Security Policy Management

Centralize the management of your firewall and network policies for better security. A Network Security Policy Management tool collects, normalizes, and optimizes network and security data for comprehensive visibility, control, and insights.

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Report

The Network Butterfly Effect: The Hidden Cost of Network Security Policy Management

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With a Network Security Policy Management solution, you will:

Simplify complex firewall and network policy management
Gain full visibility across your hybrid networks
Automate change management to reduce errors
Maintain continuous compliance

What is Network Security Policy Management (NSPM)?

Network Security Policy Management is the practice of designing, executing, and managing policies and procedures to secure an organization’s firewalls, networks, and assets against unapproved access, use, changes, or destruction.

What is risk-aware Security Policy Management?

Discover how risk-aware network security policy management improves security, enhances compliance, and drives down firewall management costs.

What is SPM? Watch the Video

Streamline your firewall security policy management

Improve firewall management

Managing a large network of firewalls is a challenge for any team. With an NSPM solution, you take control of your firewall security policy management. Complete visibility to your complex multi-vendor environment powers you to analyze rules, optimize security policies, and manage changes to eliminate the complexity of firewall management and reduce overhead costs.

Automate change requests

Network and IT teams often face a high volume of change requests in order to maintain their networks at optimal levels. Automating change management workflows enhances business agility by expediting firewall rule provisioning and freeing up staff time for crucial priorities.

Achieve full compliance

An NSPM solution ensures continuous compliance and audit readiness across your networks by properly configuring your firewall rule bases. This not only aligns your organization’s security and compliance policies but also optimizes performance, so you confidently go into your audits.

Maximize protection with a network security policy management program

Firewalls act as gatekeepers into your networks. Having clear and concise rules around network access and changes keeps your organization secure. However, with the rapid growth of so many companies, firewall rules often grow out of control. One small misstep or misconfiguration leads to disaster – violations, fines, outages, or even data breaches. This is why organizations are turning to network security policy management to take control of their networks.

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The six phases of an effective NSPM program.

Aggregate & normalize data for a single source of truth

Because most organizations today have many thousands of systems on their networks, it is difficult to aggregate all of that data into a single source of truth. The constant revolving door of servers and devices being added, removed, upgraded, consolidated, distributed, virtualized, and moved to the cloud leads to duplicates or conflicting information from different sources and vendors. This leaves the nearly impossible task of maintaining an accurate, up-to-date model of their network connectivity, access, and topology.

This is where a network security policy management solution (NSPM) tool is important. Rather than taking months to manually collect and assemble, an NSPM tool ingests and normalizes data from all L3 network devices, public and private clouds, software–defined data centers, and OT networks, so your data is all in sync. This allows you to correlate all access control lists, security tags, routing rules, NATs, proxies, VPNs, and more, as well as troubleshoot network connectivity problems and identify root causes – all from a single solution.

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Discover & visualize your network for optimal security

Managing your firewalls is a crucial aspect of a Network Security Policy Management (NSPM) solution. An efficient NSPM tool builds a comprehensive network topology map, covering hybrid, multi-cloud, and OT networks.

This map helps you better understand your network topology and enables you to perform end-to-end access analysis. In this map, you define zones, view access routes, and understand how traffic enters your most important zones, so you better defend against potential attacks on critical assets.

Normalized data from all Layer 3 devices, public and private clouds, and OT networks, also helps you quickly identify any vulnerabilities lurking in your network to help you stay on top of threats and better mitigate risk.

Learn more about Attack Surface Management

Analyze & clean up firewall rules for improved security hygiene

In many organizations, when firewalls or rules are added or modified, few steps are taken to minimize overlap or redundancy. Organizations without firewall management software end up with a bloated system, introducing unknown risks over time. NSPM tools make complex policy management easier, faster, and more effective. As a vendor-agnostic solution, they act as a single pane of glass to continuously review and monitor your firewalls for network connectivity and security policy violations.

On-going reviews of firewall rules help organizations clean and optimize their networks. This process looks for:

Shadowed, redundant, expired, or disabled rules
Duplicate or orphaned objects
Unused rules/objects
Partially used rules/objects

See how a multinational retailer improved their cyber hygiene:

Read the Case Study

Discover the six steps to optimize firewalls:

Read the Article

Provision & validate rule changes quickly and easily

Proper firewall rule management not only makes you more efficient, but it is an essential part of securing your organization. However, manual firewall rule management is time-consuming and error prone. With an NSPM solution, you directly provision firewall rules from a single platform. This near “zero-touch” approach makes it much easier to add, modify, or delete rules on your firewalls and validate rules against your organizational policies. The repeatability of the process means you are less likely to make mistakes than with manual tracking via emails or spreadsheets.

With the press of a button, an NSPM solution makes changes to your firewalls, using the same connector it uses to manage the firewall rules. Changes include:

Adding a new firewall, or decommissioning an old firewall
Reviewing and changing firewall rules
Validating firewall rules against policies

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Automate & orchestrate change management to streamline workflows

Keeping up with the inundation of complex rules and configuration changes for firewalls often leads to quick actions and a lack of proper documentation. For most teams, this is a daunting task. But what if it doesn’t have to be?

NSPM removes redundant manual and error-prone processes by creating automated workflows of established actions and orchestrating them through integrations with your on-prem or cloud firewall vendors. This frees up your team’s time for other high-priority tasks and creates consistency in processes, reducing the chance of misconfigurations or other human errors.

Automation of firewall change management workflows include creating tickets for rule or object deletion or modification, recertification, and automated provisioning of rule or object changes on firewalls. Your NSPM solution should also provide a risk assessment for any proposed changes so you understand the possible business risks introduced before you make the changes.

Learn more about Skybox automation:

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Discover Skybox automation policies:

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Reduce audit prep time with continuous compliance

Preparing for an audit is a complex and time-consuming process, taking several months – or more – to complete. Many organizations face dozens of audits a year. Additionally, regulatory processes are constantly evolving, making it a nearly impossible task to keep track. An NSPM solution helps manage this process, making audit prep a quicker, and much less stressful, process.

With an NSPM solution, processes are in place to help maintain continuous compliance and help you be audit-ready. This is achieved through:

Continuous validation of device configurations from a central location
Scheduled audits and compliance reporting, customized to your requirements
Continual reviews of configurations for vulnerabilities and policy violations, all managed by a single platform
Out-of-the-box assessments for regulatory standards, such as PCI-DSS, NERC, NIST and STIG

Achieve continuous compliance with Skybox

Related Skybox Products

The Skybox NSPM solution includes the product modules that help you simplify firewall management, visualize your environment with a
dynamic network map, automate change requests, and maintain continuous compliance.

Firewall Assurance

Improve cyber hygiene and risk management with centralized, optimized firewall management.

Network Assurance

Get total visibility and contextual intelligence across complex hybrid networks.

Change Manager

Automate change management workflows for comprehensive risk assessments.

Verified reviews from Skybox users:

Skybox Network Security Policy Management

It is particularly strong in offering a clear, real-time view of hybrid networks, including on-premises and cloud environments.”

Data Analyst

Banking

Gartner and Peer Insights™ are trademarks of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Reviews have been edited to account for errors and readability. Gartner Peer Insights content consists of the opinions of individual end users based on their own experiences, and should not be construed as statements of fact, nor do they represent the views of Gartner or its affiliates. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in this content nor makes any warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this content, about its accuracy or completeness, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

Skybox Network Security Policy Management

A must if you want to actually analyze the risk and be compliant with current regulations.”

Cyber Security Architecture & Governance Manager

Banking

Skybox Network Security Policy Management

Skybox tooling has provided excellent actionable insight into policy management.”

Security Architect

Telecommunication

Security Policy Management

Centralize the management of your firewall and network policies for better security. A Network Security Policy Management tool collects, normalizes, and optimizes network and security data for comprehensive visibility, control, and insights.

The Network Butterfly Effect: The Hidden Cost of Network Security Policy Management

With a Network Security Policy Management solution, you will:

What is risk-aware Security Policy Management?

Streamline your firewall security policy management

Maximize protection with a network security policy management program

Aggregate & normalize data for a single source of truth

Read the Case Study

Discover & visualize your network for optimal security

Learn more about Attack Surface Management

Analyze & clean up firewall rules for improved security hygiene

On-going reviews of firewall rules help organizations clean and optimize their networks. This process looks for:

See how a multinational retailer improved their cyber hygiene:

Read the Case Study

Discover the six steps to optimize firewalls:

Read the Article

Provision & validate rule changes quickly and easily

Automate & orchestrate change management to streamline workflows

Learn more about Skybox automation:

Get the brief

Discover Skybox automation policies:

Read the Article

Reduce audit prep time with continuous compliance

Achieve continuous compliance with Skybox

Related Skybox Products

Verified reviews from Skybox users:

See how we help you build a modern Network Security Policy Management program.

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