Challenges SMBs face for Effective Policy Management
Small and medium sized companies are the most widespread size of companies in the world. It is estimated that around %99 of businesses are SMB and nearly half of the overall GDP of countries come from SMB business. There are several challenges SMBs are facing during their lifetime, but in this post we will be dealing with firewall policy management challenge they need to face. When it comes to policy management or IT management activity for an SMB business, it is seen that most of these companies outsource this activity to a 3rd party. Hosting, server management, application management, network and security management are the services that is generally outsourced. Therefore, the first challenge for effective policy management comes from IT resource need. For a company to make effective policy management, they need to hire an employee having necessary skills. However, to make an effective use of financial resources they prefer working with MSSP companies that will be doing this activity on their own. This brings us to another challenge of 3rd party service management for firewall and policy management activities. Companies must be able to coordinate and audit outsourced IT services like firewall management since it is related to overall security maturity of the company and also there are several regulations that these companies must comply with. To be able to follow, evaluate or manage the service they are given there are several IT software applications that can be used. One that is related to policy management service is network security policy management applications. Therefore, either the company outsourcing this service or the MSP itself must own this kind of software. Indeed, it makes sense to make a contract having these software applications integrated to their services. In the context of Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs), managing firewall policies poses unique challenges. Limited resources and expertise often hinder efficient firewall policy management. SMEs may lack dedicated cybersecurity personnel, leading to a struggle in keeping up with the ever-changing threat landscape. Additionally, with lean IT teams, the manual configuration, updating, and monitoring of firewall rules become burdensome tasks, leaving networks vulnerable to misconfigurations and potential breaches. Furthermore, SMEs might have rapid growth or dynamic network environments, making it challenging to maintain an accurate and up-to-date inventory of assets for policy enforcement. In this context, the need for user-friendly, cost-effective, and easily scalable firewall policy management solutions becomes increasingly evident, allowing SMEs to mitigate these challenges and establish a stronger cybersecurity posture. For larger SMB companies the situation differs a bit. For larger businesses, inhouse IT resources are needed since the size of the company bigger or it is a web-based company or there are some regulations that necessitate keeping employees internal. In this case, although the company or IT is big the number of people working in IT may not be so high. There are super admins in this kind of teams managing both servers and applications or network, security, and client applications. To be able to talk about effective policy management there must be an automation in place in this kind of environment. This automation can deal with policy management activity and optimization of the firewalls, so the super admin can deal with just the reports generated by this system, not the whole life cycle of policy management. In summary, SMB businesses are the most widespread companies in the world and effective policy management is a need for them as any other company. NSPM solutions must be in place either in as a service model or inhouse for both policy and change management needs of the company.
Challenges for an Effective Policy Change Management in Large Networks
Making policy management effective is not an easy task for large enterprise environments. There are several reasons for effective policy change management in large multi-vendor networks. The first reason is surely having a multi-vendor environment, the second issue is that the written materials are obsolete or missing. Apart from these the number of policies and firewall devices are too high. In this post we will deep dive on these issues and how to cope with them in detail. Generally, large enterprises especially operating globally have firewall devices belonging to different vendors and at least two or three vendors exist in their networks. The reason behind working with several different vendors may come from regulations, security politics, local needs or abilities and procurement strategies. It is a widespread choice and there may also other reasons however, we will not deal with these. This causes increasing the challenge for policy management. First of all, If you have different firewall vendors in your network you need to train your employees for each of them or need to hire new people to your team. Also, there will be no central management of this equipment. Each vendor has a different central management software. The cost and complexity of central management will increase if you are using central manager software. Finally, standardization may be a problem since different vendors have different capabilities and different approaches, so you may need to define more general use cases or policies that would be applicable for each vendor. To be more specific it is needed to have similar and lower number of vendors for this standardization. As to written materials and guidelines. Large enterprises may have several different documents or guidelines for their networks, servers, applications and databases. However, in most of the cases the written materials are obsolete. They are written when they are first installed or created and afterwards updates are not done for all of the materials. In that case, when a change needed the materials may not be sufficient to use. For example a new application server is to be installed for an already installed server farm. For this server to correctly work the security policies need to be applied. The application team may not open a ticket for the required policies since he or she does not know the necessities and there is no written material. In that case firewall admin will need to find the necessary policies to be applied, but it is not an easy task and requires a lot of effort. There will be similar other cases that will need effort, and this will increase the challenge for effective policy management. Lastly, for large environments the number of policies and devices is generally high. Any new policy to be applied may need to flow over at least two different firewalls. Also, since the number of policies is high examination or analysis of the firewall become more difficult. It may take weeks to analyze the policy tables on firewalls. To sum up, in large enterprises there are several reasons that increase the complexity and challenge for policy change management. It may be a good idea to use an easy to use and stable NSPM solution for an effective policy management in a large multi-vendor network.
Security Policy Management and MSSPs
For smaller companies that do not want to hire IT people to manage IT infrastructure, the best option is to work with IT service companies. As to security related needs there are MSSP companies all around the world and they are managing all kind of security equipment on behalf of their customers. The time required to maintain a security infrastructure or the operational activities in security infrastructures especially on firewall devices is a bit high. For repeatitive activities like firewall policy change activity that is going on in security policy management, the automation is a must due to several reasons. One of the reasons of policy change automation is the need for higher number of people handling of these manual operations. When there are new customers getting on board, the workload surely be increasing. So, to compensate this workload MSSP will hire new people if the capacity is not enough. Assuming five security operation engineer is a need to give service to around 20 customers. When the number of costomers reach to 100, to be able to give a good level of service, 25 employees be needed. It will be scale and budget issue and must be handled in a different way because as the number of customers increasing there must be a way of reducing this capacity need to make a profitable business. Apart from higher employee need as the number of customers increase, finding employee is a bit difficult issue nowadays. According to forbes.com the number of new positions in cyber security field in the world will increase 18 percent in the following 5-year period. However, there will not be enough educated people in that period. When the demand is increasing the salary will surely increase, so it will not make sense for MSSPs to increase the number of employees in parallel to the number of customers. It makes sense to give higher priority to advance security issues like investigation of IPS signatures, malware analysis or DDOS threshold analysis to make a difference and increase the security level of the customers. To be able to give higher priority to these topics, the operational activities need to be reduced and policy change is one of the biggest operational activity. The operational activities also lead to higher turn over rates, so to make it low MSSP must give superior importance to new and advanced security issues. Managed Security Service Providers (MSSPs) are increasingly turning to firewall automation solutions to revolutionize their cybersecurity offerings. With the ever-evolving threat landscape, the demand for robust and efficient security services is at an all-time high. Firewall automation provides MSSPs with the tools they need to effectively manage and secure their clients’ networks. By leveraging firewall automation solutions, MSSPs can streamline their operations, enhance response times, and reduce the risk of human errors that can lead to security vulnerabilities. These solutions enable automated rule configuration, updates, and threat response, allowing MSSP teams to focus on higher-value tasks such as threat analysis and strategic planning. Moreover, firewall automation ensures consistency in security policy enforcement across multiple client environments, which is crucial for maintaining compliance standards. This not only elevates the level of security provided but also reinforces client trust in the MSSP’s capabilities. In a landscape where every second counts, firewall automation empowers MSSPs to proactively safeguard their clients’ networks from emerging threats. It’s a synergy of human expertise and cutting-edge technology that paves the way for stronger cybersecurity and more agile MSSP services. In conclusion, for MSSPs to make a more profitable business, to make a difference, to be able to give advance security services and not increasing the number of employee need as the number of costomers increase they need to make this security policy management and policy change activity is an automated activity.
Why Do Many Firewall Policy Automation Projects Fail?
With the development of new digital technologies and digital transformation the number of new policies be requested on firewalls has increased a lot. When there are high number of requests to be handled, this task becomes an operational activity. It makes sense to automate any operational activity like firewall policy changes and there is a tendency of making this activity an automation activity nowadays. Apart from that, although there are lots of projects going on the success rate of these policy automation projects is not so high. In this post we will be trying to focus on what may be the reasons of that. Why Do You Need Policy Automation People opt for firewall policy automation primarily to enhance cybersecurity efficiency and effectiveness. Automating firewall policies simplifies rule management, reduces human errors, and ensures consistent policy enforcement across complex networks. It also enables rapid responses to emerging threats, minimizing potential damage. Furthermore, automation allows security teams to allocate their time and expertise to more strategic tasks, like threat analysis and risk mitigation, rather than mundane administrative work. Ultimately, firewall policy automation is driven by the need to strengthen network security, streamline operations, and keep pace with the evolving threat landscape, enabling organizations to better protect their digital assets. There are several reasons that may cause these automation projects to be failed. One of the main reasons is the complexity of the customer environment. The other reason is lack of knowledge on the people running these projects. And finally the last reason is customer prioritites or lack of confidence to the vendor coupled with. To begin with in a traditional network there are L2 and L3 devices like routers, switches and firewalls responsible from routing. In a small-sized network creating a topology map and so finding any path to any destination may be easy. However, in corporate environments the situation is somehow different. There are private and public cloud infrastructures nearly in all the enterprises; Vmware NSX, Cisco ACI, Amazon, Azure infrastructures are so widespread and just collecting routing data from L3 devices is not enough anymore. Apart from that, there may exist L2 firewalls in the network and the solution must understand and discover these L2 firewall devices to create policies on them. Policy-based routing and static routes applied on the servers are also nightmare for the consultants of such projects since the path analysis requires source IP address information also. Since there are lots of non-standard configurations or applications on today’s network topologies the complexity is high and this is one of the reasons why many firewall automation projects fail. As to knowledge on the people running project. Automation projects may necessiate customer technical people involvement since the complexity of the topologies is high. However, most of the time senior people may not attend these sessions and there may be no written materials to follow to discover the network topology. Since there are lots of vendors for firewalls and other L3 devices this lack of knowledge indeed is inevitable. The consultant may know Fortinet, Palo Alto firewalls and Cisco switches well and the customer may have Checkpoint firewalls and HP switches in place and in that case the consultant will need to find information on the internet or from the people inside. This lack of necessary knowledge causes the projects to last long time and some may fail also. Finally, customer priorities, lack of confidence to the vendor coupled with are also the reasons. Customers may prioritize the analyzer part of the solution and start using it for general analysis of the firewalls. Getting the topology drawn by the system or getting unused rules data to investigate it further. Apart from that there may be lots of projects going on in parallel and the implementation of the automation part of the system may fall behind. The lack of confidence to the vendor relates to making the solution responsible for production activity and probability of downtime due to the solution. However, that’s why automation comes to play and reducing downtime due to human error. A dilemma case. In some cases resistance to make things to automate and to keep what they are doing as it is may also be a reason, but this situation be changed surely. Making policy changes to be done automatically is a need in today’s complex network topologies. There are several policy automation projects going on and as it it is mentioned in this post there may be several reasons behind that. Making policy change automation starts with choosing a solution that is robust, stable and scalable and easy to integrate in all kind of environments.
POLICY CHANGE AUTOMATION NEED
Firewalls have been at the core of cyber defense efforts for every company in any size and vertical. Separating trusted networks from unauthorized access, firewall infrastructures define access polices across the whole network. Hence, an effective policy and rule management is the single most critical factor in keeping networks safe against ever increasing cyber threats and making sure business operations run uninterruptedly. Firewall policy and rule management has always been challenging. Networks got larger and more interconnected. Speed of change in business requirements increased. Application driven digitalization and adoption of cloud added new complexities. Network Security teams struggle to keep up with the change requests and existing automation solutions fall short to help them effectively. Despite it is overwhelming, ……Policy change automation play a key role in ensuring uninterrupted business operations with minimized cyber risk. Allowing access to a new business application, revoking or changing an access right, blocking a potentially malicious traffic are some of the reasons why policy changes are applied. On the flip side, despite its critical importance for continuity and security, every policy change operation carries a down time risk. One of the most widely adopted method to avert this risk is to use “change windows” whereby in most of the cases daily, weekly and bi-weekly night works are planned. On the other hand, as the businesses go digital and global at the same time, using change windows is neither enough to keep up with the requirements nor fully serves the purpose. Due to this severe policy change automation need look for solutions that offers automation……