Advanced NSPM for Large Enterprises
NSPM Challenges in Complex Enterprise Networks
Network and Security Policy Management (NSPM) serves not only as a fundamental network and security responsibility, but also as a business enabler by regulating access to applications for hundreds and thousands of users and devices on an ongoing basis. Manual handling of such a large scale task is not attainable, and therefore many large enterprises have rightly invested in commercially available NSPM automation technologies. Despite these investments, large enterprises still struggle to achieve efficient NSPM automation. The main reasons for this are:
Difficulty of achieving seamless NSPM across multi vendor, multi technology and multi cloud platform networks
Many large enterprises rely on multiple firewall vendors, utilize micro-segmentation technologies, and manage both public and private cloud platforms. In such environments, achieving birds-eye-view visibility, easy-to-apply rule optimization features, and a single policy change framework that ensures compliance to corporate security policies are challenging.
Deployment and management difficulties
It is widely known that deploying NSPM automation solutions can take anywhere between 6 to 18 months to fully complete. This is due to the dependencies on other technologies for acquiring existing policies, large computing and storage requirements, and the difficulty of verifying compliance with corporate policies.
Also, in operation, tasks such as rule optimization, decommissioning IPs, unified policy management across multiple different access control technologies (from firewalls to network microsegmentation, cloud firewalls to micro services), setting up new servers or cloning new servers in different domains can be overwhelming and can consume significant amount of time to run.
Keeping up with business changes and new threats
Teams that are incharge of policy management are overwhelmed by the new policy change requests coming from business owners and security teams. Automation technologies do not properly address issues such as exception requests for rules that violate corporate policies, time based temporary policies, compliance requirements, devops requests and others.
Compliance and Audit Readiness
Ensuring firewall compliance with relevant regulations for the entire rule base is an enormous task. In large enterprise environments, business availability and agility take priority, and security practices are expected to support these priorities rather than hinder them. The compliance and audit preparation capabilities of automation tools should be flawless, and not every automation.
Smart NSPM Automation with Opinnate
Opinnate is an intelligent and lightweight end-to-end NSPM solution designed for large enterprises with operational efficiency in mind. The platform addresses critical use-cases across multi-vendor, multi-technology, and multi-cloud platform networks, with intrinsic compliance features that automate and address compliance requirements from the outset. Opinnate has been designed to shorten the deployment window to days and weeks, while minimizing computing and storage resource requirements by up to 90%. Using Opinnate, IT teams and companies can lower operational costs and improve cyber resilience, and ensure compliance in a matter of weeks.
