Mar 18 — AlgoSec recently released the AlgoSec Firewall Analyzer (AFA) product suite. The new suite, designed to improve the overall security and efficiency of enterprise firewalls, is built on three distinct software modules, each focused on addressing a specific set of technical requirements within the enterprise: Firewall Operations Management, Policy Optimization and Risk Management. Combinations of these modules are available in four pre-bundled license editions. The four new editions of the AFA Product Suite are: the AFA Operations Management Edition, the AFA Optimization Edition, the AFA Risk Management Edition and the AFA Enterprise Edition.

The following features are new to this release:

• Automatically completed PCI-DSS and SOX compliance reports that work ‘out-of-the-box’ to help firewall administrators and auditors spend less time completing paperwork while meeting their critical reporting requirements.
• An algorithm that provides Intelligent Rule Re-Ordering recommendations based on historical rule usage statistics that aims to help users improve the efficiency of their firewall policies and reduce the CPU utilization of the firewall devices.

“Not all users start with the same set of requirements,” said Dr. Avishai Wool, AlgoSec’s co-founder and CTO. “Depending on their role in the organization, some users are looking for a better way to meet their compliance reporting and risk management activities, while others may be searching for ways to improve their existing operational and change management processes. In all cases, they’re looking for a solution that will automate many of the time consuming and error-prone aspects of firewall management and administration. AlgoSec’s new licensed editions were developed to help these users address their specific requirements while providing a platform that can be extended to support new functions or operational requirements as the need arises.”

The newly launched AFA Product Suite offers four pre-bundled editions, including:

• AFA Operations Management Edition: Built on the core AFA software module that is standard across all editions, it supports the daily operational activities and change management requirements of firewall administrators as well as maintaining detailed change history reports for all firewall configurations.
• AFA Optimization Edition: This edition includes the full feature set of the Operations Management Edition and adds the optional Optimization software module, which offers a rich set of reports and recommendations for improving the efficiency of the firewall configuration, including the new Intelligent Rule Re-Ordering algorithm.
• AFA Risk Management Edition: This edition includes the full feature set of the Operations Management Edition and adds the optional Risk Management software module. Built on AlgoSec’s comprehensive knowledge-base of Industry Best Practices for firewall configurations, it allows users to quickly assess the security posture of their firewall configurations and ensure all devices meet their specific security controls. It also includes the automatically completed PCI and SOX compliance reports.
• AFA Enterprise Edition: This edition combines all three of the available software modules into a single, comprehensive solution, to help enterprises address all aspects of their firewall operations management, policy optimization and risk management requirements.
• AlgoSec’s Firewall Analyzer suite is constantly updated to support new functions. Where there is a difficult, complex or time-consuming aspect of firewall administration, AlgoSec aims to help users by finding ways to automate those tasks and reduce the time they spend managing their ever changing firewall environments. Through its off-line setup, the application is easy to deploy and use even in the most complex firewall environments.

AlgoSec’s firewall analysis solutions work across all available platforms from the big three enterprise firewall vendors: Cisco, Check Point and Juniper/NetScreen. Its detailed policy analysis features, combined with an easy to navigate Web GUI provides users with instant visibility into hidden risks in the firewall policy, while offering firewall administrators a rich set of capabilities to help them reduce the large amount of time spent managing these devices. The software is in use today at more than 200 enterprises worldwide.

www.algosec.com