Automate firewall change management to boost efficiency and combat modern threats

Today’s IT environments are rapidly changing. Many organizations are changing or eliminating their network perimeter while simultaneously adopting new applications, processes, and platforms. Constant changes in compliance regulations combined with an ongoing skills shortage in network operations and cybersecurity leave many organizations struggling to stay on top of infrastructure management requirements.

The current state of accelerating threats requires organizations to seek ways to alleviate some pressure. This is why more organizations are turning to automation to maximize their investment in existing network and security tools and minimize repetitive tasks so they will focus on higher priorities.

The security problem behind device management

For most organizations, the volume of firewall change management tasks is overwhelming. While firewalls act as gatekeepers into your networks, they’re just one part of the environment that needs to be managed and monitored. Most organizations have complex IT, OT, and multi-cloud infrastructures and use multiple network and security systems vendors. These disparate technologies make change management, rule recertification, and audit management difficult and resource intensive.

Adding to the struggle is the lack of qualified professionals to fill cybersecurity and other IT jobs. Resource-constrained teams are often overworked, leading to reduced organizational productivity, where teams struggle to meet SLA requirements and experience high staff turnover. Unfortunately, organizations with short-staffed teams may also face an increased risk of breaches or compliance violations due to errors from manual processes, lack of change validation, and difficulty ensuring compliance with industry frameworks.

Automation has made great strides in recent years to help resource-constrained teams tackle these challenges and do more with less. Adding a tool with automation capabilities, such as a network security policy management (NSPM) solution, is valuable for organizations struggling with limited resources and high turnover. Teams will work more efficiently while being more proactive in their security measures.

Tackling the complexity of automation

While automation may sound like an “easy button,” it is a challenging puzzle for organizations. This is because most infrastructure is fragmented and complex, making it difficult to know what to automate.

An NSPM solution solves this by providing complete visibility into your unique environment. Once you gain visibility, you will understand how your network operates and will analyze actions to enhance workflows with automation that is tailored to your specific business needs.

A good NSPM will also help you achieve a holistic view of your attack surface for improved security by:

• Collecting data from a breadth of sources to establish a unified view of security and operational information
• Building a multidimensional network model that emulates your network topologies, assets, and security controls
• Using the model to continuously validate device configurations, identify vulnerabilities, and manage traditional and cloud-native security controls from a central location

Once you have a comprehensive view of your networks, you can start automating repetitive processes. Common automations include implementing network changes, deploying new products, de-commissioning old products, and redesigning your network security policies. Automating these otherwise tedious tasks relieves pressure on your network and security teams and allows them time to focus on strategic initiatives or other priorities.

Why automation

In addition to automating manual tasks, adding automation is a great way to improve security. Teams that use automation to analyze and enforce rule, access, and configuration policies for VPNs and firewalls are more likely to spot misconfigurations quickly, reducing the likelihood of a security breach or compliance violation.

Automation also optimizes workflows, such as scheduling and automating security posture and compliance assessments or your rule recertification process. Embracing automation will help maintain business resilience by achieving higher accuracy in change control processes and lead to better security, continuous compliance, and more content staff.

What to look for

A good NSPM tool will give you visibility of your attack surface. This is the crux of the solution and what will enable you to better manage your firewalls and networks. From there, an NSPM solution will:

• Provide out-of-the-box automated workflows across multiple vendors and technologies so you get up and running quickly
• Enable you to build custom workflows to manage policy violations and exceptions easily
• Validate rules and reduce rollbacks and unnecessary changes with proactive assessments
• Offer dashboards and exportable reports customized to align with your business and compliance needs
• Integrate with existing ITMS and ticketing systems to centralize and formalize change requests and comply with audit requirements

With a comprehensive network topology map, automation will model and validate changes before implementation, seeing full access routes and details of changes at each step. Validating proposed configuration changes helps you identify exposed vulnerabilities and avoid opening your network to bad actors—and recommends alternative steps to avoid them.

Conclusion

Given the incredible rate of technological change, organizations must embrace automation to create a more efficient and secure network. Automation gives you efficiency while simultaneously limiting your exposure risk and ensuring compliance objectives are achieved.

Skybox Change Manager helps reduce errors and risk through automated change request workflows. Our solution’s automation capabilities empowers customers to create policies and workflows to automate business processes using automated tasks. Automation optimizes resources, technologies, and processes to achieve more comprehensive risk assessments, continuous compliance, and faster response times.