The cost of managing your firewall can be understood through the hidden structure of the rules in your configuration. As the firewall becomes difficult to maintain, so will the prevalence of duplicated rules, policy errors and security risks. Since rules are more often added than deleted, firewalls that undergo frequent changes are often at the highest risk for a breach. For most companies, these are also the same firewalls that are responsible for protecting the network's most valuable assets.
Athena's FirewallGrader scores your firewall on 12 factors that we have determined to cause configuration complexity. It provides recommendations on how to lower your overall management cost by pinpointing specific ways to re-structure the configuration.
Athena's FirewallGrader allows you to:
- Gain an explicit understanding of the relationship between firewall complexity and well established security guidelines.
- Reduce the prep time for security audits, testing and policy debugging by concentrating on the firewalls with the highest complexity scores.
- Quickly determine an open or restrictive rule set.
- Utilize the scorecard for a consistent and standardized way to monitor complexity so that it can be actively reduced over time.
- Analyze any Cisco, Checkpoint or Juniper Netscreen Firewall.
- Use it without filling out any forms or providing us any information! FirewallGrader can be downloaded and passed along to others without any restrictions.
