Reduce firewall management costs and strengthen security posture

One of the largest service providers in Europe, this company possesses a complex network environment with over 100 firewalls. The company’s cybersecurity organization needed a comprehensive solution to address five key challenges: Understanding the network infrastructure with its high volume of firewalls, performing critical firewall clean-up and optimization, achieving compliance, implementing a robust and closed-loop change management process and reducing the network’s risk profile. The company chose the Skybox Security Posture Management Platform to tackle those challenges.

Strengthen overall risk profile

As a leading outsourced customer management provider that adds new firewalls regularly, this company understands the need to maintain a strong network security risk profile. However, costly and slow manual change management processes were a roadblock. The company could not track changes and verify implementation as intended. And they also had compliance issues with PCI and ISO 27001.

Their overall network risk profile was unacceptable. The security teams needed to determine how to quickly and accurately check for policy violations, potential vulnerabilities, and risky new changes, plus keep systems optimized.

Achieve automated closed-loop change management

The company deployed the Skybox Security Posture Management Platform, including Network Assurance, Firewall Assurance, and Change Manager.

Using Skybox Firewall Assurance, the company achieves centralized and optimized firewall management, automated cyber hygiene tasks, and improved firewall vulnerability detection and compliance risk mitigation.

Network Assurance provides total visibility and contextual intelligence of cyber risk exposure with end–to–end path analysis across complex hybrid networks. The security team uncovers potential attack vectors and reduces the attack surface.

The combination of Network Assurance and Firewall Assurance enables the team to find and eliminate any redundant, shadowed, or overly permissive firewall rules, then conduct rule usage analysis, optimize rules, and complete faster ruleset audits. The ability to detect access policy violations, rule conflicts, and misconfigurations ensures compliance for configurations, rules, and firewall access.

With Change Manager, the company now has a secure, automated closed-loop process for change management workflows to ensure comprehensive risk assessments. The team discovers any proposed firewall rule changes that could expose previously protected vulnerable assets, create security gaps, or violate policies. By integrating with existing ticketing systems, they centralize and formalize change requests and comply with audit requirements.

Improve security processes across the estate

Using Skybox, the company dramatically improved its network security processes, security posture, and risk profile with context-aware change management, which has reduced firewall management costs and strengthened overall security across its estate.

Change management is now faster and more accurate, and operations teams are much more effective and efficient at managing their firewalls while maintaining compliance with PCI and ISO 27001.