AlgoSec Reviews

I mainly use AFA and FireFlow. The majority of the network is internal. We have a very limited footprint in the cloud right now. But what we do have in the cloud is private. Being a financial institution, everything is very secure. So we don't have anything in the public cloud.

We're primarily using AlgoSec for firewall management and change validation. So we use it for monitoring all the firewall changes and security ratings. Any kind of firewall change is monitored and we have our own process that we use AlgoSec for to validate that changes are implemented according to the requests and go through all of the change approval processes.

We are using it for the firewall change auditing process for our department. They are one of the leaders that we found in this area. There is a very limited group of vendors that provide this kind of functionality and we've gone through the majority of them. AlgoSec still stands out as the leader, in our opinion.

We primarily use AFA for the change management portion of it. But the security ratings also are used by our security group to ensure compliance and validate that nothing is being configured that is not in our best interest.

The overall visibility AlgoSec gives into our network security policies has been very good. We are happy with the way the application works. It is very intuitive and easy to use. I would give that a very high rating.

AlgoSec provides full visibility into the risk involved in firewall change requests as well. It definitely allows us to drill down to the level where we can see the actual policy rule that's affecting the risk ratings. If there are any changes in ratings, it'll show you exactly how to determine what's changed in the network that will affect it. It's been very clear and intuitive as far as that.

I don't know if it has reduced the time it takes to implement firewall rules in our company. We don't use it for implementing changes because our network is very in-depth and we're very particular with our security on that, that we do manually make all of our firewall changes. So we're not using the automated functionality of AlgoSec to do that for us. But I think that's more because of the restrictions that we have in our own network.

AlgoSec is very good when it comes to preparing for audits and ensuring our firewalls are in compliance. The security ratings are a major factor in that lately, as well as being able to show the configurations and how they affect the risk ratings. Whenever we do need to address any issues, it's very clear to show us exactly what the effects of the ratings are, as tied into the firewall policies.

We work with multiple security vendors. I'm not on the security team any longer. I went from network group to security and then back again. But our security group does work with AlgoSec and they use it very intimately for different functions.

Some of the auditing functionality needs improvement. Our major focus is the firewall validation process and tracking and verifying that changes are implemented correctly. We are actually doing parts of the auditing process manually. And getting any one of the vendors to bring out a good auditing process has been very difficult. AlgoSec does a good job of showing us the changes, but we're doing a manual process to actually audit it and do documentation that we can provide to our auditors that shows we're validating everything, and on top of it, that nothing gets implemented without being caught. Part of that could be improved upon.

I have been using AlgoSec since 2016, so it's been around five and a half years. 

The stability has been great. We had a minor bug with the latest version and development. I did work with support to get that ironed out. They resolved it so right now, it looks to be very stable. And we are looking to put that into production shortly.

The scalability seems very good. I haven't seen any restrictions if we were to bring in other hardware or other devices in terms of how to scale it out, either size-wise or vendor-wise.

We have our network group, which we use AlgoSec for, for investigating the risks, configuration issues and things like that. The security group uses it for risk ratings and compliance verification. Then we have a separate group, which is a different group of security that uses it for the firewall validation process. They're the ones that use it on a daily basis to investigate any firewall changes and tie those back to the original request and validate that they were implemented properly.

The support has been very good. They're very responsive, very quick to get back to you, and very helpful. They bring in developers very quickly and easily to get into the details. Our last issue we had seemed to be very unusual, and with their support, they brought in the actual developers that were working on this software and resolved it very quickly.

We used a couple of different solutions and they all have their problems. We thought we had a good solution at one point until we found out that it wasn't working properly. When you trust in an application like this and you believe in the numbers that it's giving you, you go with that as gospel until you find out that it's wrong. That vendor's support was just not on the level that we wanted. We were getting no response from them for a long time. So we finally gave up on them until we went to AlgoSec, and it was a much better solution for us.

The initial setup is very straightforward. It is very easy to integrate network devices into AlgoSec and manage them. It's even getting easier with the latest version. We integrated Palo Alto devices into AlgoSec and it is very simple to bring it in. We have a development server that we're testing out the latest version on, and that came in in minutes. It brought it all in automatically.

The earlier versions of AlgoSec, especially when they came out originally, would not integrate properly with Panorama. So at that point, we had to integrate AlgoSec to actually reach out to every firewall individually for configurations and change status. The current releases are now integrating directly into Panorama. It's just basically one connection into Panorama and it pulls in all of the configurations from there. It's much more simplified.

I don't really get involved in ROI. But I definitely think it's valuable to us and I think it is a good solution for us.

I don't get into the pricing aspect of it that much. But from my beliefs of it, I believe it is very cost-efficient compared to other vendors. Their licensing is very straightforward and they're easy to work with.

There were three main players at the time, we went through proof of concepts with each of them, and AlgoSec was definitely the strongest vendor in that group and we don't regret it at all. I think it is a good solution.

The other vendors were promising a lot more than they were actually delivering on when it came time to actually putting it onto our network and evaluating it. We were finding that things that they were telling us that they supported and were part of their packages were not actually functional at the time. So we did not go forward with them because of that. AlgoSec actually had everything working properly. It was very easy to set up and use and it did what they promised.

Their sales engineers have really been very helpful and very good at working with us. I have nothing bad to say about them. They were excellent and I have a good relationship with them. If I ever need anything, I'll reach out to either our sales executive or our SE anytime and they respond immediately to us.

I would say the biggest thing we've learned with it is how much information it does give you. It is a nice platform. It definitely drills in a lot of layers of security and efficiencies that you can do. We're not using it to its full potential for cleaning up policy rules. As most companies are now, they are short-staffed and overworked. But it definitely can be used a lot more than we are using it for. Overall, it's a great solution and I have not seen another vendor in this marketplace that does any better than this.

I would rate AlgoSec a nine out of ten. We would like to see the auditing functionality improved. But that would be the only shortcoming at this point. I do think that they are top of the marketplace for this.

If a use case comes where a customer who has different firewalls, e.g., Palo Alto and Fortinet, wants a single pane of glass, where all the firewalls are visible, this is the only use case where AlgoSec would be used.

The customer has to judge, "Are they going to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for the feature of seeing firewalls of different vendors under the same hood?" Is that the value they want versus the dollar value they are spending? Most of the time, the answer is no. Customers don't want to spend $300,000 or $400,000 just to see a single dashboard. Especially during COVID times, it has become even more impossible to sell such a product. 

From a product perspective, AlgoSec has multiple components. Its security management solution is the primary one that you need to have. You must have this in order to install the platform. 

There are some legacy customers still using AlgoSec. The benefit is the ease in management of firewalls and rules. Also, if they have a small setup, making changes to multiple firewalls at the same time is something the customer enjoys due to limited resources. When an organization becomes an enterprise, then change management comes into the picture as well as best practices, so making changes to multiple devices at the same time is not good. 

It has the capability to be an enterprise grade product, but the use cases have not been fine-tuned for that in the past four years.

There are some integration-related issues too. For example, AlgoSec does not integrate with Forcepoint, and Forcepoint Firewalls have become very prevalent these days. They also don't integrate with Aruba devices. So, the integration ecosystem of AlgoSec is very limited, which is also the case with Firemon.

These days, people are looking at products which can visualize not only their firewalls, but also their networking equipment, under a single map. Can AlgoSec do this? Yes, it can, but with very limited capacity. If I try to sell the automation story of firewall management, there are vendors, like Forcepoint, who are not supported, so if a customer has Forcepoint, then I have to straight away walk off. The worst part of the story is they don't have even a roadmap for this.

Another problem with AlgoSec is that it gives you the capability to make changes to hundreds of your firewalls at the same time, but big enterprises have change management policies. Change managers will never allow you to make changes to more than 10 devices at the same time, which is a feature in AlgoSec. Because, what if something goes wrong, then you have to roll back and figure out what caused the impact, e.g., which firewall did not work well. Doing that post-mortem becomes a difficult thing. So, change automation on a firewall is actually defeating the purpose of the change management policies in any organization. If you run a bank, you will not allow anyone to make changes at the same time from a single click for 10 firewalls. The bank will never allow this. So, what is the use of this automation? Even if you are using this automation, you can do it from your native firewall vendor, e.g., Panorama or FortiManager, where everyone has their own cluster managers. At least if something goes wrong, you can still call Palo Alto and tell them you are Panorama has not done the change right, causing you an impact, and this is your Palo Alto firewall. 

In this case, if I have to raise a case first, then I have to call AlgoSec and check why it has not worked. Second, I have to call the firewall vendors that their firewall is not working well, but AlgoSec has done the right job. Handling multiple vendors for such a trivial issue becomes a problem.

I have been using AlgoSec for four years. First I was a customer, then I became a partner.

If you hit a bug with mass changes, do you troubleshoot on AlgoSec or the firewall? Now, you have two products that you have to tackle for bugs. The two vendors then finger point and you waste time. That is why having the firewall and firewall manager together from a vendor, like Palo Alto, is better.

If the scope of work is just firewall management, it is easy to deploy. However, when you add the flow information, since AlgoSec can also import the flows of your firewall rules, that is live traffic. Then you include FireFlow, or it becomes a nightmare, because what you have to do is take a copy of traffic from different segments/firewalls and bring it into AlgoSec. Doing that becomes a challenge because a lot of companies, such as banks, will not allow you to sniff the firewall traffic live traffic because they have credit card information. 

These days, the traffic has changed to HTTPS, which is all encrypted. Four or five years back, it was HTTP, which was all plain text. Even if you take a mirror of the traffic, how can you decrypt it? You need a decryptor to look inside. FireFlow looks at the packet of the transaction. In order to look at the packet/payload, I have to decrypt it because now it is encrypted. But, who will decrypt it? Then you have to buy another product that does decryption.

Customers look at return on investment to determine the benefit from a product, e.g., the tangible value in return. If I go to sell AlgoSec or Firemon today, the customer will say, "I already have Palo Alto," because Palo Alto Panorama has picked up a lot in the last five years of this market. 

AlgoSec is not a cheap product. If I compare Firemon and AlgoSec, because I am also Firemon certified, Firemon is still cheaper in price than AlgoSec. That is another catch. 

AlgoSec-type products and requirements are not necessary or prevalent these days. If you look at AlgoSec, what do they have? They do firewall management, predominantly. Firewall management as a technology is dying. If you look at Palo Alto, Fortinet, Forcepoint, Cisco, or Juniper, all these firewall vendors are coming up with firewall management platforms. If you talk about Palo Alto, they have Panorama. If you talk about Juniper, they have Junos Space. If you talk about Fortinet, they have FortiManager. You can manage their firewalls using the respective vendor management consoles. The question comes, "Why would someone want to use AlgoSec to do firewall management?" The usability takes a dip in terms of capability because people trust the native vendor, e.g., someone who manages Palo Alto firewalls will do it with Panorama because Panorama is a product of Palo Alto.

AlgoSec's use case was good four years ago before FortiManager and Panorama. If you have a hundred firewalls from Fortinet, then you can manage all of them for a single FortiManager. If you have 50 Palo Alto Firewalls, you can manage those from Panorama in a single pane of glass. These solutions did not exist four years ago, and now AlgoSec is losing its essence in the market since these native vendors have been launched.

Four years ago when I started off with AlgoSec, and I'm still working with them, it was strategic. Now, it has become tactical. AlgoSec has a very good feature of doing firewall rule optimization, which has not been there in the native products. For the last couple of years, the native products also started coming up with firewall rule optimization. For example, Palo Alto (from PAN-OS 9.0 and above) was released a year and a half back. It does firewall rule analysis for you. It is the same case with Fortinet and Forcepoint. Therefore, if I have to sell products on firewall management, which does firewall rules on analysis, what is the use case that I give to customers with AlgoSec?

I am running out of AlgoSec use cases because the native vendors give you the capability to do firewall management, firewall rule analysis, and pushing conflicts to multiple firewalls from a single screen. These are the use cases of AlgoSec. This is what AlgoSec does. This story is not just limited to AlgoSec. Products like FireMon and AlgoSec and the way they used to do firewall management have become a commodity. Now, most of the firewalling vendors have the same functionality in their management console. 

Companies, like RedSeal, or even to an extent, Skybox, are better built because they take the story to the next level. They don't just look at firewalls. They also look at the network, vulnerabilities, risk, governance, compliance, architecture issues, and incident response. This is the story which customers love to see because none of the native vendors are providing this. 

RedSeal and Skybox are doing firewall management for free. They don't charge you for it. On top of it, they do:

• Complete network visualization.
• Give you best practice conflict checks.
• Security architecture issues.
• Risk analysis of every IP asset in your organization.
• Vulnerability prioritization.

AlgoSec has been amazing, but it did not evolve well with time. If you look at AlgoSec from a cloud perspective, it does not support service chaining. So, if I have Palo Alto Firewall in the cloud, which has become very common, they can't detect that firewall. If I ask them to detect Oracle Cloud, they can't detect that. The problem about cloud, even if I'm doing service chaining with VMware NSX and Palo Alto, which is a very famous integration, they can't detect them. They cannot detect these because they are new things which have happened in the market in the last three years. So, they aren't able to catch up. The legacy part is good, but they are not able to catch up on the latest stuff, like service chaining. With anything new, AlgoSec is unfortunately running behind. 

I have used all the components: CloudFlow, Firewall Analyzer, FireFlow, and Algo Bot (which I have used to optimize policies). I have not used AppViz a lot because it just came out. If you talk about the complete suite, then AppViz gives you application-related visibility. However, when you don't have a rich integration ecosystem versus a native firewalling vendor, like Palo Alto, who does give this. What is the use of having AlgoSec (or Firemon)?

I would rate this solution as a seven out of 10. The product is good, but the issue is with AlgoSec's use cases.

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. 

We use the solution for change control of policies on firewalls, for service desk integrations, and for the service desk rules of network users.

We use the firewall management solution. Our environment is on-premises only. Our company works with financial institutions and they require everything to be on-premises.

There is no question that AlgoSec has reduced the time it takes to implement firewall rules. That is also true because some of our clients use firewalls from various vendors and AlgoSec allows them to implement firewall rules on those firewalls simultaneously, even though they are from different vendors. Even so, when we receive a request for a rule exception, no one controls how long this exception is valid. As a result, these exceptions are valid for a long time and accumulate one by one. With the help of AlgoSec, it is very easy to eliminate this problem. A timer is set for a given firewall rule and, when the timer runs out, a security engineer is notified that the rule is set to expire at the specified time.

In addition, large deployment cases face a large problem due to the number of firewall rules, which can slow down the performance of a firewall and overload the firewall memory. This happens in part because of duplicate rules and rules that conflict with one another. With the help of AlgoSec, we reduce the number of rules, on average, by 30 to 35 percent. AlgoSec cleans duplicate rules and conflicting rules, freeing up memory.

At least two of our clients, when using AlgoSec extensively, have seen a reduction of at least 1.5 to two times what it would take them to implement firewall rules, by reusing predefined templates within AlgoSec. In addition, they find it extremely helpful that AlgoSec checks them for compliance. Before AlgoSec, they had to manually justify compliance of every single firewall rule, when being audited for compliance. They had to explain why it was created, which client and/or service was behind that rule, et cetera. In comparison, AlgoSec does the compliance check on each and every firewall rule making sure it is always compliant with the latest requirements and one can quickly create a report to prove it.

When it comes to preparing for audits and ensuring firewalls are in compliance, about 60 percent of our clients are financial institutions, like banks and insurance companies. They have to adhere to the strict compliance rules and AlgoSec allows us to ensure that the firewalls are in compliance with the normative requirements. IT departments are able to create PCI and DFS reports via AlgoSec that are acceptable for such audits.

In terms of working with multiple security vendors, we usually integrate AlgoSec with other service desk vendors, like ServiceNow and controllers like Cisco ACI. AlgoSec has resources on their website where we can find documentation about integrations with various systems. It was fairly easy to integrate AlgoSec with ServiceNow and Cisco ACI. Their API is understandable and very well described.

The major value, at least here in Ukraine, when integrating AlgoSec with Cisco ACI is that we see most of our clients prefer DSN systems, like Cisco ACI, for data processing. ACI contracts are treated similarly to firewall rules, i.e. permission is required for access. Some of our clients use over 400 such contracts for data processing. Implementing access rules for these systems is not easy. With the help of AlgoSec we can create a rule and AlgoSec checks it for compliance, for duplicate rules, and rule conflicts. That very much simplifies the implementation and deployment of contracts in ACI.

AlgoSec helps tremendously when it comes to reducing human errors, especially when the environment includes firewalls from disparate vendors. In that situation, the probability of human error is very high. It is difficult for me to approximate by what percent it has reduced human error but the reduction is very significant.

In addition, it has helped to simplify the job of security engineers. I’m very sure of that because, otherwise, our clients wouldn’t buy more AlgoSec user licenses.

For us, as well as for our customers, firewall management and change management are the most important features.

We see a very high demand for using containers and Dockers and therefore there is a need for managing access control to these platforms. I checked AlgoSec’s roadmap and, for now, there are no plans for developing these features.

We have worked with AlgoSec for two to three years, implementing the solution for our clients.

Everything works great. We have not seen any significant bugs.

Our deployments of AlgoSec are not large so we haven’t faced a scalability issue. The maximum AlgoSec deployment we’ve done is for about 100 endpoints and that is not a problem for AlgoSec.

We have never needed to use AlgoSec support.

To deploy AlgoSec properly it is important to understand the client's environment. To that end, we have a questionnaire that we send to our clients and that helps clarify what the client's requirements are. It also provides information on the architecture of their environments. Once we receive the questionnaire, we go over the project specifications with them to make sure they didn’t miss anything, such as integrations with other systems. 

Next, we usually do a PoC to test AlgoSec in their environment and that is when we calibrate the solution to the client’s specs and do the necessary customizations. Then we purchase the licenses and roll out AlgoSec into the client's production environment. We also provide technical support for the client for at least a year to make sure that they become familiar with the solution.

The amount of time it takes to deploy always depends on the complexity of the client’s requirements. For example, for firewall management setup without integration with other systems like a service desk or reporting systems, deployment generally takes up to one month. If we need to integrate AlgoSec with solutions like a service desk, then the deployment can take up to four months because there are major changes to the whole business process and these changes require planning, documentation, implementation, and training of end-users.

There are usually three people involved on our side: a salesperson and two engineers, with the latter actually implementing AlgoSec.

I can’t say that this is a cheap system. It's affordable for large enterprises and, in some cases, for mid-sized companies. For the majority of other companies, this solution is out of their price range.

I have hands-on experience with Tuffin and both of these products (Tuffin and AlgoSec) are equal in terms of functionality. In terms of main differences, it comes down to a personal preference.

My advice is to do a PoC. Many would simply read reviews about the solution, watch demos, and request price quotes. At that point they would note that it is not a cheap solution and stop there. That is why I strongly recommend doing a PoC. Only through using the solution can you see how easy it is to manage and implement security rules. It becomes very clear that you’ll see a return on investment in terms of the time saved by your security engineers.

Another recommendation would be to evaluate similar solutions to AlgoSec, especially for companies that are planning the implementation of DSN systems, like Cisco ACI. This is because it involves labor-intensive rules implementation, and with the help of AlgoSec it can be drastically simplified.

The overall visibility the solution provides into network security policies is not applicable to us because our clients are using AlgoSec for firewall only, for edge connectivity of their networks to the internet. We only have one client that used AlgoSec to control rules on the internal firewall, which is deployed into their data center.

We help deploy solutions to customers around Africa and Nigeria. We deploy it, then we also provide local support to our customers. We do PoCs, deploy solutions, and provide support whenever we have the opportunity to provide solutions which solve problems of one or two customers.

Most of our clients just want to stick with AFA. Most times, we just work around AFA and do a lot of things with it. We are quite conversant with AFA's portfolio.

AlgoSec provides our customers with full visibility into the risk involved in firewall change requests. Most of our customers are in the financial industry. AlgoSec can analyze existing policies that you have set up on your devices, gauging the risk. For example, with PCI requirements, there needs to be a description for each firewall rule change as to why it was made. Therefore, if a change was made by one of our clients, who was unable to put a description or comment against that rule, then automatically I would need to flag that.

ActiveChange integrates with your change workflow and ticketing system. For example, a change request is made to open port 8080. Then, if the guy who was supposed to implement that change mistakenly opened port 80, then ActiveChange will say, "What was approved was 8080, but what you actually opened was 80." That actually helps to fix human errors. It helps to check everything that is being done. You can go through the analysis and see changes that were made, and AlgoSec is able to alert you immediately. Whenever there is a change, notifications are sent to the administrators because it gives you that real-time alerting and change. 

The most valuable features are:

• Compliance reporting
• Their immediate support team
• Maps: You can trace the traffic and what firewall is blocking what connections, services, and websites.
  

You don't need to be tech-oriented to work with AlgoSec.

One of the beautiful things about AlgoSec is that it gives you templates. There are quite a number of compliance templates, depending on the industry that you are in. For example:

• The ISO number system
• The information security - ISMS management system
• PCI DSS
• FISMA Compliance. 

For our clients, they especially have to maintain ISMS and PCI DSS, as these are the two compliance regulations that they have to maintain. You can run analysis or reporting based on the templates. Within minutes, you get into the report, can see your compliance status, and what exactly you need to fix. You can clearly see what parts of the requirements you are not meeting and where you are falling short within standards. It is very clear and visible. We can customize all of this with the reporting, however the client wants it. This is one of the critical parts for most of our clients.

In late December or early January, we were trying to add another solution, but it wasn't working because there was no support for the version that we were running at that point. After they released the hotfix, that took care of this issue. That particular device was then supported. So, it has been very stable and working fine since then.

I have been using it for about three years now.

The stability is excellent.

There have been some recent updates and hotfixes that have been released. These have taken care of a number of things, which include support for some particular firewalls.

The scalability is good. We have had to scale for some of our clients who have about 10 firewalls or 10 network devices, and they wanted to have more. All we had to do was acquire more licenses, then we just scaled. It is quite seamless.

I have worked with AlgoSec for about three years. Before COVID-19 struck, the technical support used to be 10 of 10. You would make a support call, someone would join you on a session, and you would get help almost instantly. Since COVID-19, a number of the technical support team members have been working from home or remotely. So, we haven't gotten to support people right when we need them. Sometimes, it takes a couple of hours or even days for us to get that instant support that we used to get. I think they are working on it. The last time that I had a support session with them, which was about two months back, I saw some relative improvements.

We have been using the OVA file on a virtual box. Once we slam it on the VM, it is quite straightforward. Once you are done with that, then you define the IPs.

We have had quite a number of our prospective clients have come to us, and say, "Hey guys, we want AlgoSec," but one of their turn-offs has been the pricing. I would like it if AlgoSec would review their pricing and come down on it. The solution is quite amazing and versatile, so we would really appreciate it if the pricing could be reviewed for Nigeria because we definitely would get more sales if that happened. 

In Nigeria, quite a number of industries have been hit hard by COVID-19 and we are not a high income generating country, so a lot of people want to cut costs. When it comes to the security, companies would rather settle for less and take a step back because of the cost. They might even put infrastructures off. However, if the pricing is reasonable and affordable for people in this part of the world, then our company will definitely see more sales.

AlgoSec is 10 out of 10 compared to FireMon. Compared to any other solution that does firewall analysis and policy management, AlgoSec deserves 10 out 10 because of:

• Its simplicity: Virtually everything about AlgoSec is straightforward.
• Versatility, as far as the reporting and alerting.
• Support, which is quite amazing.

If you are looking for a tool that will provide you clear visibility into all the changes in your network and help people prepare well with compliance, then AlgoSec is the tool for you. Don't think twice - AlgoSec is the tool for any company that wants clear analysis into their network and policy management.

Anybody can use AlgoSec once they take all the training.

Compared with other tools on the market, the solution is 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.

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.

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.