AlgoSec Reviews

We have a large setup of multi-vendor firewalls with large in numbers of policies and rules. Handling rules and policy visibility manually are very difficult for clients multi platform firewalls. AlgoSec AFA has eased day-to-day operation, firewalls rules optimization, clean-up for unused policies and reporting, and visibility on policy and rules. All of this improves the firewall performance.

AlgoSec FireFlow workflow change tracking in environment makes it easy to have a central repository also multiple stakeholder approved change management.   

The AFA workflow has helped us to manage firewall rules implementation using multiple stakeholders' approval with an end-to-end lifecycle of change management and tracking. 

Reporting helps us with deliverables, areas of focus for improvement, and much more. Algosec AFA is useful for policy optimization and clean-up and can measure capacity management. 

AFA provides greatly extended support for firewall rule review for risky rules, optimization, and clean-up for unused rules. 

Firewall rule automation for implementation also makes support easy for support firewall administrators.

AlgoSec currently has two useful features: AFA and AFF. 

The AFA workflow helped us to manage firewall rules implementation using multiple stakeholders' approval with an end-to-end lifecycle of change management and tracking. 

Algosec AFA is useful for policy optimization, cleanup, and measuring capacity management. 

AFA provides greatly extended support for firewall rule review for risky rules, optimization, and clean-up for unused rules. Firewall rule automation for implementation also makes support easy for support firewall administrators.

There could be certain improvements such as supporting secure email. We have some cases where the client SMTP /POP email system is discarded, which is very important factor change notifications.

Fireflow workflow rule/change implementation for time-based rules is not currently supported. 

These improvements in upcoming code will definitely help with end-to-end firewall rule implementation. 

NAT rule implementations were in the roadmap. We are expecting this soon. 

Certain optimization of AFA/AFF SMS resources would ease daily operations.

I've used the solution for four years.

While stability is good, further improvement is needed.

The scalability is good.

Technical support is good.

Positive

We did not use a different solution previously.

Some changes in setup are ongoing as we are growing.

I am a vendor partner of AlgoSec.

The licensing is commendable.

We evaluated a few other options before positioning this solution. 

The solution could use improved support.

One of our customers was using basic firewalls and the VPN, however, much of the policies were not applied - hence there were a lot of loopholes and hence a lot of spam and malicious activities were going on in their organization. Employees were able to use blocked sites, IT managers were not able to address the issue on their own. 

The client replaced existing solutions with AlgoSec. AlgoSec has given better visibility and better performance. IT managers who [reviously could not find loopholes were able to address them. 

Detection of loopholes and pinpointing troubleshooting areas were the key value additions that AlgoSec has provided. Its response time is fast. 

Detection of malicious activities and malware is much better than other options. 

Previously, the company was dependent on third-party solutions for audit reports. AlgoSec now provides an instant audit report. 

It has improved the management of all the firewalls (which are both cloud and on-prem) via a single console. The integration with the routers and other IT products is seamless.

The most valuable aspect of the product is the automatic application connectivity. The second best feature would be detection and response and analysis of the data. Applying security policies over the network is easy. AlgoSec instantly provides audit reports which is a most useful feature in this organization. 

Integration of the next-gen firewall, cloud firewall, routers, and load balancers is seamless and a very useful feature.

The solution offers unified and risks analytics reports features. 

AlgoSec helps IT managers automate firewall management across all hybrid environments.

The blacklisting and whitelisting of IP addresses should be improved. There are many false positives.

The cloud migration process should be more streamlined for my customer-facing issues.

The price should be less. The customers who have just started using the AlgoSec firewall management tool, as of now, have not faced any major issues apart from some small debugging. 

Improvement can be done in many areas. For example, it would be great if AlgoSec could integrate with an endpoint solution and directly integrate with firewall and endpoint solutions to bring much more visibility.  

Our first use case is the homogenization of important rules for a large number of firewall-enabled devices in our corporate network.

With one click, we have at our disposal everything we consider important and in this way we do not have to enter each device to verify the information.The AlgoSec Security Management Suite collects all of this information.

The most important thing is to have all of the information in one application. At a glance, we can see security problems and possible issues in the future. In this way, we can be proactive and solve problems before they happen.

With AlgoSec Security Management we have many advantages.

We have all of the information about the firewall devices that we have at risk, either because there is a firewall policy with some open protocol that can give us security problems later, or because long-unused rules present a security hole.

We have collected all of the alerts for each of the firewalls, which helps to identify devices that are in need of a more in-depth analysis.

The most valuable feature is the ability to compare policies with certain established and accepted configurations and values.

We have the option to generate several security reports for our firewall devices, such as what policies were created, what cluster they were created in, and which pose a risk either because they have been obsolete for a long time or because they have very specific technical specifications. Examples of this are open ports that are totally vulnerable or declared services that violate security.

All of the reports can be exported to PDF, meaning that we can send them to the different departments to study the cases and determine whether these rules are necessary. If not, then they can be eliminated to optimize the system.

It would be very helpful to have a direct link to the relevant firewall policy embedded within reports when there are warnings or risks indicated. Regardless of how serious the risk is, we could jump to the policy with a single click. In this way, the administration would be much easier and we would not have to be changing the screen every time we want to look at or modify something in our firewall. I understand that they are third-party software packages that can achieve this, but it would be more comfortable to have it integrated.

We have been using AlgoSec for two or three years.

The stability of this solution is very good.

Scalability is very good.

We have had no problem with technical support. Different incidents have been resolved without major complications.

The first solution that we used in this category was AlgoSec.

The initial setup is not complex.

Our in-house team performed the deployment with help from the vendor team. The expertise was good.

The price is within the standard of security products.

We did not evaluate other options before choosing this solution.

Our primary use case for this solution is FW analysis and compliance.

We have hundreds of FWs to manage and check. It is normal that similar rules, and perhaps not so good ones, can be set up. AlgoSec helps to make our network security better and improves our internal customer relationships by using FireFlow.

AlgoSec helps us to manage hundreds of FWs and take care of policy compliance.

The most valuable features are the FW report, traffic simulation, and the FireFlow system to help manage requests.

We have a complaint about the compliance check, in that sometimes we want to keep rules rather than merge them.

This is a stable solution.

I believe that it could be better, and make sure different scenarios are possible.

The customer support is very good. They really show that they want to make the product better, and take care of the customer's needs.

We did not use a previous solution.

The initial setup is straightforward. The complexity sometimes comes from the fact that the company scenario is not so easy.

We implemented the solution internally with support from AlgoSec.

We did evaluate other options, but I am not sure of the reasons for choosing this one because it was a management decision.

We have a big environment consisting of around 100 firewalls with a combination of different vendors. We use AlgoSec Firewall Analyzer to analyze our firewall rules from different vendors and importantly for our firewall optimization project.  

We recently moved our data center to a new location and we migrated our firewalls from one vendor to a different vendor. AlgoSec helped us tremendously to clean up shadow rules, unused objects even before moving to a new vendor. 

Firewall Optimization is all time favorite which saves a lot of manual work and increases device performance. Compliance is also equally important as our organization is very concerned about it and AlgoSec does it for us in minutes. 

I always wanted AlgoSec to support cloud base security firewalls such as Amazon security groups-AWS or Microsoft Azure network security groups. Hoping they will have it ready by end of 2018. 

AlgoSec releases hotfixes every now and then which keeps the product stable and with better performance.

AlgoSec is a much-needed tool for any organization as it helps in reducing manual effort when it comes to managing firewalls. 

I have not contacted customer service that much but whenever I do, I receive a great support and they reach beyond your expectations.

We have used Tufin beforemuch-much we faced lots of challenges and saw bugs all the time so we wanted something better. 

I have AlgoSec Firewall Analyzer and FireFlow certifications which helped me a lot during initial set up. It was straightforward and easy. 

It was in-house.

It's a lot, as it saves time and money.

I am a security engineer and from my point, I would say setup is without complications. Pricing and licensing is taken care of by my senior management so I cannot comment on it. 

Just Tufin, as this was a competitor to AlgoSec.

It's simply great, keep going. 

If a use case comes where a customer who has different firewalls, e.g., Palo Alto and Fortinet, wants a single pane of glass, where all the firewalls are visible, this is the only use case where AlgoSec would be used.

The customer has to judge, "Are they going to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for the feature of seeing firewalls of different vendors under the same hood?" Is that the value they want versus the dollar value they are spending? Most of the time, the answer is no. Customers don't want to spend $300,000 or $400,000 just to see a single dashboard. Especially during COVID times, it has become even more impossible to sell such a product. 

From a product perspective, AlgoSec has multiple components. Its security management solution is the primary one that you need to have. You must have this in order to install the platform. 

There are some legacy customers still using AlgoSec. The benefit is the ease in management of firewalls and rules. Also, if they have a small setup, making changes to multiple firewalls at the same time is something the customer enjoys due to limited resources. When an organization becomes an enterprise, then change management comes into the picture as well as best practices, so making changes to multiple devices at the same time is not good. 

It has the capability to be an enterprise grade product, but the use cases have not been fine-tuned for that in the past four years.

There are some integration-related issues too. For example, AlgoSec does not integrate with Forcepoint, and Forcepoint Firewalls have become very prevalent these days. They also don't integrate with Aruba devices. So, the integration ecosystem of AlgoSec is very limited, which is also the case with Firemon.

These days, people are looking at products which can visualize not only their firewalls, but also their networking equipment, under a single map. Can AlgoSec do this? Yes, it can, but with very limited capacity. If I try to sell the automation story of firewall management, there are vendors, like Forcepoint, who are not supported, so if a customer has Forcepoint, then I have to straight away walk off. The worst part of the story is they don't have even a roadmap for this.

Another problem with AlgoSec is that it gives you the capability to make changes to hundreds of your firewalls at the same time, but big enterprises have change management policies. Change managers will never allow you to make changes to more than 10 devices at the same time, which is a feature in AlgoSec. Because, what if something goes wrong, then you have to roll back and figure out what caused the impact, e.g., which firewall did not work well. Doing that post-mortem becomes a difficult thing. So, change automation on a firewall is actually defeating the purpose of the change management policies in any organization. If you run a bank, you will not allow anyone to make changes at the same time from a single click for 10 firewalls. The bank will never allow this. So, what is the use of this automation? Even if you are using this automation, you can do it from your native firewall vendor, e.g., Panorama or FortiManager, where everyone has their own cluster managers. At least if something goes wrong, you can still call Palo Alto and tell them you are Panorama has not done the change right, causing you an impact, and this is your Palo Alto firewall. 

In this case, if I have to raise a case first, then I have to call AlgoSec and check why it has not worked. Second, I have to call the firewall vendors that their firewall is not working well, but AlgoSec has done the right job. Handling multiple vendors for such a trivial issue becomes a problem.

I have been using AlgoSec for four years. First I was a customer, then I became a partner.

If you hit a bug with mass changes, do you troubleshoot on AlgoSec or the firewall? Now, you have two products that you have to tackle for bugs. The two vendors then finger point and you waste time. That is why having the firewall and firewall manager together from a vendor, like Palo Alto, is better.

If the scope of work is just firewall management, it is easy to deploy. However, when you add the flow information, since AlgoSec can also import the flows of your firewall rules, that is live traffic. Then you include FireFlow, or it becomes a nightmare, because what you have to do is take a copy of traffic from different segments/firewalls and bring it into AlgoSec. Doing that becomes a challenge because a lot of companies, such as banks, will not allow you to sniff the firewall traffic live traffic because they have credit card information. 

These days, the traffic has changed to HTTPS, which is all encrypted. Four or five years back, it was HTTP, which was all plain text. Even if you take a mirror of the traffic, how can you decrypt it? You need a decryptor to look inside. FireFlow looks at the packet of the transaction. In order to look at the packet/payload, I have to decrypt it because now it is encrypted. But, who will decrypt it? Then you have to buy another product that does decryption.

Customers look at return on investment to determine the benefit from a product, e.g., the tangible value in return. If I go to sell AlgoSec or Firemon today, the customer will say, "I already have Palo Alto," because Palo Alto Panorama has picked up a lot in the last five years of this market. 

AlgoSec is not a cheap product. If I compare Firemon and AlgoSec, because I am also Firemon certified, Firemon is still cheaper in price than AlgoSec. That is another catch. 

AlgoSec-type products and requirements are not necessary or prevalent these days. If you look at AlgoSec, what do they have? They do firewall management, predominantly. Firewall management as a technology is dying. If you look at Palo Alto, Fortinet, Forcepoint, Cisco, or Juniper, all these firewall vendors are coming up with firewall management platforms. If you talk about Palo Alto, they have Panorama. If you talk about Juniper, they have Junos Space. If you talk about Fortinet, they have FortiManager. You can manage their firewalls using the respective vendor management consoles. The question comes, "Why would someone want to use AlgoSec to do firewall management?" The usability takes a dip in terms of capability because people trust the native vendor, e.g., someone who manages Palo Alto firewalls will do it with Panorama because Panorama is a product of Palo Alto.

AlgoSec's use case was good four years ago before FortiManager and Panorama. If you have a hundred firewalls from Fortinet, then you can manage all of them for a single FortiManager. If you have 50 Palo Alto Firewalls, you can manage those from Panorama in a single pane of glass. These solutions did not exist four years ago, and now AlgoSec is losing its essence in the market since these native vendors have been launched.

Four years ago when I started off with AlgoSec, and I'm still working with them, it was strategic. Now, it has become tactical. AlgoSec has a very good feature of doing firewall rule optimization, which has not been there in the native products. For the last couple of years, the native products also started coming up with firewall rule optimization. For example, Palo Alto (from PAN-OS 9.0 and above) was released a year and a half back. It does firewall rule analysis for you. It is the same case with Fortinet and Forcepoint. Therefore, if I have to sell products on firewall management, which does firewall rules on analysis, what is the use case that I give to customers with AlgoSec?

I am running out of AlgoSec use cases because the native vendors give you the capability to do firewall management, firewall rule analysis, and pushing conflicts to multiple firewalls from a single screen. These are the use cases of AlgoSec. This is what AlgoSec does. This story is not just limited to AlgoSec. Products like FireMon and AlgoSec and the way they used to do firewall management have become a commodity. Now, most of the firewalling vendors have the same functionality in their management console. 

Companies, like RedSeal, or even to an extent, Skybox, are better built because they take the story to the next level. They don't just look at firewalls. They also look at the network, vulnerabilities, risk, governance, compliance, architecture issues, and incident response. This is the story which customers love to see because none of the native vendors are providing this. 

RedSeal and Skybox are doing firewall management for free. They don't charge you for it. On top of it, they do:

• Complete network visualization.
• Give you best practice conflict checks.
• Security architecture issues.
• Risk analysis of every IP asset in your organization.
• Vulnerability prioritization.

AlgoSec has been amazing, but it did not evolve well with time. If you look at AlgoSec from a cloud perspective, it does not support service chaining. So, if I have Palo Alto Firewall in the cloud, which has become very common, they can't detect that firewall. If I ask them to detect Oracle Cloud, they can't detect that. The problem about cloud, even if I'm doing service chaining with VMware NSX and Palo Alto, which is a very famous integration, they can't detect them. They cannot detect these because they are new things which have happened in the market in the last three years. So, they aren't able to catch up. The legacy part is good, but they are not able to catch up on the latest stuff, like service chaining. With anything new, AlgoSec is unfortunately running behind. 

I have used all the components: CloudFlow, Firewall Analyzer, FireFlow, and Algo Bot (which I have used to optimize policies). I have not used AppViz a lot because it just came out. If you talk about the complete suite, then AppViz gives you application-related visibility. However, when you don't have a rich integration ecosystem versus a native firewalling vendor, like Palo Alto, who does give this. What is the use of having AlgoSec (or Firemon)?

I would rate this solution as a seven out of 10. The product is good, but the issue is with AlgoSec's use cases.

We are security consultants based in India. We provide solutions to our customers and implement for them. We deploy AlgoSec on cloud and on-premise, depending on the customer. The use case is generally for companies that have multiple firewall vendors. If you have FireEye, for example, you can create the rules according to your environment. But if you have four different kinds of firewalls, and you want to allow or block something, you need the configuration on all the firewalls. AlgoSec simplifies that process. Many of our clients in India use this solution. We are official partners of AlgoSec. 

This solution will cut down operating costs in any company. 

It's a bit difficult for a network engineer to login on the firewall and make the changes and in that sense, AlgoSec is a lifesaver. You don't need to log in on each separate firewall, you just login on AlgoSec and make changes on all the firewalls from one single pane of glass. You can get the logs from all the firewalls to your AlgoSec as well. And if you see any blocked traffic, you can delete it at the point it gets blocked. If you have five firewalls, it will show which firewall is getting blocked and that can be automated. It's a very powerful and useful tool that can be customized to your requirements. One of the main features is that you can configure all the rules in one place. It also provides a complete report of Euro firewall rules that complies with security authorities such as GDPR.

If we talk about Cloud and SDN Platforms it support AWS, Azure etc.... 

I'd like to see this solution support some other Cloud platforms as well such as Alibaba and a GCP to give the customer flexibility. 

It's a very reliable and stable product because it's not dependent on any hardware, and is installed on a one-to-one machine. 

Scalability in this case really depends on whether the customer is able to provide the resources or not. It requires resources including memory, RAM, and those sorts of things. From a software point of view, I'd say it is very scalable. 

I haven't needed to access technical support because their documentation was so clean and in such a format that I was able to implement without any issues. My customers use it and they are pretty happy with it, because there is good customer support available in India.

The initial setup is very straightforward. You just find the resources on the virtual machine and download.

Licensing is on an annual basis. The best part is that if you have two or three firewalls, but you are using them in a cluster, it's counted as one. This is a basic aspect of the licensing with AlgoSec. I think the licensing is pretty good because they now have all the compliance issues sorted. 

If any user or customer has firewalls, maybe 15 or 20 plus, definitely go for this product. It cuts down operating costs. The benefit of AlgoSec is that you only need one engineer to do all the configurating, rather than separate engineers for the different firewalls. Not only that but you can automate as well. Obviously you have to integrate a texting management tool, but you can integrate and follow the focus.

I rate this solution a 10 out of 10.