Review: AlgoSec Security Management Suite

The Security Management Suite from AlgoSec provides many features for both firewall policy and risk management. The suite can come bundled in a single appliance and includes two key components, the Firewall Analyzer and FireFlow.

The Firewall Analyzer is the larger of the two components. Administrators can use it to perform auditing, compliance and risk analysis, optimisation and change monitoring. FireFlow allows administrators to manage firewall policy through automation and workflows to ensure that submitted changes are compliant with regulations.

We found this appliance to be quite easy to set up and manage. All administration is done via a lucid management interface that is comfortable to navigate and easy to use. We also found this appliance to offer a lot in the way of configurability and automation. From the interface, it is easy to interact with firewalls and devices such as routers and switches.

This appliance also comes loaded with many out-of-the-box workflows ready to go for the FireFlow component. Using these workflows, an administrator can easily double-check changes before they are made to the infrastructure, including risk and compliance assessments and optimal design recommendations. FireFlow also can submit changes to select devices using its ActiveChange function, which helps eliminate human error.

Firewall Analyzer has three major components. The first is risk analysis. The Analyzer can compare security policy with a database of industry best practices and identify the associated rules. It can then define various configurations to which devices must be compliant and report on their status. Furthermore, the appliance monitors for changes and can provide instant feedback if the change may create risk or take network sections offline.

The second component is compliance standards. This offering provides full compliance checks against many standards right out of the box. The final component is optimisation, which allows for clean-up of unneeded or duplicate rules along with rule reordering suggestions to improve overall performance of firewalls.

Documentation includes user and installation guides complete with screenshots, step-by-step configuration instructions and examples. We found all documentation submitted to be well-organised and easy to follow.

Customers can access a web portal that includes documentation and a knowledge base, along with other support resources at no cost. Customers looking for more support can purchase this as an extra.

At a price starting at c£6,400 for the full suite, we find this product to be great value for money. The AlgoSec Security Management Suite provides a number of features and functionality that make both policy change and risk management easy and seamless, while ensuring that compliance needs are met and adhered to.

Very strong feature-rich product