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 like the auto-mapping features and configuration overview. We use this for many things, but primarily for quick reactions to security events, audit, project management, and quick operational efficiencies."
"It has reduced our audit preparation efforts and costs drastically and maintains continuous compliance."
"AlgoSec has helped us save time by having one central location to view firewall policies, especially when crossing multiple vendors."
"If you go through that compliance report, it will give you whether your firewall is in compliance or not. It will also give you a recommendation whether you need to change it. The compliance has helped us with customers, e.g., internal audit from the quality team and external auditors."
"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."
"There are some important and really nice features that I want to mention about AlgoSec. The most useful feature is instantaneous AFA reports, that you do not have to wait (at least one week or even more for a more accurate one) to get optimization recommendations about policy as many other vendors."
"We now have baseline and rules checking."
"It gives control and visibility to the end users."
"When it comes to real-time compliance management, it is very good because it is able to compare changes in the configuration as well as giving us a timestamp. It also sends email alerts to our environment so we know if someone has made a change on the network. It gives us the whole picture of that change. Whether it is a configuration change or just a small comment, it gives us the before and after snapshot."
"The most valuable features are Policy Optimizer and Firewall Manager for different brands of firewall."
"FireMon saves us a lot of time and it's nice because if you're adding a rule that's similar to another rule, it'll tell you so sometimes you can just edit the one and add another source or destination in there without creating a duplicate rule. It enables you to consolidate and have fewer, more meaningful rules. We're saving around 30% of our time."
"The ease of use is the most valuable feature. There are a lot of products out there, but the ability to navigate through and use Firemon is very good."
"Compared to other applications, it is user-friendly. The appearance of the menus and titles is clear and they are easy to follow. Of course, it requires some experience through using it, to go through everything, but it is not very difficult. It is an easy application to use."
"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 firewall assessment feature is great."
"Priority should be to improve the user interface for the risk and compliance part, making it more responsive and user-friendly."
"We are using AlgoSec directly against our Cisco Firepower. At first, AlgoSec didn't work with Firepower. It didn't know how to read the logs. So, improvement has been made. Now, the feature that was available on the older generation firewall is available on the current one, but this is a problem which has already been dealt with."
"The risky rules reporting should have more information available in the risky rules report - especially when you export the data into a .CSV format. .CSV format being a text-based visualization, some information and formatting cause the reports to lose meaning and only become just another character in the file since it cannot port over some properties (like severity represented by colors)."
"The only problem I have with AlgoSec is just its level of support, not with the product. Not with the organization or the documentation or anything else, but if I need any additional support, the only problem is the time it takes to get it."
"Needs better integration between modules and also a better troubleshooting methodology."
"AlgoSec's audit management is not good enough and can be improved."
"Support for Layer 7 policies, including User-ID and threat profiles with Palo Alto firewalls, has been a pain point from us. We would like to include the additional info specifically because we believe it changes the riskiness of the rule if it is only set for a specific user or a group of users."
"It would be easier if the network maps could be updated using the GUI portal instead of from the OS."
"One area for 7.x customers that needs improvement is the migration. It is an involved process so get ready to spend some time getting your environment back to the way it was."
"Our firewalls have multiple paths through them and FireMon falls short a little bit because it's not Palo Alto-centric. I don't think FireMon has kept up with where Palo Alto is at. They started out being Check Point-centric for years and they've never really fully embraced the nuances others, like Palo Alto or Fortinet, have. They don't handle a lot of the capabilities and attributes that Palo Alto does yet. They're working on it. They're getting there."
"FireMon could improve its end-user practices. As an end user, I am just trying to catch up on all the alerts. There are so many, and you still have to go through them and document what was found."
"I ran a report and FireMon suggested that certain tools were not used. When I removed them, while it didn't bring our environment down completely, a lot of our environment started malfunctioning. Our backup system did not work, nor did other things that involve internal and external communication. We are not comfortable with what it did."
"The cost of the solution is pretty expensive. It would be ideal if they could work on their pricing."
"We have had some stability issues that are affecting operations. We rely heavily on this solution and if it isn't working then we have to create rules manually."
"The advanced features are complex in setting up the rules."
"We're working on implementing FireMon with our ticketing system service now. Having that would be an improvement."
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.
See our list of best Firewall Security Management vendors.
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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.