Tufin Makes It Easier to Track Firewall Rules Across Applications

One of the biggest wastes of time in enterprise IT is the never-ending battle to keep applications in sync with firewalls. With more applications being rolled out faster than ever before, each new application or update has the potential to change the settings on a firewall. Multiply the number of application updates by the number of firewalls in the enterprise and it becomes apparent what a tedious task managing firewalls can become.

What’s needed is a way to first identify application contention issues with firewalls, and then automate the remediation process as much as possible. That’s the thinking that went into the development of SecureApp from Tufin Technologies, a provider of firewall management tools. According to Tufin Technologies CEO Ruvi Kitov, the basic idea is to provide a set of tools that make it easier to visually manage firewall rules within the context of any given application. As such, SecureApp essentially act as a central repository for tracking firewall rules that identifies the relationship between an application and every firewall it touches. Just as importantly, Kitov says SecurApp creates a process for documenting firewall rules, which in most organizations is a process that is either not done at all or managed so poorly as to be almost nonexistent.

Kitov says SecureApp, when used in conjunction with other Tufin tools, essentially automates the management of the firewalls by creating the first application-aware change automation framework for managing firewalls.

Anybody who manages security regrets how manual the complex processes associated with managing security have become. This not only drives up the cost of security in terms of the number of specialists required, but it makes the organization less secure because it can’t quickly adjust defenses to deal with an onslaught of new enterprise applications.

It’s amazing when you stop to consider how often theories concerning the development of agile IT environments are hampered by mundane tasks such as firewall management. In fact, when you think about the reality of all the interdependencies that span the average enterprise IT organization, it’s sometimes a wonder that anything ever gets done at all.