Removing Firewall Audit Pain to Reach the Unreachable Network Performance Star.

You’ve worked in networking for more than a hot minute and know that firewall audits improve network security. You’ve already heard umpteenth times that malicious actors seek to exploit vulnerabilities and that firewall rules reduce the attack surface. 

However, you worry that the firewall audit process is going to disrupt operations. Like Don Quixote setting off on an impossible quest, you seek to reduce firewall rule bloat to improve network performance and security. However, making rule changes can break access or lead to service disruption.  

With change management automation, you can remove firewall audit pain with network change workflows that engage in risk assessments for network security and performance impact. While this feels like an impossible dream, it’s really just working with Tufin for a real-time view of your entire network so you even spot bottlenecks and proactively mitigate issues.  

Firewall Auditing Nightmares 

Network security might keep you awake at night, but the walking nightmare is the firewall audit process. Your firewall audit checklist makes sense until you try to implement the steps. If you have multiple firewall vendors, then you need to manage: 

• All network devices and how they define their security policies 

• Owners for all the network devices 

• Everyone responsible for change requests, approvals, and accountability during the change management process 

• Industry standards and regulatory standards that apply, like PCI DSS, HIPAA, ISO 27001, NERC, SOX, andGDPR 

• Documentation for tracking, reviews, remediation, and exceptions 

With multiple firewall vendors, these processes become a nightmare as you work to review and reconcile security policies that use different naming conventions and have varying degrees of granularity.  

Tufin’s automated workflows wake you up from these nightmares. Our change management automation engages in proactive risk assessments before you implement changes to detect rule violations. By simulating firewall changes in a controlled environment before applying them to live networks so you can proactively assess their impact on security, compliance, and network performance.  

Achieving the Impossible Dream of Network Performance and Cybersecurity  

Firewall rules create network latency since the processing required to filter packets takes time, creating lag. While overly permissive rules reduce lag, they negatively impact your security posture.  

For example, consider the following network performance issues arising from firewall rule bloat and network security technologies: 

• Packet inspection: Firewall configurations that block or allow network traffic to increase the time a request takes. 

• Rule complexity: Complex rules requiring deep packet inspection or application-level filtering require more processing time. 

• Virtual private networks (VPNs): Requests go to a web server that decrypts them, then the intended IP address, back through the VPN service for encryption, and finally the original user.  

To achieve the seemingly impossible dream of optimized network security and performance, you can use your firewall audits to cleanup and optimize rules. By identifying issues proactively, you reduce service outage risks, especially when using automated rule analysis.  

Tightening Overly Permissive Rules 

When you know how people really use your networks and their access, you can enforce the principle of least privilege more precisely. Eliminating unwanted rules improves network performance by reducing the amount of packet inspection and time requests take. Simultaneously, by limiting user access at a more granular level, you create more robust security controls.  

Tufin’s Automatic Policy Generator (APG) automatically creates a secure, effective, and optimized firewall rule base by analyzing firewall logs to understand network traffic and your security policies are used. It automatically creates new security policies and tightens overly permissive rules to reduce network traffic while providing cyber threat mitigation.  

Identify and Remove Disabled and Unused Rules 

Unused rules mean that the firewall is unnecessarily processing network traffic. By removing these unused rules, you reduce the number of potential network connections, reducing the attack surface. Simultaneously, you improve network performance by reducing the amount of network traffic processed. 

Tufin makes it easy to prioritize rule optimization for improved firewall configurations. Our platform automatically identifies and troubleshoots unused or low-use rules so you can easily: 

• Review the need for them 

• Document business reasons for maintaining them 

• Decommission them 

Identify and Remove Shadowed Rules  

A shadowed rule means that a specific rule matches the same criteria as a broad rule that sits above it, duplicating something you have without adding any benefit. From the network security standpoint, shadowed rules introduce vulnerabilities since the broader rule is more permissive and may make the specific rule irrelevant. From a network performance perspective, you’re introducing latency as the duplicated firewall policies process the same traffic for the same thing twice.  

Tufin’s Rule Viewer sheds light on Fully Shadowed rules where a higher priority rule’s conditions fully intersect with the rule making it completely redundant, never used, and safe to remove. Reviewing the fully shadowed rule allows you to determine whether it handles network traffic the way you intended so you can remove it or you should reorder the rules to align with business network security goals. Additionally, removing the rule streamlines network performance by eliminating dual analysis of the same network traffic.  

Reorder Firewall Rules 

Rule order impacts both network security and performance. You should place your most frequently used and important firewall rules at the top. As your network expands, firewall management becomes more difficult, especially when you add new devices from different vendors. A disorganized ruleset introduces vulnerabilities, like having overly permissive rules above specific rules that can allow inappropriate access. Your speed suffers because less used rules will always unnecessarily analyze network traffic.  

Tufin helps you streamline and reorder firewall rulesets with your firewall policy to improve network device performance. The Rule and Object Use Report calculates the amount of logged network traffic that was passed or blocked for each rule or object. Using these metrics, you can make informed decisions about high-use rules and reorder the ruleset for faster networks.  

Take Tufin on Your Glorious Network Security and Performance Quest 

While firewall management may not have been Don Quixote’s glorious quest, it is yours as a network admin. Starting with Tufin’s dynamic network topology map, you gain visibility into your entire network so you can understand network traffic from internal networks, across DMZs, and from the public internet. With Tufin’s suite of solutions acting as a single, central, real-time hub of security truth, you can gain insights into unneeded, risky, and misconfigured access control rules and objects.  

By automating rule cleanup, optimization, and change management processes, you can run regularly scheduled firewall audits, you can achieve the trifecta of network dreams – performance, security, and continuous compliance.  

To learn more about firewall management and auditing with Tufin, book a demo today!