We performed a comparison between AlgoSec and FireMon Security Manager based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Firewall Security Management solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."The most valuable feature of AlgoSec is its firewall analyzer."
"It has reduced the workload for the firewall team thanks to the API integration with our ticketing system, handling the standard types of requests automatically."
"The most valuable features are the FW report, traffic simulation, and the FireFlow system to help manage requests."
"AFA provides project teams with a simplified way to obtain the status on their current rule set."
"FireFlow continues to drive customer efficiencies, allowing an organisation to keep up with the pace of change."
"FireFlow helped with documenting all the processes in our rule implementations."
"The PCI compliance feature has been helpful in preparing for audits."
"The solution provides us with full visibility into the risk involved in firewall change requests. This is very important for us because we are regulated according to the FDA. It shows us which changes have been made and why. So, it has worked very well for our compliance needs."
"It is a good product. Previously, we were using only spreadsheets to compare the usage, but now with FireMon, we are able to clean up or review the policies to some extent. It is still a work in progress, but we are at a good stage now."
"The SQL language is convenient to use. It allows us to process a bunch of criteria very quickly and narrows things down if there is an issue with the firewall. It's easy to do that with SQL queries."
"We also use the solution’s SASE integration capabilities to extend security policy management for cloud firewall management. It helps in creating one consistent rule across multiple platforms and it improves accuracy."
"FireMon decreases errors and misconfigurations by 10% that increase risk in our environment. That has to do a lot with the change reporting that is in place, but also with the built-in controls and custom controls that we have made. Those all decrease the errors that people naturally make on a day-to-day basis for firewall administration."
"The most valuable feature is the Firewall reviews for our company compliance."
"The firewall assessment feature is great."
"For the cleanup of firewall rules, it performs really well for us. We utilize it in our regular rule cleanup tasks, several times a year. FireMon is our primary tool when doing that, either by going through its out-of-the-box compliance rules or using it to search for certain things in our rules that we want to prune from our firewalls."
"It is the single place where we go to review all of our firewall changes. The solution makes it easier for us to track all the changes made. It is a central place where we can look at all the firewall rules, because we have three different firewall vendors. It save us time and creates efficiencies by looking at the general picture."
"Releasing hot fixes or patches is late compared to other security products."
"The initial cost was high for us, but we have always been behind the tech curve and cost has always been the limiting factor."
"I would like to seem improvements in performance and software stability."
"The product should support more vendors with the same in-depth analysis that it already is providing. This would give more reasons to for other companies to adopt it."
"It needs support for its cloud-based solution."
"It would be interesting if the product could automate the switch configuration and create a dynamic map of the entire network."
"This product could be improved in several ways including more device support, an automated rollback process and options in active push, software-defined WAN integration and support, and application-aware policy identification and optimization."
"The MAP has a persistent issue with a firewall that is using a double BVI (Bridge virtual interface)."
"FireMon could be easier to use and flexibility regarding reporting could be improved."
"Policy Planner requirements section is good, but could use some improvement to allow flexibility to enter different types of requests (modifying an existing policy, object or service group, for example) in a structured task format that can be auto-verified."
"We've had recurring issues managing FireMon's internal backups. Sometimes, the space allocated for the backup is full, and there is no process where it deletes files that are older than I certain date. It's just waiting for the storage to get full and then it's cleaned up. It isn't something that creates serious issues for us."
"While I like the reporting, I think that has the biggest room for improvement. Right now, as a user of FireMon, if I create a report, I am the only one who can see it inside FireMon. If someone on my team creates a report, they are the only person who can see that report on FireMon. It doesn't matter if you're admin in FireMon or not. The way we have to do it now is that we have created a service account user and that service account user runs all the reports. This way, all the reports, which are running, are just run under a single user so we can always access them. This definitely needs to change so users can see other users' reports or we can share reports within FireMon."
"The stability has been fairly decent, but there have been a few issues. My coworker has had some issues in the past where he has had to work with support."
"When it comes to documentation, they need to start putting together a basic command manual. With Cisco, you can look up a command and it gives you examples of three or four different ways that command can be used. It tells you how to put it into the GUI and the CLI. FireMon does need to start doing that."
"Our firewalls have multiple paths through them and FireMon falls short a little bit because it's not Palo Alto-centric. I don't think FireMon has kept up with where Palo Alto is at. They started out being Check Point-centric for years and they've never really fully embraced the nuances others, like Palo Alto or Fortinet, have. They don't handle a lot of the capabilities and attributes that Palo Alto does yet. They're working on it. They're getting there."
"One area for 7.x customers that needs improvement is the migration. It is an involved process so get ready to spend some time getting your environment back to the way it was."
AlgoSec is ranked 1st in Firewall Security Management with 173 reviews while FireMon Security Manager is ranked 4th in Firewall Security Management with 53 reviews. AlgoSec is rated 9.0, while FireMon Security Manager is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of AlgoSec writes "Gives us the ability to dig down into details and work at a level above the skills that we already have". On the other hand, the top reviewer of FireMon Security Manager writes "Makes compliance much easier compared to doing it manually, and automates policy changes across environments". AlgoSec is most compared with Tufin Orchestration Suite, Skybox Security Suite, Palo Alto Networks Panorama, ManageEngine Firewall Analyzer and Fortinet FortiManager, whereas FireMon Security Manager is most compared with Tufin Orchestration Suite, Skybox Security Suite, Palo Alto Networks Panorama, ManageEngine Firewall Analyzer and RedSeal. See our AlgoSec vs. FireMon Security Manager report.
See our list of best Firewall Security Management vendors.
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Thank you, Sunil and Carlo, for your insightful responses.
I really appreciate that and will investigate further.
Best regards,
John
It’s been too long since I evaluated AlgoSec to give some solid feedback here. I can say that mapping in FireMon is terrible if you have a complicated network, otherwise, it works pretty well.
FireMon performance- make sure you get the best server, you can break them out and put certain roles on different boxes to get a lot of expansion possibilities though it might not be necessary this depends heavily on the size of your configs. If you have 1,000 firewalls with 100 rules each no problem but a handful of firewalls with 900k+ rules can become problematic.
We have not pulled MPLS configs into the system but their protocol support (FireMon) seems top notch.
DR, well you can distribute the environment all over the place so it’s really up to you with Firemon how robust your DR is. I’ve never had a failure requiring a massive restore, even our older servers running their pre-web UI version is still running fine.
Unfortunately we chose Tufin over both those products, sorry I cannot give you a comparison on either. For us, Tufin simplifies the needs we have for Risks/Cleanup/Violations in our FW policies.
We also leverage compliance policy for best practices. You can also take advantage of the reporting functionally which suites your environment or infrastructure such as:
- New Revision
- Advance Change
- FW Modul Change
- Object Change
- Expired Rules
- Rule and Object Usage
- Policy Analysis
- Security Risk
- Rule Documentation.