We performed a comparison between AlgoSec and FireMon Security Manager based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Firewall Security Management solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."I found that for policy optimization it does a great job."
"AlgoSec has improved our organization in terms of improving efficiency within our firewall setup. It has added automation to working process that has helped us achieve our initial goal of reacting faster to incoming requests, which as a result of allows the relevant teams time to focus on other areas of importance."
"It saves time by allowing administrators to test network traffic and pinpoint which rules are being triggered for a particular traffic flow."
"The most valuable feature is the reporting, including the policy report and regulatory compliance reports."
"The PCI compliance feature has been helpful in preparing for audits."
"It enhanced the complete workflow system within six months of deployment."
"This is something that increases business efficiency and helps avoid bottlenecks in our NOC team."
"The most valuable features are the FW report, traffic simulation, and the FireFlow system to help manage requests."
"The most valuable feature of FireMon is its ability to configure multiple devices and consolidate them into a single desktop, which allows us to manage all of our security devices, such as Palo Alto and Zscaler, from one place."
"It is a good product. Previously, we were using only spreadsheets to compare the usage, but now with FireMon, we are able to clean up or review the policies to some extent. It is still a work in progress, but we are at a good stage now."
"Firewall auditing is very important. We also use the solution for rule traffic analysis, traffic flow discovery and hidden/shadow rules within over 100 firewalls spanning five different brands."
"The unused objects is another nice feature, where it digs a little bit deeper into comparing the logs that it sees versus the configurations that it sees... The unused objects feature will go through in a pretty detailed way and show us which ones aren't being used. Or, if they are used, it will show us how often they're used."
"The automation that the platform provides to create tickets reduces human error and more generally, reduces the operational overhead."
"The firewall assessment feature is great."
"The most valuable features are Policy Optimizer and Firewall Manager for different brands of firewall."
"It gives us the ability to go to one place to look for potential firewall rules that are inappropriate, or which don't meet compliance. Instead of manually searching hundreds of firewalls for a policy, we can go to this one location and find the rules which are now out of compliance."
"Lacking in support of other platforms."
"AlgoSec can probably do better at introducing features for the cloud firewall scenarios. This is something that will probably help customers. It needs a hybrid scenario that includes private cloud, public cloud, and on-prem things. If a feature could cover all three different types of deployment, that could probably make it even more desirable for clients."
"The interface is more on the complex side."
"We needs object level permissions and application level recertifications."
"I would say that the cases opened with AlgoSec could be solved faster or escalated sooner to the senior engineers/2nd or 3rd tier."
"Algosec should also be exploring the integration with the open source firewalls as well."
"The pricing for smaller installations should be lowered because sometimes there is just no ROI to add AlgoSec to the small branch offices with only 10 rules."
"Our experience with support has been inconsistent. Sometimes, support is fast and clean; other times, not so much. Occasionally, they have taken a while to respond or provided an inadequate workaround instead of a solution."
"The training for configuring new users or operators is confusing because the UI is not user-friendly and has room for improvement."
"When it comes to identifying risk in our environment and prioritizing fixes, it is really about the different priorities within the organization. FireMon is not so smart that it can tell what's important to us. It's up to us to figure that out."
"While I like the reporting, I think that has the biggest room for improvement. Right now, as a user of FireMon, if I create a report, I am the only one who can see it inside FireMon. If someone on my team creates a report, they are the only person who can see that report on FireMon. It doesn't matter if you're admin in FireMon or not. The way we have to do it now is that we have created a service account user and that service account user runs all the reports. This way, all the reports, which are running, are just run under a single user so we can always access them. This definitely needs to change so users can see other users' reports or we can share reports within FireMon."
"The AWS integration is still not mature for us to use. It is just not ready for our use case for AWS connectivity. Therefore, it does not provide us with a single pane of glass for our cloud environments, because we can't manage our cloud environment with the tool."
"The current health and monitoring of the devices is atrocious... Imagine you have a list of 200 devices, and you can grade each of those devices as either green, yellow, or red. However, there might be three different reasons for you to go to red, or eight different reasons to go to yellow, and all of those things could be combined... Out of all those categories, I only find one or two of them that are, perhaps, pertinent."
"When it comes to real-time compliance management, something that is missing is alerting on certain, predefined controls. It would be good to have a predefined set of controls which, if not complied with in a newly set up rule, would create an alert for us. That is something that is missing, out-of-the-box."
"Some of the things that you want to do in FireMon are not exactly straightforward, like creating certain reports or controls. Some of the functions could be a little more user-friendly, such as creating certain filters."
"The initial setup can take some time, including connecting it and configuring it. It's not something that is easy for anybody to do. There is time and energy required because of the number of systems you have to configure to get it to work properly."
AlgoSec is ranked 1st in Firewall Security Management with 173 reviews while FireMon Security Manager is ranked 4th in Firewall Security Management with 53 reviews. AlgoSec is rated 9.0, while FireMon Security Manager is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of AlgoSec writes "Helps identify risks, reduce attack surfaces, and streamline policy changes". On the other hand, the top reviewer of FireMon Security Manager writes "Makes compliance much easier compared to doing it manually, and automates policy changes across environments". AlgoSec is most compared with Tufin Orchestration Suite, Skybox Security Suite, Palo Alto Networks Panorama, ManageEngine Firewall Analyzer and Fortinet FortiManager, whereas FireMon Security Manager is most compared with Tufin Orchestration Suite, Skybox Security Suite, Palo Alto Networks Panorama, ManageEngine Firewall Analyzer and RedSeal. See our AlgoSec vs. FireMon Security Manager report.
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Thank you, Sunil and Carlo, for your insightful responses.
I really appreciate that and will investigate further.
Best regards,
John
It’s been too long since I evaluated AlgoSec to give some solid feedback here. I can say that mapping in FireMon is terrible if you have a complicated network, otherwise, it works pretty well.
FireMon performance- make sure you get the best server, you can break them out and put certain roles on different boxes to get a lot of expansion possibilities though it might not be necessary this depends heavily on the size of your configs. If you have 1,000 firewalls with 100 rules each no problem but a handful of firewalls with 900k+ rules can become problematic.
We have not pulled MPLS configs into the system but their protocol support (FireMon) seems top notch.
DR, well you can distribute the environment all over the place so it’s really up to you with Firemon how robust your DR is. I’ve never had a failure requiring a massive restore, even our older servers running their pre-web UI version is still running fine.
Unfortunately we chose Tufin over both those products, sorry I cannot give you a comparison on either. For us, Tufin simplifies the needs we have for Risks/Cleanup/Violations in our FW policies.
We also leverage compliance policy for best practices. You can also take advantage of the reporting functionally which suites your environment or infrastructure such as:
- New Revision
- Advance Change
- FW Modul Change
- Object Change
- Expired Rules
- Rule and Object Usage
- Policy Analysis
- Security Risk
- Rule Documentation.