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."The most valuable features for us are the functionality it provides for our two main use cases: planning firewall changes and traffic simulation queries."
"The most valuable feature is traffic simulation because, with this function, it has become more practical to know if something is released or blocked in my environment."
"Traffic Analyzer provided the centralized view for our IT SOC operations to focus mainly on high-risk firewall rules exposing with explicit any rules."
"AlgoSec gives us a high level of confidence that our ACLs and our risk components are actually in line with our expectations. Because we run a lot of our firewalls as an internal change control boundary, we rely on them heavily to segregate vendor networks. It gives us a high level of confidence that those third-party networks that ride on the backbone are segregated and appropriately defined."
"The complete and end-to-end visibility and analysis it provides of the policy rule base is invaluable and saves countless time and effort."
"The features that I like are the monitoring and the alerts. It provides real-time monitoring, or at least close to real-time. I think that is important. I like its way of organizing, also. It is pretty clear. I also like their reporting structure - the way we can use AlgoSec to clear a rule base, like covering and hiding rules."
"It can be easily integrated with different firewall devices (even different brands and models)."
"The Firewall Analyser feature is the most important and valuable part of this tool. This provides quick and simple visibility on the firewall's risk assessment."
"Policy test, access path analysis, and change reports."
"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 Security Manager part of FireMon... gives me an eye on everything that's out there, everything that I cannot see. Because I'm not a network admin, I cannot go to a firewall itself, but at least I have FireMon so that I can go in and view everything that I want to view. And I can eliminate whatever I see that is wrong,"
"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."
"The firewall assessment feature is great."
"It is the single place where we go to review all of our firewall changes. The solution makes it easier for us to track all the changes made. It is a central place where we can look at all the firewall rules, because we have three different firewall vendors. It save us time and creates efficiencies by looking at the general picture."
"The most valuable feature is the Firewall reviews for our company compliance."
"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."
"I would like to see more object-based reports on groups and object usage."
"The initial setup was extremely complex due to our large environment."
"It would be nice if it was more variable when checking virtual domain baseline in the same way as Fortigate's firewalls do."
"At the integration point, a manual page could be added to the dashboard where directions about the products are explained in detail."
"Having the ability to patch an issue as oppose to upgrading the entire suite."
"We are still waiting to implement FireFlow, and getting it into place will hopefully speed up our implementation time and help with policy standardization."
"Support can be improved as there are time delays for resolutions."
"This solution would be improved if it were able to compare configurations and provide recommendations."
"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."
"Its reporting can be improved. I am the only one who works a lot with it, and I am having problems in terms of reporting. In the case of Palo Alto, I'm okay with it, but with some of the Cisco devices, such as routers, when I provide the reports to other teams for review, they always say that the hit count is incorrect. So, I was struggling for a long time to work with them. When working with other teams, they have a lot of questions about reporting, such as how it reports, and we are still struggling with that."
"A phone app would be nice. This is the reason why it is not perfect yet."
"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."
"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."
"We've had recurring issues managing FireMon's internal backups. Sometimes, the space allocated for the backup is full, and there is no process where it deletes files that are older than I certain date. It's just waiting for the storage to get full and then it's cleaned up. It isn't something that creates serious issues for us."
"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."
"Some of the core functionality in our environment doesn't seem to work. We will get buggy code releases. They need to work on their Q&A of every code release."
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 "Gives us the ability to dig down into details and work at a level above the skills that we already have". 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.