AlgoSec Reviews

The purpose of using the product was to attack and Analyse rule bases from a holistic perspective. The Firewall Analyzer has a rule base consolidator as well as a feature to make the rule base more permissive. It also helps to reduce rule base clutter, as well as legacy rules.

Traffic query helps us to quickly find rules that allow outbound access.

FireFlow is a useful ticketing system that integrates with many products.

We would like to use FireFlow's API to automate certain tickets that come through to leverage automation in our environment. 

An example is that we have a policy with 900 rules, which we were able to reduce to 500 rules. That's close to a 50 percent savings on the rule base.

We used the Unused rules function in Firewall Analyser to examine our rule base. This has drastic performance increases in our production firewalls.

Objects not used within rules can save even more when it comes to cleaning up rule bases. Where this is a very manual process without AlgoSec, engineers can have a level of automation by building useful reports to assist with clean up.

The most valuable feature is the Firewall Analyser, which has a number of fantastic features.

From a risk perspective, you can apply compliance Frameworks like ISO 27001 and PCI DSS against firewall rule bases to see if your rule base is compliant. If you are not then AlgoSec provides descriptive ways on how to adjust rules to make your rule base more compliant. 

Definitely, the policy-cleanup features are the main draw. Shadowed rules, rule duplication, rule consolidation, rules permitting too much access, and rule usage are very useful and help to clean up rule bases.

There are areas where auditing rule changes are not accurate. It is important to be accurate when using rule changes, as users need to be accountable for their changes; however, I cannot trust AlgoSec when rule changes come through on reports as they reflect incorrectly. I have taken this up with support and have never really had a resolution for this. 

I would like to see enhanced dashboards or build meaningful reports for executive consumption. 

AlgoSec is a fantastic product, and I would like to see more "granular" breakdowns of traffic on IPT traffic analysis for source and destination, as the way it does it currently does not allow me to self problems for rules with ANY in the destination.

We have been using AlgoSec for one and a half years.

The stability is good.

Scalability-wise, this product is good.

The technical support is always responsive and always willing to understand the issues. 

Our previous solution was not useful and did not have an intuitive interface. Support was also terrible.

The initial setup is straightforward. If you understand your infrastructure, it will be easy to deploy in a central location.

Our deployment was done through a vendor team and it took one week.

We haven't saved any money yet but we have improved the performance of certain devices.

I would suggest that you start with a VM, get a PoC with a temp license, and try it out. You will love it.

I would not like to disclose which other products, but I have used two other products that didn't even come close to AlgoSec's power.

Its a good production and good support, definitely worth it.

The primary use case of this solution was to optimize and cleanup all the unused legacy firewall rules from multiple firewalls which was massive in terms of time and effort.

The other user case in our environment was to automate all the manual day to day firewall changes to reduce the turnaround time for application owners.

We wanted to have central visibility for our entire firewall portfolio to see the firewall flow of traffic traversing through multiple layers of firewalls.

Definitely with the help of this solution it made our life easier to optimize and clean up the task within a short span of time which provided the quick visibility of all the rules to be actioned.

Traffic Analyzer provided the centralized view for our IT SOC operations to focus mainly on high-risk firewall rules exposing with explicit any rules.

The other best feature is the Fire flow module which is in the process of implementation to automate the firewall rules changes along with the workflow model right from the requester to the implementer.

Both the modules of AlgoSec solution which has been on-boarded in our environment are amazing to use it as it provides a central end to end visibility of the firewall rules spanning across the multiple layers of the firewall.

It's helping our Risk and Compliance team to assess all our firewall rules periodically and help us to remain compliant. 

It saves a lot of manual time especially in daily operations and increases the turnaround time for business.

It has helped us internally to provide the documentation for our auditing and reporting purposes.

AlgoSec should explore integrating more multi-vendor platforms and should be looking towards ready infrastructure for providing Infrastructure as service (IAAS) on any cloud platforms as the trend and technology is gradually moving from In House platforms to Cloud platforms.

Algosec should also be exploring the integration with the open source firewalls as well.

The GUI features of Algosec solution should be more flexible to use and adopt.

We have been using this solution for one year.

In terms of scalability, it's a license-based model to add license at any point of time when you have any new firewalls added in the portfolio.

Customer service is good but needs more improvement to be on listening side of the customers.

No, this is the first time we have introduced this solution.

Our Initial setup was not so straight forward as we were exploring all the features to its depth so lots of engagement was done with OEM level to explore and implement in our environment.

We went through local vendor support however the involvement from OEM was also huge and phenomenal.

Definitely the simplicity to use this solution is the key factor to be a leader in this competition and the other factor is the response and support model.

We went through the RFP process evaluation for all the magic quadrant leaders of the  market.

We've been using Algosec as our reference tool to clean our policies from old unused rules and objects and to assess rules that are categorized as risky so that we can fix those risks.

Firewall Analyzer from Algosec is our main tool for Firewall auditing and it makes our external auditors very confident on the way our policies are managed.

Fireflow from Algosec also helps us identifying which firewalls are on the way from source to destination when we need to open flows and it saves us a lot of time. We are still on our path to implement full automation of firewall policy creation with Algosec's Fireflow but the goal is to achieve it soon.

Since we deployed Algosec our Firewall policies which didn't have much maintenance over more than 15 years had their policies reduced to less than half the rules by using Algosec's Firewall Analyzer to remove unused rules, unused objects withing rules, compacting several firewall rules in one rule, etc.

We were also able with Firewall Analyzer to get risk reports of our firewall policies and start tackling them to close them or at least to be aware of its existance.

Firewall Analyzer is amazon in Policy Optimization and we feel we are much more secure since we have this product. If we add a rule that poses a risk we get an alert from Firewall Analyzer which is very important to us.

We are also starting to use Fireflow and our goal is to have the policy creation automated soon. For now we are already able to identify which firewalls are on the path between point A and point B and we are on the path to full automation which will reduce a lot the workload of our team.

The feature we find the most valuable is the Firewall Analyzer for the firewall policy audits and to show external auditors we have a process to identify risks and to tackle them. It's also very important for policy clean maintenance. 

This helps us know which devices are between the source and destination on the flows that we need to open for the business. The audit tools are also very important to us because we can easily have everything that needs to be presented to the security auditors.

We are in the process of implementing FireFlow for full automation which will save us time for more important things we need to to on daily basis that are not creating firewall rules. We aim to achieve the full automation soon.

In our case it would be very important to improve support to Dell switches and also some Juniper switches, which we have a lot of in our company network. This has been our difficulty for the full automation on the Fireflow. If all our network devices were Cisco I'm sure we would have the network map complete very easily and the full automation working with much less effort.

We already asked Algosec for the support of the switches we have that are not natively supported for the future versions and we expect that we are lucky enough for them to be supported on the next releases, although there are some ways of working around non-natively supported switches to complete the network map.

We have been using Algosec solution for more than 5 years now.

We never had issues so far in terms of stability.

The solution is very scalable and allows you to add all the firewalls and devices you need.

It is also scalable on the licensing as you can start by buying only the Firewall Analyzer license with which you can start onboarding all the devices and completing the network diagram so that Algosec's has the whole picture and know all the paths from network A to B.

After that you are ready to start using FireFlow and you can buy the license only when you are ready to start deploying it.

Sometimes it takes more time than expected to have answers for support tickets, but in general the customer service is good.

Positive

Not in our case.

The initial setup has been easy. The only difficult thing was the part in which we needed to onboard non natively supported switches. That part is a bit more complex.

We implemented with a mix of external company and in-house. The external team was helpful and had a good expertise level.

The time we save on our daily operations is very important. We could reduce the team size with this tool as we had a trainee almost fully working on opening flows.

It also allows us to detect risks on firewall rules and fix them, keeping the company network safe.

The price for the solution is not cheap but if you use it fully it will compensate in terms of securitization and in terms of time gained on the daily operations. It is also very helpful if your company is audited on the security part.

We heard about Tufin and Algosec, and after going through the specs we decided to go on a POC with Algosec and ended up buying it as it fitted our needs. We followed our Firewall integrator advice, who also recommended Algosec for our Firewall's park which is basically Fortinet and Check Point.

We recommend trying fully automation in a controlled environment before widely deploying it to the production firewalls. It's important to gain confidence on the product.

We use AlgoSec for firewall policy management.

The most valuable feature of AlgoSec is its firewall analyzer. AlgoSec also has a better interface.

AlgoSec's audit management is not good enough and can be improved. Also, AlgoSec should be made more scalable.

I have been using AlgoSec for around one year.

AlgoSec is a stable solution.

AlgoSec is not a scalable solution. Only I use AlgoSec in our company to do firewall management.

It is moderately easy to set up AlgoSec.

Two staff were involved in AlgoSec's deployment, which took around three hours.

Before choosing AlgoSec, we evaluated Tufin as an option. We chose AlgoSec because it has a better interface.

AlgoSec is a good firewall management tool for organizations with multiple firewall levels. If you only have two or three firewall levels, then AlgoSec is not worth investing in.

Overall, I rate AlgoSec an eight out of ten.

One of the use cases for the solution is when you have many firewalls from different vendors and would like to handle all the configurations from a single pane of glass.

We are an AlgoSec distributor, and another use case that is very important to our customers, especially in the financial sector, is generating compliance reports. AlgoSec has very comprehensive compliance reporting. Most of our customers who use AlgoSec care a lot about compliance reports, whether ISO or PCI or other types of compliance.

AlgoSec saves time by providing an analysis of all the firewall rules. For example, I might find 10 unused rules, or rules without objects or without a subnet. To get that information manually can take time. I might have to go through a firewall and check the rules and it would take at least 10 minutes for 10 rules. And a manual process can result in errors. AlgoSec saves time because it can detect all unused rules and I can just remove them via the AlgoSec platform through FireFlow. Removing those 10 rules manually can take about 20 minutes, but through AlgoSec it takes one or two minutes.

The solution can find all the misconfigurations in firewall rules and it can delete or modify them automatically, with no human action needed. As a result, there will no longer be errors in the firewalls. FireFlow handles the workflow of adding and removing policies. Sometimes, an engineer may not have solid experience when it comes to firewall rules. If he goes to the firewall portal itself and tries to add or remove a policy, this policy may cause errors or potential risk. AlgoSec handles this process instead. It helps eliminate human error.

Also, if you have a network engineer with less experience, he can still go through AlgoSec and submit rules. AlgoSec supports another tier of engineers who approve the policies. This is all done using FireFlow.

We use the AFA (AlgoSec Firewall Analyzer) and FireFlow. AFA is the most popular feature in our region and FireFlow is good for managing workflow.

AlgoSec Firewall Analyzer can detect misconfigurations and unused or permissive rules, as well as rules without logging. Through a single dashboard, I can see all the problematic rules from all the firewalls. It's very simple, with AlgoSec, to get an analysis of all the rules, and that helps with visibility. AlgoSec can do a risk assessment for each policy or rule in the firewall and detect the severity of each rule, whether low, medium, high, or critical. I can get a quick overview of the risk policies that a customer needs to change because, perhaps, there is a rule where the risk is high.

The AlgoSec dashboard is very simple. I can find all the information without any effort. All the tabs are clear and straightforward.

I can apply changes to rules through FireFlow. For example, when I detect many unused rules, I can remove them and, using FireFlow's process, it is very simple to do so.

It is very easy to generate a compliance report for ISO or PCI. It can be done with one click. Some organizations may have a baseline for compliance. The beauty of AlgoSec is that it can adjust compliance according to the corporate needs or environment, when standards vary from one region to another.

When it comes to visibility, the solution can make a network map for all the devices in the network, whether routers or firewalls. I can run queries to detect network policies. For example, if a customer cannot access the corporate stack or the application site, using AlgoSec I can detect which firewall, and which policy inside the firewall, may be fully or partially blocking access. This is a very important feature and most of our customers use network mapping to create visibility into the network.

AlgoSec integrates with most of the leading firewall vendors, but one issue is that AlgoSec doesn't support Sophos and Forcepoint. AlgoSec competitors, like FireMon, support Forcepoint. I have told AlgoSec a number of times that we have many customers that use Forcepoint. I have asked why they don't support integration with Forcepoint. They have said they don't care about Sophos, Forcepoint, and SonicWall. They don't consider those vendors to be leaders in the firewall market and they don't have plans to support them.

I have been using this solution for about two years.

Sometimes a customer's platform is down, but overall AlgoSec is stable.

Support from AlgoSec is good. When I create tickets, they support us and solve all the tickets. There is no delay in support.

One of the things I don't like about AlgoSec is that when a customer has an issue with the platform, it takes time to resolve. Issues often need more than tier-one or tier-two; they're often not easy for the customer to resolve. It requires the AlgoSec team to solve issues with configurations or performance.

For example, AlgoSec upgraded the platform six months ago and it was mandatory for all customers. On my side, it was not easy to perform the upgrade and I had to request support from AlgoSec.

Positive

We use:

• FireFlow 
• AFA, AlgoSec Firewall Analyzer
• BusinessFlow

I use AlgoSec to optimize the firewall rules and to analyze the logs of a lot of firewalls, like Palo Alto, Check Point, and Fortinet. 

When a user creates a ticket in AlgoSec, I validate the ticket or don't. It's opened flow in the firewalls also. 

I also use it to implement and push the rules in the equipment. 

I have used it for compliance and analytics. I audit Cisco ASA equipment. I do a compliance report for every piece of equipment. I do some reports and also weigh any risk on each piece of equipment. Some rules use, for example, a critical port. If it shows to be a risk, we'll take action. For example, we can optimize a permissive rule and create new rules to have a more secure flow.

I use FireFlow to help users when they create a ticket in AlgoSec. I help them with information like the IP source, IP destination, and endpoint. 

AlgoSec also helps users choose the right equipment. There are a lot of stages and at every stage, I can choose the equipment. We have a lot of equipment and a lot of firewalls so that we can identify equipment. I also use the map to see the flow from the source IP to the destination IP so we can discover the network. It's essential to have a picture of the flow in terms of the equipment, services, and protocol.

We have critical security policies. With AlgoSec, we can create a security policy to manage critical applications. I have worked in the bank and they have critical applications. We created some security policies for those applications. Controlling the flow is critical for our customers. 

In the beginning, we compared tools like AlgoSec, Tufin, and Skybox. We did some research. There was budget to purchase the resource. We did comparisons and found AlgoSec to be the best solution.  

It's easy to use. It's not very complex. You can do a lot of things with AlgoSec.

AlgoSec should be optimized. There is a lot of RPA and we have scripts in AlgoSec that need recertification. With AlgoSec Firewall Analyzer, we can see lots of objects and lots of rules that tell us we need to clean the equipment. It will give us a solution but it doesn't always work. The solution that it gives us is not always accurate from the scripts.

For example, because we have a workflow, when the user creates his ticket, the ticket was automatically dispatched to different teams. We have a security team and another team to implement and push the rules. The ticket automatically will get sent to the wrong team and then we need to send it back to the user for them to update. 

I have used AlgoSec for two years. I use AlgoSec in French.

I find AlgoSec to be stable. Sometimes there are days that it doesn't work. We connect to AlgoSec via the web. Some days we don't have access to it and we get in touch with the support team to help us. This happens around once a month. 

It is scalable. 

I reach out to support when I have questions. I send emails with my questions. 

The initial setup was not complex. It was easy.

In terms of pricing, it is more expensive than other solutions. It's expensive because we also have the AFA module. 

AlgoSec is better than Skybox and Tufin. We have a lot of AlgoSec licenses. It offers the ability to do optimization and varied tasks.

AlgoSec offers diagrams about different pieces of equipment but Tufin and Skybox don't offer these features. I can also control external IPs. We can see the configuration. All equipment has configuration and AlgoSec enables us to log that traffic. We have control over the flow.

I would rate it an eight out of ten. It's practical and easy to use. Many enterprises use it in France. Anytime we have questions, the support team is responsive.

We are security consultants based in India. We provide solutions to our customers and implement for them. We deploy AlgoSec on cloud and on-premise, depending on the customer. The use case is generally for companies that have multiple firewall vendors. If you have FireEye, for example, you can create the rules according to your environment. But if you have four different kinds of firewalls, and you want to allow or block something, you need the configuration on all the firewalls. AlgoSec simplifies that process. Many of our clients in India use this solution. We are official partners of AlgoSec. 

This solution will cut down operating costs in any company. 

It's a bit difficult for a network engineer to login on the firewall and make the changes and in that sense, AlgoSec is a lifesaver. You don't need to log in on each separate firewall, you just login on AlgoSec and make changes on all the firewalls from one single pane of glass. You can get the logs from all the firewalls to your AlgoSec as well. And if you see any blocked traffic, you can delete it at the point it gets blocked. If you have five firewalls, it will show which firewall is getting blocked and that can be automated. It's a very powerful and useful tool that can be customized to your requirements. One of the main features is that you can configure all the rules in one place. It also provides a complete report of Euro firewall rules that complies with security authorities such as GDPR.

If we talk about Cloud and SDN Platforms it support AWS, Azure etc.... 

I'd like to see this solution support some other Cloud platforms as well such as Alibaba and a GCP to give the customer flexibility. 

It's a very reliable and stable product because it's not dependent on any hardware, and is installed on a one-to-one machine. 

Scalability in this case really depends on whether the customer is able to provide the resources or not. It requires resources including memory, RAM, and those sorts of things. From a software point of view, I'd say it is very scalable. 

I haven't needed to access technical support because their documentation was so clean and in such a format that I was able to implement without any issues. My customers use it and they are pretty happy with it, because there is good customer support available in India.

The initial setup is very straightforward. You just find the resources on the virtual machine and download.

Licensing is on an annual basis. The best part is that if you have two or three firewalls, but you are using them in a cluster, it's counted as one. This is a basic aspect of the licensing with AlgoSec. I think the licensing is pretty good because they now have all the compliance issues sorted. 

If any user or customer has firewalls, maybe 15 or 20 plus, definitely go for this product. It cuts down operating costs. The benefit of AlgoSec is that you only need one engineer to do all the configurating, rather than separate engineers for the different firewalls. Not only that but you can automate as well. Obviously you have to integrate a texting management tool, but you can integrate and follow the focus.

I rate this solution a 10 out of 10. 

I have been implementing AlgoSec for different end customers. None of the environments are on the cloud, they're on-premise applications. Some of them have been planned, but a majority of them are for virtual instances. I have implemented four or five end-customers and also supported them with AlgoSec.

I deploy and maintain AlgoSec for customers for test purposes. I use it before doing anything on the customer's premises. For testing purposes, I have used it in my own environment also, but the majority of the time I'm using it in the customers' environment.

I have integrated AlgoSec with Check Point, Palo Alto, some older Cisco versions like WSN, Fortinet firewalls, and Cisco ASA.

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. For example, if the customer is concerned about different standards, like ISO or PZI levels, we can all do the same compliance from AlgoSec. We can even track the change monitoring and mitigate their risks with it. You can customize the workflows based on their environment. I find those features interesting in AlgoSec.

The visibility is pretty clear from top to bottom, even interconnected maps and zones.

We can always customize the standard risk profiles. But even within the standard one, before doing any changes, when you go with the flow, they always inform you. Before implementing the change, you get the visibility there. You get the visibility with risks.

This is important because the places that I have worked have different departments for risk handling. So whenever we go through the flows before implementing, that part goes through the risk department and gets their approval first. With AlgoSec you get to know the risk profile before implementing the change. That way you get to know the risks that you are taking with that particular change. So it's important.

It has helped to reduce the time that it takes to implement firewall rules. In some places where I work, they fill a form and send it to a particular manager. For example, if an end-user fills it and he sends it to his manager, then it gets his approval and he sends it to the risk department, and gets their approval, and sends it back to the person who implements. There's a chain that takes a longer period of time and even their paper costs. That gets reduced when they use a workflow from AlgoSec. They always get automatic notifications when the change moves on to the next level so they know exactly which stage the change is in.

It is helping to reduce those policy changes by more than 50%.

You can face audits in two ways. You can either do it from AlgoSec. I have used it like that for periodic audits. You can always plan it. Either you can go from one of your rules, clean up your rule base and improve the standards of your risks and all the other areas in the AlgoSec reports. Or else, you can go for a PCR level report and you can prepare it stage-by-stage and commit up to a certain standard. I have used both methods. You can also do reports for the particular changes and check how much your environment is improved after you follow the report and do the particular change that they suggest. For example, reordering or combining your rules or removing some of the unused objects. Then you can run a report and see how much it gets improved. So in terms of auditing, which they can run every six or eight months, or once in a year, you can always turn on your audit before it comes to that level. You can always prepare for your audit by scheduling reports.

It's pretty easy when it comes to integrating with the leading vendors. If you want to integrate, they have proper documentation. Their documentation is very good. I have to give them credit for that. You can always follow it. Integrations are pretty easy and much easier than with some of the similar competitive products that I have used. I don't want to mention names, but AlgoSec is much easier because of their proper documentation. For example, when you are integrating a particular device or application, you know the things that you need to do because they have the proper documentation before doing it. It takes less time to integrate compared to some of the other products in the field.

I have come up with two cases of misconfigurations in some rules. One of them is with change requests when you have a single object and you just have to amend it to the particular rule but not to other specific rules. The other thing is what rule it's covering. It's not a misconfiguration, actually, and you can amend it. I have come up with some situations like that. Before coming back to my stage, it is always clear from the other risks and level of approval. So I did come up with that kind of a scenario but it's not actually a misconfiguration.

AlgoSec has helped to simplify the job of security engineers because you can always monitor your risks and know that your particular configurations are up-to-date, so it reduces the effort of the security engineers. You can always get top to bottom. For example, if you talk about the rule base of a particular firewall and access to some particular things, you can always get a clean one with the required security. So rather than going here and there, they can always use this tool to do the automation and their decision-making.

I haven't yet configured with Cisco ACI, but in the next one and a half months, I'll be integrating it with an ACI structure.

I expect the value of bringing AlgoSec and ACI together will be good. It'll be like an extension. If you integrate AlgoSec, it's not like a single point. If you connect it with the ACI fabric it will be challenging. I haven't really experienced it in full, because I am still in the designing phase and I haven't done the full implementation, but I feel like it'll be interesting and challenging. Since I have not experienced it or yet done the implementation combining these two, I cannot fully say how it will be. It's a question mark. But I'm expecting it to be a little bit challenging because the visibility differs.

AlgoSec needs improvement with its support level.

I know that they have 3D architecture like SMB and enterprise on top of that. Some people consider this as a noncritical device. But because it's not as critical as a firewall, some people think that the support level does not need to be equal to a firewall level of support. But if some people are monitoring and managing firewalls through AlgoSec, the level of support should be equal to a firewall level. It shouldn't be dragging over two or three days. I know that they have three levels of support, but at the very first level, I believe you should be able to directly contact the tech and get a solution as soon as possible.

The only problem I have with AlgoSec is just its level of support, not with the product. Not with the organization or the documentation or anything else, but if I need any additional support, the only problem is the time it takes to get it.

I've been using AlgoSec for two and a half to almost three years now.

I use AlgoSec Firewall Analyzer and FireFlow.

It is generally stable. As I mentioned, the only problem the customers are worried about is the technical response time from AlgoSec. If you have to contact tech support the project will get delayed. The customers are comparing it because, for example, in their environment they have Palo or Check Point, and their support levels are much higher. With them, when you open a ticket, after a few minutes you can check and get the opinion from the tech or check if an engineer is available. If it's a critical issue, you can always talk to him within hours and fix the issue. So they always compare that level to AlgoSec's support level. That's the only issue that we have to explain to them. The customer's opinion is this is a non-critical device because this is not a firewall. But we manage firewalls so that kind of level of support should be given.

In terms of scalability, the maximum that I have tried with AlgoSec is six clusters. Its scalability is good. The way that we can work with it is good because with every device you can see everything on the same dashboard. If you want to check the monitoring, you can always select the device to see. You can check the status by clicking the device. It's the same structure. The scalability is good but I have only worked with a maximum of six clusters so I can't tell you exactly when it comes to a high number of hours, if it is good or bad, but for the six that I have worked with, it's good.

We do have plans to increase usage of AlgoSec. I have explained to some of the customers about the application integrations, the visibilities, and the rule-based optimizations by using this feature. In terms of features, I am expecting that they'll amend that component to their environment. Since we are a system integrating company, when we propose a solution for a particular customer, we always propose to do firewalls. Therefore, we always add AlgoSec. When we are proposing it, we always submit AlgoSec automatically.

I did not find the initial set up very complex. It's advanced, but not complex. Their documentation for implementation is very good.

It really depends on the customer. Some places, when you go for a POC or a deployment, we can always plan and tell them that if they are integrating these kinds of things, these are the levels of provisions that we need. These are the things that they need to do from their end. 

The POC for some customers goes three or four days because of their delays. But with some customers it goes fairly quickly, like a day and a half or two days. For one customer it took five days because they had a procedure where you have to fill a form and send it before creating your user for AlgoSec when it's with the firewall integrations. Because of that, it took a little bit longer. So depending on that I give it three to five maximum days to integrate four or five clusters. It really shouldn't have taken that long to do the work. Then you need to contact different teams to get the support. It all causes delays.

In terms of implementation strategy, I'm always looking at what their components are. I always have to go with the Firewall Analyzer components and to check what type of devices  they are willing to integrate for this particular unit. I check if it is a Check Point cluster, or the Palo cluster, or a Forti cluster, and what the additional features are that they are looking for. Based on that, I complete the Firewall Analyzer unit as soon as I can. Since I have worked with the product, I have similar use cases. What are the things that we can use to demonstrate for firewall change flow? I'm always asking for input from them. What are the things that you need for base level policy changes, etc...?

In terms of actually deploying AlgoSec, most of the time it's me only. But I have to contact the other end. There is always a direct contact person and a support team when it comes for integrating the firewalls. 

When it comes to maintaining AlgoSec, we have another colleague also. They can always give the support.

I have seen improvements of ROI at companies. Although customers might have a department, they recruit new people to use AlgoSec reports to analyze their risk, monitor the alerts, and check their daily tasks. I have seen new implementaton by a banking customer who obviously see the value.

I'm on the technical side so I don't have a clear picture about pricing and licensing. But as far as I know, if a customer asks for a 24/7 support, the pricing level is much higher, relative to normal 8 - 5 support.

Recently, we proposed AlgoSec and there were other companies who proposed other solutions. During the technical discussions, I was the one who did the demonstration, and we were able to say that whatever features they are looking for, we can always provide it with AlgoSec. When they finally released the tenders we were in the top three options and the second place for technical. The only problem was the pricing with AlgoSec.

The other company gave much a lower price. We couldn't match the AlgoSec price level to that particular vendor. I think the company and customer were really impressed with our presentation and demonstration that we gave. They even told us if we can reduce our pricing by a certain level, they can take us because they are impressed with our product, but the pricing won't do. But when we tried to AlgoSec to reduce the cost so we can get this deal they couldn't match it to that level. Unfortunately, we lost the customer.

It was not a one day effort that we put into submitting these documents, to comply to their requirements, and do a demonstration. They were convinced to take this product, but because of the pricing issue we lost it. We all got disappointed about the support level.

I find AlgoSec more organized than some of the other products. With some other products, you have to go here and there to check it, but with AlgoSec it's more organized. But, I find some of the other products more customizable than AlgoSec. It takes a little bit of time to do the customization, for example, if you need to change or add some special level of approval or if you need to add three different levels of approvals for a particular workflow. To do that, sometimes you have to contact AlgoSec's regional support. But with other products that I know, it's just a matter of adding a particular character to the workflow. In some cases I have found other products that are useful, but in terms of organization, I find AlgoSec easier and more manageable than some of the other products.

I have learned so many lessons here. A secure environment is your main asset. When you have a secure environment you can always run your business smoothly, do your changes smoothly, and do your daily tasks smoothly. A secure and safe environment is the key to a successful IT business. That's the main point that I've learned from this.

If you're implementing, I always recommend AlgoSec and to check whether it can cater to their needs. Most of the time, it is capable. It's capable of handling your requirements most of the time.

On a scale of one to ten, I would give AlgoSec a seven.

This is taking into consideration the support and everything else. Any talks about AlgoSec and you need to consider their support level.

Many of our customers have big networks with several different vendors of telecom and firewall equipment. This means that network management overhead is significant and manual firewall rule modification is slow and error-prone.

Many firewalls have a bunch of redundant and often unused rules and that decrease overall network performance. The AlgoSec ASMS solution gives customers a very powerful tool for taking control over their firewall policies and to speed up their network security operations and incident response.

AlgoSec ASMS brings a holistic view of network firewall policy and automates firewall security management in very large-sized environments. Additionally, it speeds up the changes in firewall rules with a vendor-agnostic approach. As a result, the security and accuracy of firewall rules are increased.

Another very helpful feature of the AlgoSec ASMS solution is the ability to automate the mapping between applications and IT systems traffic requirements, and firewall rule base in couple with security risks analysis and compliance.

The AlgoSec solution consists of several modules and each of them improves the environment in a specific area. The Firewall analyzer produces a holistic view of the network topology with knowledge of firewall policies, security risks, and compliance.

The Fireflow module automates the change management process and is tightly integrated with the Firewall Analyzer to achieve compliance with minimal exposure.

The AppViz module allows for mapping applications and IT systems, their traffic with vulnerabilities, and firewall rules and policies.

The initial setup can be complex for beginners.

We started to offer AlgoSec ASMS solution to our Customers in 2015.

Scalability is good if you choose the right sizing of hardware and design.

We have had several projects with other firewall management solutions, and our customers choose AlgoSec because it's very flexible.

The setup is easy when you know what to do. The solution has many options to customize and tune.

Our company engineers implemented the solution.

We have evaluated Tufin and Skybox.

For many customers in Russia, the support of local firewall and network vendors' equipment is very important and they will be happy to get that from AlgoSec.

In Russia, there are several common firewall and VPN solutions that are widly deployed over the country. Sometimes, the use of these products is required by regulation, whereas other times, customers prefer using Russian devices to lower foreign vendor dependency risks. It also ensures that no foreign sanctions will break their network and security operations.

Having the support of these devices is very important for our customers.