Athena Opportunities for Partners
Perimeter security services are a fast growing market because of ballooning corporate network complexities, ad-hoc change processes and stricter compliance requirements. Most enterprise-class infrastructures are plagued by bloated, erroneous rulebases that are too difficult to assess for security exposures to critical information assets. Athena Security offers an automated assessment tool that not only provides consistent and accurate top-level firewall risk analysis, but also the precise technical detail required to harden and comply these devices to regulatory requirements such as PCI.
Using Athena's Firewall Security Manager, our services partners are winning sizable repeat consulting engagements. Our US experience shows that Athena brings the ability to position consulting talent as significantly more advanced than in-house staff by pinpointing risks that are impossible to find in typical reviews. In cases where a product sale is also involved, our partners have been able to create 3:1 in new services to product license revenues (see project opportunities below).
Athena Security is best-in-class for field based audits. We also offer the additional significant advantage because we are US based with a large base of global customers. Athena tools are applicable to large and mid-size environments and provide a unique way to capture a loyal following of managers and technical engineers alike.
Optimization and Cleanup of Customer Firewalls and Network Definitions
Firewall rule bases tend to grow over time and remain unattended and unoptimized because of the difficulty in optimizing these rules without affecting the implemented security policy. Firewall Security Manager ensures correct-by-analysis decomposition of security policy followed by an optimized re-construction of the same policy using re-ordered rules and removal of unused ones. This analytical approach ensures correct behavior of the firewall after the optimization without requiring manual expertise.
Network rule and service definitions can also be cleaned up and rationalized to encourage sharing and uniform usage across devices. This reduces the risk of inadvertent exposures caused by inexperienced personnel. Firewall rule cleanups and network definition optimizations open up new service opportunities with existing infrastructure customers.
Cloud based Security Audit and PCI Compliance Management
Customers require a non intrusive audit mechanism that ensures their security devices are programmed correctly and are compliant to corporate and externally required security regulations like PCI-DSS.
A cloud based scheme to auto run Firewall Security Manager assessments and to deliver results back to customer provides a non-intrusive, automated, accurate and repeatable customer firewall audit service that does not require manual intervention or customer location visits, thereby optimizing service provider value.
Security Policy Management
Device migrations and upgrades require careful, precise and extremely high levels of competency to ensure that security policies are preserved during this process. Deployment is preceded by exhaustive testing to ensure that production service availability is maintained after the upgrade or migration. Firewall Security Manager provides an analytical approach to validating the policy after such events. It compares security policy before and after the change, taking into account the differences in the devices participating in the migration/upgrade and reports on the policy changes in more detail than would be provided by testing. The time and effort using Firewall Security Manager is often a fraction of the time required otherwise.
