FireMon, a network security policy management company that brings visibility, control, agility and automation to enterprise cloud and hybrid network infrastructure, recently announced the industry’s first agile network security policy management (NSPM) platform.
We sat down with Tim Woods, VP of Technology Alliances at FireMon to discuss the network security challenges the industry is currently facing and how this new solution could change the market's approach.
Tell us about the challenges that traditional approaches to managing network security policies present.
In the on-prem world, managing network security policy was a thorny problem, but it was contained to managing firewalls from one or two vendors. Policy changes could be managed by a ‘rule review committee’ that met every couple of weeks.
But today, things are very different. IT assets are spread across datacenters and clouds, complexity has increased significantly, rates of change have grown exponentially, and everyone wants and needs more automation. The old ways of doing things just can’t keep up, they create a bottleneck in the process. And that’s before we even talk about agile processes like DevOps and CI/CD.
What are the top benefits of this industry-first agile NSPM platform? How does this change the game?
Agile NSPM answers the need for responsiveness and flexibility head-on. We wanted to highlight four primary areas that are often overlooked. The first benefit is our unified cloud interface. As enterprises increasingly move to hybrid environments, managing policy across on-prem and cloud environments is a huge pain point. Within our single, unified interface cloud constructs are presented natively, even as policy is managed holistically across both cloud and on-prem environments.
Another major benefit we knew was of critical importance was developing comprehensive, flexible APIs for orchestrating policy. Our customers can access virtually any function available through the user interface. FireMon’s orchestration APIs allow customers to inject NSPM capabilities at any point in their process, as they see fit. It was very important that we give our customers this flexibility so that there was no need to change their own process or workflow to use our tools, rather we wanted to work within the existing environment.
Next, we wanted to further simplify policy management by allowing customers to use tags to search rules and objects across all of their firewalls, clouds, and other types of devices. This makes it much easier to find and modify rules when something in the environment or policy changes.
Finally, we offer the most extensive support for SD-WAN and SASE architectures, both of which our customers are increasingly adopting. FireMon’s customers can now integrate and manage these technologies alongside traditional firewalls and clouds. Today we support Zscaler, Palo Alto’s CloudGenix and Cisco’s Viptela.
Who should be using this product? What size company / with what problems?
Global 2000, mid to enterprise size organizations that are in need of compliance and risk mitigation. We serve all industries but many of our customers are in financial services, healthcare, and retail.
Any future product updates that you can share? What are the longer-term plans for this solution? Further integrations, etc.
Early next year we plan to roll out robust features that further aid customers on their digital transformation journeys, helping to ease the transition of workloads from on-prem to the cloud while maintaining the hybrid environment.
Where can people go to learn more about this product?
People can go to our website here to learn more about Agile NSPM.