Many types of major network renovations require implementing a company-wide naming convention, or consolidating a massive number of object definitions, which can be tedious, error-prone and a huge diversion for the network operations team. SolarWinds provides the only solution available anywhere for isolating the relevant address and service objects used in firewall policies so that they can be correctly renamed, split, modified, or replaced with another object in the device configuration.
Discover why hundreds of network engineers find SolarWinds' object standardization solution to be the most comprehensive and easy to use.
Just as rules can accumulate over time to become inefficient and difficult to understand, so can the network and service objects. Especially in large environments, where M&A activity, many partners and ad-hoc change processes are prevalent, objects with the same name frequently do not have the same content.
When combined with a large number of redundant rules, it is a nightmare to try and manage. Change requests cannot be completed on time and ensuring service delivery is a problem. For companies in this situation, implementing a global management system provides visibility into all the objects defined in the enterprise avoiding duplication of objects. You can also use the FirePACs Cross inventory Firewall Object Search to get visibility into the objects that exist in the firewalls. But in order to implement products like Cisco CSM or Juniper NSM, it is recommended to cleanup your rules and objects first before attempting any kind of migration. This will save you months of frustration and expense and ensure a smooth transition.
SolarWinds Firewall Security Manager imports the object definitions and usage information to perform the following steps for object standardization.
- Remove the unnecessary rules and objects from the configurations using SolarWinds' Rule/Object Cleanup.
- Export in Excel spread sheet the complete object based group by object name, same definition and firewalls in which they occur using Firewall Security Manager.
- Specify the various kinds of mappings like modify, replace, rename, split object mappings in the spread sheet.
- User can then import firewall mappings for review or modification and confirm the impacted firewall rules.
- Once satisfied with the mappings, generate command scripts to complete the standardization process.
- Validate that the changes were applied correctly using SolarWinds' Impact Analysis.
The Object Standardization component is available as an add-on to the standard Firewall Security Manager components for project-based support. Consider using it before any major network restructuring effort including implementing a global management system, accommodating new infrastructure, divesting an operating business or migrating a data center.
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