Designing a Centralized Firewall Management System
WHAT’S A CENTRALIZED FIREWALL MANAGEMENT SYSTEM?
To ensure all-round protection of their network, organizations often use several firewalls provided by different vendors. Such a multi-vendor security approach is common for those with a few clouds and an extensive infrastructure. However, this usually means that the system is difficult to manage and maintain since every provider has its own architecture, software requirements, firewall appliances, and rules.
Designing a centralized firewall management system lets you manage various firewalls in a single point of control or dashboard. It’s an effective approach that streamlines the maintenance of network security, bringing enhanced control, optimized firewall policies, consistent systems, and adherence to security best practices
WHO NEEDS A CENTRALIZED FIREWALL MANAGEMENT SYSTEM?
Companies that have a complex or distributed infrastructure (with multiple separate firewalls across an organization or many offices) can definitely make use of a central control system. Some even have combos like traditional firewalls mixed with NGFWs (next-generation firewalls) and cloud-based apps for security.
Instead of managing and configuring each firewall separately, you can make changes to the firewall rules, policies, and setups in one place. You may also handle troubleshooting and even generate security reports and analytics data to check the security and compliance of your configurations in real-time.
FIREWALL ORCHESTRATION
Lets you monitor and manage multiple firewalls
Gives you centralized control
Simplifies policy setup / firewall configuration
Ensures compliance with security policies, settings consistency
WHAT ARE THE BENEFITS OF CENTRALIZED MANAGEMENT OF FIREWALLS?
Provided that the firewall management system is configured rationally, you can reap many business benefits, including:
| Efficient coordination of firewalls and cybersecurity processes | Increased visibility, clearer documentation and compliance | Firewall rule consistency across the whole network and unified policy management | Simplified firewall management and optimized configurations |
|---|---|---|---|
| Having a unified tool set with interconnected procedures and systems | Centralized setup changes (e.g., DNS, IP addresses, routing, security policies, signatures, etc.) | The ability to oversee and control various firewall operation aspects and monitor changes | Quicker threat response thanks to automation |
| Removed silos between cybersecurity systems and fewer configuration conflicts | Optimal resource allocation due to fewer miscommunications and useless maintenance effort | More secure firewall configuration and deployment due to a more holistic network security approach | Additional opportunities for scaling your security solutions |
If you don’t know how to approach the matter of properly designing a centralized firewall management system, feel free to reach out to Outsource IT Security’s team for a consultation on centralized firewall management system design service.
HOW IT WORKS
Firewall specialists put together templates and set up configuration pieces in a single place. For example, such configuration components may regard a predefined user access control rule that’ll be created once and then deployed on the corresponding firewalls. This way, you don’t need to handle repetitive configurations within separate firewall systems.
Preset rules and setup changes within a centralized firewall management system provide partial automation, quicker amendments, process optimization, and lots of cybersecurity engineer time saved on ongoing firewall administration tasks.
WHERE IS THE CENTRALIZED FIREWALL MANAGEMENT SYSTEM BASED?
You can design a central management system using the tools provided by your firewall vendor (for example, Panorama Firewall Management by Palo Alto Networks).
For those with firewalls from multiple different vendors, a standalone tool like AlgoSec can be a great security solution for managing all of your firewalls and network security tools.
Outsource IT Security is an official partner of both ⤴
CENTRALIZED FIREWALL MANAGEMENT SYSTEM DESIGN SERVICE
Our cybersecurity team has ample experience in handling firewalls at various stages. So if you need an efficient management system, we can design one for you that’ll spare your engineers a lot of time wasted on useless routine work and optimize multiple firewall-related processes.
How can Outsource IT Security help you? We can:
Analyze the Existing Systems and Environment
We’ll conduct a thorough analysis of your firewalls, used network security tools, security appliances, configurations, rule sets, etc., and offer an optimal solution based on the existing best practices.
Design and Implement a Management System
We’ll handle the design and implementation of the best-fit centralized firewall control system to boost your engineers’ productivity and enhance network security, enforcing your threat response.
What else? We can also:
- help you decide whether you need such a system or not;
- if yes, select an optimal centralized firewall management system path for you;
- design the management system and get it running;
- audit your existing system and give configuration standardization recommendations;
- advise on the possible additional areas that can be automated (e.g., how to remove unnecessary complications);
- assist with turnkey tasks on demand (such as firewall policy clean-ups or our firewall security management service).
