AlgoSec Reviews

As a value-added distributor, we sell the AlgoSec solution primarily to financial institutions and Telcos. This is done through our partner network. The main use case we see is process automation. Customers can manage several firewalls or network devices with a single pane of glass.

Policy optimization, visibility, and a faster change management process has reduced unnecessary times required for manually changing processes. The resources are now utilized more effectively for other areas.

• Risk Analyzing: Short time analysis and accuracy
• Policy Optimization: Removing garbage policy rules and improving the performance of network devices
• Compliance: For Audits in the short term

There is room for improvement in the rollback process.  

What we would like to see in the future is related to support. For integration with newly supported devices, we require a proper support matrix with an escalation process.

In regards to stability, there is no complexity. We have not seen many faults reported by our customers. Faults are rectified quickly. 

AlgoSec facilitates several form factors where customers can choose different options, including both hardware and software. For CloudFlow customers, we now have the SaaS model as well.

The support from the AlgoSec team is prompt and helps to rectify the issues in a timely manner.

We did not use another solution prior to this one.

The initial setup is straightforward for many of our customers. However, when we integrate with some newly supported network devices there is a challenge in getting support from the AlgoSec team.

As the distributor, all of the implementations for our customers was done by our own engineers.

Depending on the customer it takes between twelve months and eighteen months to see ROI.

The pricing is flexible with a low cost setup. 

There is no complexity in the licensing methods.

As a distributor, we took AlgoSec as a complementary product to Fortinet, which was one of our main products.

The AlgoSec Firewall Analyzer was greatly used for firewall analysis, policy tuning, and optimization. The automated change management feature was very useful and integrates seamlessly into the change management process.

This solution helps in maintaining and providing regulatory compliance metrics and to optimize the overall security of the organization. It provides great visibility into your firewall rules, thereby allowing you to eliminate redundant or overlapping rules. It saves time by allowing administrators to test network traffic and pinpoint which rules are being triggered for a particular traffic flow.

The most valuable features to me were the following:

1. Testing network flows and optimizing firewall policies.
2. Obtaining regulatory and compliance metrics for audits.
3. Visualize complex networks using the topology maps.
4. Simple interface and ease of navigation.

The product has a lot of great features already. However, I would like the reporting to be more customizable, as per user and auditing needs.

It is a highly scalable solution as per my experience.

I haven't used any other solutions.

I do not have much information on the pricing, as I wasn't part of the actual procurement process. I was told that the pricing and licensing was comparatively fair.

I did a basic evaluation of FireMon, which had identical features to the AlgoSec Firewall Analyzer.

• Overly permissive rules need more visibility, and we have given the "any to any" access in some cases. 
• Looking for the solution which will provide details and description of the policy, like providing the source and destination addresses that are used from particular rules.

Policy optimisation helped reduce the policy count of the firewall. Therefore, the visibility of firewall policies improved. 

Policy tightening feature: It gives the visibilities of "any to any" rules, which source and destination are used, and the actual traffic from overly permissive rules. Therefore, we are able to tighten the policy of the firewall. 

I would like to suggest that cloud visibility feature is provided in the next release. We would be able to understand how traffic flows from the source to destination.

No.

Yes, Skybox was there, but the GUI and some of the features are missing.

• A systems integrator to implement for clients
• To help them manage their firewalls that were bought from us as well.

It provides the organization by giving us visibility in the process of our clients and automates policy implementations and checks. It gives value to our managed services that we provide.

• Algosec Firewall Analyzer and Algosec FireFlow: They basically give us a full picture of how traffic flows and how we can secure it.
• The product, directly implementing the policies to be enforced by the gateways, makes life easier to the IT.

Based on the conference I just attended, it is improving by Algosec opening their API more. This allows us as a systems integrator to give more value to our clients. We will be able to integrate more things that do not come out of the box.

Stability is fine as it's been in the market for a long time.

Scalability is fine especially as they just released their CloudFlow as well.

No.

AlgoSec helps us be ramped up on our technical expertise on the product.

N/A.

Licensing is simple, and the setup is straightforward.

Yes, Tufin.

• Firewall management, configuration, and risk management functions to ensure the highest security posture
• Automated change notification is a must and is critical in maintaining a safe environment and compliance. 
• Need the ability to review the policy and NAT rule bases
• Lastly, logs from a firewall can be overwhelming and difficult to maintain, so every security department needs the ability to review logs with accuracy.  

AlgoSec provides visibility of policy and NAT firewall rules for rule review and cleanup. It provides risk management status of our firewalls at a glance, and notifies when any change is made to the firewalls. This solution has improved our security posture, lowered our risk and exposure, saved time with cleanup and maintaining the firewalls, and allowed for log review with ease. Finally, AlgoSec has changed how firewall management and changes are conducted, so it has improved our overall process and procedures.

I value all the rich features of AlgoSec equally since it solves many problems with one solution. From the ability to see rules with a few clicks to maintaining or lowering the firewall's security risk score is priceless. And, the support team behind the solution is equally as strong and helpful, making this one of my best implementation decisions and tools in the toolset.

AlgoSec is my favorite tool because it does what it is designed to do and it does it well. The service I've received from their support teams is second to none. They have always successfully answered my questions and solved my problems. So, it is difficult to improve a solid solution but, not everything is perfect. Having executive type reporting capabilities which explain the security posture and scoring to provide to executive management would be a nice feature to add. Reports can be printed, but an executive summary report would be an improvement. 

• The flagship feature used is its correlation of filtering rules (ACL/firewall).
• The audit of changes made in our environment is also very useful in the investigation of failure.

In an environment where onion layer security is strongly implemented, the filter elements can be configured in various places, and the traffic simulator proves, in this case, to be life-saving, whether in diagnostic time or in efficiency.

The AlgoSec solution has allowed us to achieve a clean-up and optimization of our filtering rules across our entire environment. The rules analysis allowed us to delegate the tool for operational purposes for the evaluation of firewall opening and audit requirements.

• The filter rules correlator allows us not only to have a clear view of the blocking points but also the quality of the filtering performed on the various firewalls highlighted by their risk index.
• Another interesting feature of the product is its ability to highlight filtering rules that would mask other more specific rules and thus lead to an optimization of the system.
• AlgoSec also allows us to have a history of changes. This feature is especially useful in the event of an outage or an unwanted change.

Although I'm very satisfied with the product, one of the ways of improving the product could lie, perhaps, in the acceleration of the analysis process and especially in the section — traffic simulation query.

Another improvement would be the support of an orchestration of different firewalls in a heterogeneous environment, mainly at the level of the management of the objects so as to have a homogeneous nomenclature.

• To manage the various network security equipment deployed
• Be able to detect unauthorized changes in those equipment.

It is still being deployed, but it shall enable reliance on more third parties out of the IT security team without losing the assurance that the configurations are under control. 

• Ability to manage all the network security equipment centrally
• Ability to delegate to local ITs the network security equipment change requests
• Ability to decrease the necessary workload to enable network connections, troubleshoot
• Ability to detect unauthorized or non-compliant changes in the network security equipment configuration.

Ability to manage more diversity of equipment, as well as simplify the management of the various workflows.

No previous solution.

Yes: Tufin.

The primary use case was the firewall policy cleaning and optimisation, plus compliance control and some change auditing.

AlgoSec provides a good optimization function that matches our needs related to other vendors. It allows us to clean useless rules and objects.

We are only using Firewall Analyzer, which is really good compared to other vendors. The other features (FireFlow and BusinessFlow) still aren't mature, and their licensing is expensive.

The production needs to be smarter and maybe have some AI capabilities to provide better firewall optimization and workflow integration.

The solution is more stable than in the past.

The report takes time, and the virtual appliance is a resource consumer.

The documentation is clear. The support is available but restricted to some requests that need advance service (not free).

Yes, AlgoSec provides a better solution for the firewall rule optimization that matches our production need.

The initial setup was simple, and only firewall integration could take time due to some complex interaction.

The implementation was in-house; the product is still simple to manage.

Reduced the firewall load due to a good rule table and then extended the firewall life cycle.

Compare with other products to see which one matches the best their needs.

Tufin, Skybox.

No.