AlgoSec Reviews

We use AlgoSec FireFlow and AFA modules for risk analysis, audit, and change management to enforce appropriate security compliance.

It has streamlined our processes for access and firewall management. It is used by all the IT user community internally and by our service provider who is in charge of our IT run activities.

AFA and FireFlow modules are the one that we use. 

• AFA provides project teams with a simplified way to obtain the status on their current rule set. 
• Fireflow is used for our change management process and is linked to our CP FW. 

Integration to cloud ITSM tools, such ServiceNow.

Be able to automatically analyze application traffic with machine learning capabilities and propose simplification for rule set optimization.

• Granular visibility
• Risk rules evaluation
• Saves with manual processes and dependencies

• Saves person-hours
• Security tightening and optimization in minutes
• Loophole identification which helps with compliance
• Effective tracking and automation of change management

Automated policy push for the Fortinet product family. The Active Change/Automated Policy push feature is already there for all other leading devices such as Cisco, Check Point, Juniper, and Palo Alto, etc.

I've used it for two years.

It's not hard to deploy, and can be run on a virtual environment.

It is a robust easy to use platform.

It has highly scalable architecture.

The customer service team is reliable.

They have time-zone matched technical/SLA support and local response team available.

It is pretty straightforward and a piece of cake for the network engineers.

Initial implementation is highly recommended to be done through a vendor and/or subject matter expert so you can leverage the best of the features.

AlgoSec is a best of class solution with unique value proposition. Licensing has flexibility perpetual and subscription models, and by identifying your own real needs can achieve savings.

As a fair evaluation, other solutions are available in the security policy cleanup area. However, AlgoSec stands apart with a visionary business centric approach – not limiting itself to a mere firewall security cleanup tool. With AlgoSec, we also get an automated security change management/compliance solution. It has the unique and powerful application connectivity auto-discovery and then translates these to firewall rules. This is useful to achieve automation during datacenter migration, etc.

AlgoSec is a business-driven security management solution, a comprehensive and visionary solution which covers what needs to be covered in firewall security visibility, security change management, and application-security connectivity. AlgoSec as a platform fills the gaps between the otherwise disconnected teams - Security, Network and Applications - within an organization.

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 are not personally using AlgoSec in our organization. We consult with the customer, as to why they have to buy such a solution like Firewall Analyzer. We are a distributor for the Indian market. We guide the customer to why they have to buy this kind of solution, what are the business requirements, etc. 

I have done PoCs and demos on the product.

The solution allows multi-vendor firewalls to have a centralized solution where they can analyze all the rules, duplicates rules, etc. Also, it helps them understand if a change can be automated.

We consult with big customers who have multiple locations. In every location, they have various firewalls available. With AlgoSec as our product, it has really helped with our operational tasks and activities.

If you go through that compliance report, it will give you whether your firewall is in compliance or not. It will also give you a recommendation whether you need to change it. The compliance has helped us with customers, e.g., internal audit from the quality team and external auditors.

AlgoSec integrates with multiple security vendors. It captures the rules, policies and authentication required.

It is pretty simple to use. Resources are readily available.

Firewall Analyzer and FireFlow are very helpful for IT guys, especially for multi-vendor firewalls.

We get a lot of visibility from Firewall Analyzer. It is definitely helpful to see the details of duplicate rules on the firewall. It can define the connectivity and routing.

The solution provides us with full visibility into the risk involved in firewall change requests. This is always required. For example, if you are implementing one rule for network A to network B, but you don't have that visibility in terms of network when you have multiple firewalls, then you have to deploy the rule on every firewall. However, if you have FireFlow, then FireFlow will automatically deploy this rule where it is needed.

I would like more documents and support for the cloud firewall.

We have been using it for one year. I am level 2 certified. I am familiar with AFA (Algosec Firewall Analyzer), FireFlow, and CloudFlow. I have done the online training for AppViz and AppChange.

It has been good. I have not seen any issues.

One to two people are enough for deployment and maintenance. 

The scalability is good.

The technical support is good because it is already available in India as well as the R&D. Whenever I need help, they take my call. I don't have complaints in respect to the AlgoSec support.

I also have experience with Tufin.

It is straightforward and easy to deploy. Two to three days was enough time to complete the configuration along with the device integrations.

For implementation, I always follow these steps:

1. Understand the customer's infrastructure, e.g., what are the customer expectations and primary pain points?
2. Deployment architecture
3. Hardware requirements and prerequisites
4. Port prerequisites
5. initial configuration and setup
6. Onboard devices with default configuration
7. Monitor devices for seven days, then apply the recommendation based on the AFA solution.

For the migration, it is really helpful because we all capture all their policies. We can clean up things with Firewall Analyzer. When doing a migration, we take a backup and that is really helpful for the migration process.

It has reduced the time it takes to implement firewall rules in hundreds of our customers' organizations. Without FireFlow and Firewall Analyzer, you would need one to two hours to deploy the firewall change request rule because you need to identify where to position that rule. It definitely reduces the time by half.

The pricing is good. Though, I would like if pricing could better support small businesses.

We use Cisco ACI with Check Point , FortiGate, and Palo Alto.

This technology gives us total control of our stuff, validation, and clean up of everything that we need.

If you are doing migration from on-prem to cloud, then there is definitely a very quick process and helpful process for that migration.

I would rate this product as an eight and a half out of 10.

Our primary use for AlgoSec is to automate our firewall configuration. We use the AlgoSec system to remotely configure the firewalls, making our life easier.

We are in a multisite environment with plenty of firewalls for perimeter security and LAN segregation for specific proposes. This solution helped us to make the process more dynamic.

It has reduced the workload for the firewall team thanks to the API integration with our ticketing system, doing the standard type of request automatically. Before having it, we had to create a lot of standard rules that now can now be just pushed from the AlgoSec system.

The automation of the firewall rule deployment, working together with our ticketing system, is the most valuable feature of this solution. The needs as required by a user request are automatically validated and configured in the specified firewalls without any human action. This improves the firewall team's workload.

I would be nice to have a good tool for network map discovery in the GUI to make it more user friendly and be able to check and modify network maps in graphical and more intuitive way . This will improve our network overview for new deployments and troubleshooting. 

I have been using this solution for three years.

In three years, we have only had one issue with respect to stability.

When we had the issue they responded well.

We did not use another solution before AlgoSec.

We deployed this solution using our in-house team.

The reduction in workload reduces the cost in terms of human time.

We use this solution for managing an environment with more than five thousand registered devices across firewalls, routers, balancers, and VMware. Highly critical banking environment.

We use FireFlow as our primary ticket management tool.

With AlgoSec, it was able to conduct the environment so that it was possible to get more accurate and fast information about the changes that the environment went through.

It has reduced the time for firewall rule requests to be implemented in the environment.

The most valuable feature is traffic simulation because, with this function, it has become more practical to know if something is released or blocked in my environment.

IPT is valuable because this function is of great help to have a more effective security policy.

I believe Active Change needs to be improved because not all products are supported, and some functions cannot be implemented by Active Change either.

Technical support needs to find solutions more quickly.

Active Change could implement routes in Firewalls, it should also be able to perform the creation of APP control and URL filter rules.

We have been using this solution for six years.

In general, it is a stable product. We have rarely had a problem that resulted in the total unavailability of the solution.

AlgoSec requires a large amount of processing power to perform its tasks, making it a piece of equipment that always requires monitoring to be optimally optimized.

Some troubleshooting took months to resolve. So, I think we have to improve this point.

I used Nipper and FireMon, but I started using AlgoSec due to the great recommendations I received.

The architecture was defined with one master, four slaves, and one remote.

Our internal team handled the deployment.

I do not have many details of this commercial part.

I evaluated FireMon and Nipper in addition to this solution.

Many users have the tool but don't use it with everything it can offer. What I recommend is that you explore all of the features of the product.

We are currently using this solution to audit our firewall policies (both in performance and compliance), as well as automating the creation of new rules and improving application functionality delivery. We are also using AlgoSec to automate machine provisioning (creation of new rules associated with that machine) and machine decommissioning (removal of rules associated with that machine).

With AlgoSec, we are now able to automate several time-consuming tasks. We are currently in a rule base performance improvement process and AlgoSec is an invaluable tool to accomplish this. Furthermore, we are starting rule creation automation, which will also provide some relief on our workload.

The most valuable feature for us is AlgoSec's ability to analyze rules for risks and for performance while allowing the user to submit a change request immediately based on that assessment. Additionally, the fact that it integrates seamlessly with Ansible, as well as providing an API for the users to extend based on their own needs, is a great plus for us.

The product is severely lacking in vendor support. They claim to support some devices, but when you dig deeper, it is only basic support, with enterprise-grade features for those devices being unsupported. This is a big deal for us, as several sections of our network are not fully supported which, in turn, does not allow us to fully automate rule creation. Moreover, we cannot perform end to end connectivity checks. One such feature is the lack of VRRP support on devices other than Cisco or Juniper, which causes the software to interpret a non-existent router as the next hop for a particular flow (the VIP address of the VRRP).

While this solution is somewhat stable, there is definitively room for improvement here. We've had some issues with the solution during our usage but, so far, no show stoppers. Other customers of this solution have complained that a large number of devices can severely hinder the stability of the solution.

This is a very scalable solution, built mostly on open source technology. The customer is allowed to extend its functionalities via the API to integrate with other solutions or existing automation.

Technical support is sometimes difficult to deal with as the response times are somewhat lacking. One good thing is that the case owner you are assigned to is generally the same,  which is great because, after several cases, the case owner is already familiar with your network.

The initial setup is not cumbersome at all. The documentation and training videos are definitively a big plus.

The implementation was mainly performed by us, with the help of a vendor team. The level of expertise of the third party was passable, but we were looking forward to having someone with more expertise with the product.

So far, the ROI is currently only due to the fact that rule automation has decreased the load on our support team, allowing them to work on other projects. We are also able to provide reports to auditors without losing a single day from the network support department. We simply provide AlgoSec reports and analysis.

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.