when it comes to making changes. The whole idea is to be able to initiate a change and have it proliferate across thousands of devices. It's critical. So, just in that alone, we can save six months' worth of man-hours just in making a single change for some of the environments that we work with.

Tufin is really a leader in the space for taking manual processes and eliminating them as much as possible.

My advice to anybody researching this or a similar solution is to look for longevity in the field. Also, look for product development expertise and a legacy of that. Finally, look for scalability, stability, and growth within the marketplace across device sets.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We are using Tufin to generate reports on unused rules and for compliance reporting.

In our environment we have two data centers which have the same IP address for service in both. This means that in data center A, server X's IP address is the same as server X's IP address in data center B, but it's sitting in a different firewall. So we are exploring SecureChange to automate the pushing of rules in both gateways at the same time. That way we will be able to track to which firewall, in which data center, we have pushed rules.

It helps us to meet our compliance mandates because we are able to define whatever compliance we are subject to. We are a financial institution so we have to comply with PCI DSS, we have to comply with certain financial rules and regulations. We are able to do that with Tufin.

It also helps ensure that security policies are followed across our entire hybrid network. So far there have been no complaints from the auditor who is checking our firewall rules. The only exception is that, because we have so many requests in a day, some of them are not used yet by the requester. What our auditor sees is only the unused part. But we are 80 to 90 percent compliant.

Finally, I expect it will help our engineers to spend less time on manual processes, that it will cut half of the time spent looking at all the rules and validation. Currently, 70 percent of my engineers' load is looking at rule validation and requests that are not being made correctly.

We are still using only one-third of the functions that Tufin has, but SecureTrack is among the most valuable.

The most valuable function is the SecureChange where it is able to automate everything from the validation of the rules to the pushing of the rules. We are mainly using Checkpoint and Tufin together.

In addition, it's helpful that we can generate accurate and detailed rule-usage reports. That enables quick clean up.

In terms of visibility, Tufin does show all the schedules based on the usage.

Another feature I like in Tufin is that we are able to track the flow of the source and destination, passing through which level of device and which firewall. It makes our operation, our daily tasks, much easier than doing it manually for each and every request.

There is room for improvement in the speed of Tufin. It is using so many of my VM resources and yet it is still a bit slow. They need to improve how they do their database indexing. That is the main fault of Tufin right now for us. It's slow. Even though we are allocating 64 gigs of RAM, we still have to wait for a few minutes for a single report to be generated. Otherwise, it would be a perfect tool.

The stability is great. It has never gone down. The only problem is the slowness.

The stability is dependent on the devices. The part where we are having a problem now is the result of migrating to RAT which is using APIs which keep going down when our MDS has a heavy load.

In terms of scalability, the only issue is the licensing part. You have to have the correct license to go to a larger installment.

This solution is the first of its kind in our bank.

The initial setup was straightforward. I was able to deploy Tufin in a few minutes only. Integrating with devices - as we are using Checkpoint, API, Syslog - is simple.

For now, we have only installed one server, not distributed. Soon we will go for distributed, because we need to collect all the logs from all our overseas sources.

I was the only one involved in the deployment and am the only one who takes care of the maintenance and day-to-day configuration. Our firewall team will be using Tufin but they don't do the maintenance. At the moment there are about 15 users. Half of them are the firewall team and then there are a few auditors and a few people in the business unit who are monitoring the rules.

ROI is measured in engineers having time for their families and being able to have more time to do other things. It is not a specific figure, it is more a matter of how time is spent.

The current licensing scheme is quite confusing but it is clearer than the old one. If you have one MDS you just buy the MDS license and the gateway license. That's most of it.

Before this, they broke it down into VS, virtual environment, physical environment, single boxes, cluster boxes. Now the licensing part is much more straightforward. If you have ten gateways you don't need to define one as a single and another as a cluster gateway.

Pricing is quite high. We did compare it with AlgoSec but the pricing is not much different between the two.

The decision was made before I joined the organization. I don't know if they looked at competitors or not. Currently, we are looking at AlgoSec, if it can replace Tufin or compete with Tufin in terms of features.

The main differences between the two are only in the pricing and the look and feel. They both do the same thing. Both will be able to achieve our organization's targets. But in terms of look and feel, our engineers are already used to what we have. And I do prefer Tufin.

If you are looking at a large environment and a large number of policies, you really need Tufin to help you manage all the rules. We have 25 policies, and each policy has around 1,000 to 1,500 lines of rules. Managing that manually would not be easy.

We haven't started using the change impact analysis capabilities of this solution yet. We are still testing it. We are not that familiar with the process yet.

Because our team is doing cleanup every three months, we need to keep generating a report every day to have correct visibility: which rules are unused and which rules need to be removed to be optimized. We are using it quite intensively. I don't know how we can increase usage until we deploy and start using SecureChange. At that point it will be more intensive because after SecureChange everything will be automated and they will start only using and looking at the secure Tufin interface, in terms of rolling out all the requests.

We haven't seen a reduction in the time it takes to make changes yet, because we are still tweaking the SecureChange part. We will be testing it in a few months' time. We need to see integration with our ticketing system because people are making requests over HPSM and Tufin needs to be able to grab them first, before we can start to roll out SecureChange.

Functioning monitors (not just marketing hype) for most types of firewalls and firewall managers, overall stability, scalability (could be better, but the still best on the market), and the ease of performing OS and software updates.

Having one vendor for both TOS operating system and TSS application makes it much easier to form relationships with Tufin sales, engineering and support, and improves product maintenance.

They should include a way for customers to add third party RPMs to expand system functionality that's retained across updates. A single central (master) database does not scale well past 1000 firewalls.

Also, it needs to expose a remote collector for central message (queues) metrics, monitor Java, Tomcat, web and database performance, to provide better intra-application data monitoring and alerting capabilities.

I've used it for seven years.

TufinOS 2.10 has been the easiest OS release to install to date. I haven't had the system running TSS R15-3 long enough yet to know if REST API improvements are usable.

None, so far with TufinOS 2.10 or SecureTrack R15-3. Postgres database (v9.0) should probably be updated to a newer version for improved performance and stability enhancements.

The SecureTrack R15-3 central-database shows significant performance strain, handling policy revisions, and rule/object usage updates from our 1600+ base of firewall devices. However, it continues to function, albeit slowly, day-in and day-out.

USA support M-F has been very good, and with pre-arrangement, weekend assistance is also available. Over the years, US Tufin support has had to escalate distributed application (remote-center db) performance problems to their Israeli R&D and developer teams for remediation. When this happens, mean time to repair can be measured in weeks instead of hours.

Very good, technical expertise from the US support staff, and exceptional technical expertise from the Israeli R&D people.

I have looked at other vendors, but we have been a Tufin customer since 2008, and have benefit from the maturity of their TOS and TSS products.

Upgrading from TOS 1.x to 2.x is a bit painful; the process requires wiping the system clean and reinstalling OS and applications, and then recovering data from a backup. But overall, the appliance approach that Tufin has taken greatly simplifies upgrades and patching.

Since 2008, we have purchased products through a Value Added Reseller. Our VAR intercedes for us on annual maintenance (support and update) calculations, and helps with unexpected contractual problems.

We have not calculated ROI, because we are always changing how we use the TSS application to obtain security information.

We have not performed a cost analysis on other similar products, but I'm confident that Tufin does and remains cost comparable.

In 2008-9, the choices were thin (Tufin, FireMon or AlgoSec); of those only Tufin offered the promise of an appliance based system that would scale large enough to warehouse data for reports and analysis from many hundreds of firewalls installed across the US.

Tufin is still growing and adding new features to its TSS applications suite. I don't believe your company would make the wrong choice if the products meet your company's requirements. Their latest product offerings of TOS run on virtual machines, and their near-future promise of a distributed central database (scalability improvements) should not be overlooked.

We use this solution for firewall compliance reviews.

This solution has helped us to speed up our review process. After we do make a change, we're able to quickly review what has actually changed. 

This solution has helped us with compliance because we're able to map out certain firewall rules against compliance requirements, and we're able to write reports to show us exactly what our firewalls look like in those areas.

From our perspective, the most valuable features are the compliance and firewall reporting modules. Indirectly, we use Tufin to clean up our firewall policies. We run reports, and then use those reports to drive improvement in the firewall rules. The visibility into the Check Point firewall rules is a lot easier to look at using a Tufin report as opposed to a Check Point report.

This provides good visibility of our firewall rules. Using Check Point is a little cumbersome to get what you need, so with this solution, we’re able to filter through and better get the information.

Tufin has a lot of tools for PCI compliance, as well as other modules that support things like SOX, but there is nothing substantial out there for the NERC CIP space. It would be nice to have some automated tools for NERC CIP compliance.

One of the areas that I've had challenges with is making complicated reports. There is an ability to pull in CSVs, but I've struggled to find the format that the CSV should be in.

I could spend hours building out a policy to check the firewall rules, and then the next person comes along and they don't see it because it's stored within a user profile. Consequently, they have to build out the exact same thing for hours instead of just being able to export it, and then import it into their profile.

The stability of this solution is fine. We don't have any issues with it, at least as far as I know.

It seems to be really scalable once you have all of the modules working together. We have a broad array of subgroups that we're working on compliance with, from really small to really large, and it works well with all of them.

I've never had to deal with their technical support.

I was not part of the initial setup of this solution.

Using this solution has allowed us to reduce the amount of time we spend making changes by approximately twenty percent.

This solution has a lot of functionality that we aren't using at this point, but it seems to have the flexibility and scalability. The drawback is the lack of integrated NERC CIP.

For anybody researching this or a similar solution, I would always tell them to look at all of the available options, but Tufin does all of the things that we needed it to do.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We use Tufin to do the review of rules, best practices, changes, and usage. So, it's an outside entity looking in to see what's happening on the rules sides. Then, we can do recertification for our rules, so they can be used again. Tufin puts it together really well, saying what's needed or not, then cleaning things up. We've been a customer for a very long time with them, and we're pretty pleased.

The solution's visibility is excellent for Check Point.

There's a new feature that validates standards. It allows the checks and balances against it, so it doesn't even go forward. It just says, "You're not right. Do it again."

We just got done with major audits. Tufin was able to provide information to give back to people, and say, "Hey, this is what I need to do, and what we're doing."

It's working on helping us meet our compliance mandates. We're a bank, so we're always chasing it, but it is helping us a lot. Rule recertifications are our biggest thing. However, what happens in the world of firewalls is people will put in rules to get what they need but don't ever clean them up when they stop using them.

The reporting is very good and provides in-depth knowledge for Check Point. We can write the rules as we see them. We can review rules and do searches. It has its own database which pulls all the information in regularly. This is very nice, and it is a good product for us.

I like the change impact analysis. It tells you what is going on,so you can review what has changed. In case you have to go backwards, and say, “Oops, that wasn't supposed to happen. How do I go get it?”

We were just talking to them about usage for the F5 platform. They will not be going after specific environments, but a more OpenAPI. They will have other companies write it, etc. It's a little different than I had expected.

It is a very stable product. 

It has very good growth. The scalability is very nice. We're doing a distributed environment right now. So, it has met our needs, which is nice.

The technical support has been excellent.

We were the first North American company to do this product, a long time ago. So, I don't know how the initial setup went. It's been a while. However, every time we go back and do stuff, it has been a pretty straightforward installation.

We used an integrator and professional services.

The overall experience was very good. I liked it.

We have seen ROI.

Buy Tufin because it works! I love the product. It's been a great product to work with. The people are great, and the support is awesome. I have had no downside out of it.

We're just getting started on the change workflow. So, we're learning it, and it's working well.

It helps with our review process. We do a peer review, saying "Hi, here's all the changes," then you can look at it and go, "Oops I forgot something," or, "I don't think that was in any drop," and we can go back and review that. This is where it helps us minimizes errors. Before Tufin, we would not end up not catching these errors.

We are automating, so we are getting to a place where our engineers are spending less time on manual processes.

Primarily, it is being used as a type of security auditing control on our firewalls. We are in the middle of a new project acquiring dedicated new hardware while building out SecureTrack and SecureChange. After this initial project, and building out all that infrastructure is done, then there will be a project to kick off some of the automation and orchestration type stuff to try and improve some of those processes for the IT group.

The goal is to use it to revalidate, clean up, and optimize firewall policies, but we are not there yet.

The company has had the product in place for a while. 

I am giving up the web proxy stuff, so I can become the SME on the Tufin.

The plan is to integrate it into things, like ServiceNow, then use the automation. That was one of the strengths in the decision to stay with Tufin and invest more resources into it. 

My hope is to use this solution to automatically check if a change request will violate any security policy rules. It is not doing any of that right now.

Right now, our compliance mandates are all over the place, but previously, what they were doing is they were just taking screenshots of something, and I don't know how we passed our audits.

I was shocked and appalled that the current network team isn't even using it right now. In previous roles in previous companies, this product (or one of the competing products) was like the lifeblood of how we worked. It was like step two, after picking up a ticket. We went to use this tool to see where we needed to make changes. That they're not doing that explains why they're probably having to do rework 60 percent or higher limitation tickets, because they're missing devices or it is not being implemented properly.

In our current environment, the most valuable feature from Tufin is their Network Map because our network team can't give us a network map. Tufin has given me more than what the network team have ever given me, as far as documenting the network infrastructure. So, I'm thrilled.

The visibility is good.

The biggest area where I see a need for improvement is some of the documentation and training stuff. It does a really good job of hitting the big concepts, but it needs like another layer deeper of actually getting into some of the details of how to do some of the things. Conceptually, I understand how the product works, but now how do I start building stuff and integrating it into my environment. 

Just being a bit more upfront and honest about issues, as far as like HA, distributed stuff, and the need for load balancers, if you want to do HA. Nobody ever likes talking about the fact that their solution really isn't truly HA, you got buy an F5 to sit in front of it if you want to do HA, or something like that. Everybody shies away from talking about that, but if you get that out upfront, then the engineers can be prepared for it, then they can try and figure it out and make it work. This is not unique to Tufin. Everybody is like, "Oh yeah, we do HA." Then, three months later, after you have bought some stuff, now you're just like, "Oh no, we got to have an F5 in front of this. That didn't even come up in our discussions. So, how do I get resources away for that? Because I don't have an F5 in this environment, and I need one." 

I just found out some of the things that I need to use right now, like the reports from the report package are only available on 17-3 and above, and I need that as soon as possible. Hopefully, we will upgrade to 19-1 or 19-2 even before I go to bed tonight.

It is sort of an uphill battle right now to ensure that it has all the visibility that it needs, so we can be assured that it is doing what it will do.

The stability is solid.

The scalability is good.

I have not used the technical support yet.

I've used Tufin, Firemon, AlgoSec, and all the other solutions at other companies before, and seen what we've been able to do with them. So, when I came to this company, it was just like, "Okay what's our tool? Oh, it's Tufin. What do you mean nobody's using it?"

The initial setup is not even complete yet. We bought some stuff, then had it shipped. There are some additional discussions which are going on next week after this, where there will be some design tweaks which will occur. At first, we were thinking of using VMs for the distributed stuff and collectors, but we can't get those level of resources from the server team. So, we will be better off just buying smaller hardware boxes and having them completely managed by us that way it will be easier. Also, we'll be able to complete it much faster in our environment.

We are using a reseller, but I'm not exactly sure how that relationship even works right now. It is really early. Our stuff has been bought and shipped. We are still trying to complete internal documentation, so we can start doing stuff.

I wasn't part of the bake-off. I think the company went in the right direction, and I am glad that they didn't even look at FireMon.

While our UK side has Skybox, which I have never even seen, the orchestration piece was really the key to solidifying us on the Tufin solution.

I was talking to somebody earlier today who said that Skybox has a more powerful Network Map than what Tufin has, but I haven't even seen Skybox,

If someone was looking for this type of solution, I would tell them, "Here are the top four solutions that I know of and the places that I worked on each of them. Here are the benefits, gossip, and downsides that I've seen for each one." Tufin has the best solution as far as it being self-contained, reliable, and integrating with the other things that you want it to integrate with. The customer service is also not arrogant like some of the other solutions.

We need to utilize it to its capacity and capabilities, and we're not doing that yet.

It will eventually reduce the time it takes to make changes. I don't know how much time it will save, since a lot of the manual processes are done by another team. I am still building my team underneath me.

The cloud stuff is great, but I am sort of scared to look at it because we still trying to work out our traditional stuff being compliant and under control, then doing what it's supposed to be doing. I can't even imagine what the developers are doing in the cloud stuff.