In today’s complex multi-vendor network environments, security teams often struggle to gain the visibility and control they need across their networks in order to maintain a strong security posture. Many are left managing workloads that exist not just on-premise, but also in the cloud which security often isn’t aware of. In 2019, 90% of companies were using cloud services, with experts reporting that 60% of workloads were running on a hosted cloud service in 2019 versus 45% in 2018. All of this expands the organization’s attack surface, requiring threat prevention across multiple devices, networks, and applications – which in turn demands making and managing frequent security policy change requests.
And this complexity is causing security headaches. In 2019, an AlgoSec survey examined the issues involved with managing security in native, hybrid and multi-cloud environments, and the 700 respondents stated that their biggest challenges in managing their hybrid environments was detecting misconfigurations and security risks, closely followed by a lack of visibility into the entire cloud estate. Further, over 42% had a network or application outage in the previous 12 months, with the leading causes being human errors in security management and device configuration changes.
So how should organizations get effective security management across their entire network estate, that accommodates the dynamic nature of their business?
Fortinet and AlgoSec partnered to create an industry-leading security solution that addresses these challenges. Bringing together AlgoSec’s business-driven security policy automation with Fortinet’s industry-leading FortiGate network security firewall platform and Fabric Management Centre, customers can benefit from comprehensive security policy lifecycle management capabilities while simultaneously leveraging the best-validated security protection in the industry.
Managing a heterogeneous network with AlgoSec
Whilst organizations may be using several solutions from one supplier like Fortinet, they are unlikely to be operating a complete single vendor networking environment. Most will be monitoring and securing numerous solutions from different vendors, both on-premise and in the cloud, adding an extra layer of administrative and operational challenges.
Security automation is essential if organizations are to maintain security and compliance across their hybrid environments. The joint Fortinet-AlgoSec integrated security solution simplifies and intelligently automates network security policy management to make enterprises more agile, secure and compliant – all the time.
With this automation, organizations can seamlessly manage security control layers across all cloud services with zero-touch, in three key areas: First, the automation solution provides full visibility of your entire network architecture, producing a network topology map that allows you to see, for example, your Fortinet on-premise and virtual Firewall, as part of AWS Cloud. With this visibility, customers can auto-discover application connectivity requirements, proactively analyze risk from a business perspective, and optimize time-consuming security changes.
Finally, the integrated Fortinet-AlgoSec solution generates a compliance report on all vendors’ devices, and each customer can customize the platform dashboard to include all the relevant regulations that are required from their organization and whether they are being met.
How AlgoSec enhances application security management
For many organizations, the shift from an office environment to a remote work strategy is essential to ensure business continuity these days. However, the possibility of 80-90% of the workforce going remote almost overnight is unprecedented in workplace history. AlgoSec’s Firewall Analyzer and FireFlow solutions are designed to help organizations better manage and secure business-critical applications.
AppViz, an add-on for AlgoSec Firewall Analyzer, enables users to discover, identify and map business applications providing visibility of the network connectivity flows associated with each. The solution automatically associates business applications to the firewall rule it supports, enabling you to review the settings quickly and easily.
FireFlow with AppChange allows users to request changes at the business application level, including application migrations, server deployment and decommissioning projects. Security operation teams can amend applications’ firewall ports from a single management interface, speeding up the secure deployment of business applications throughout the entire change lifecycle. These capabilities allow them to effectively support the business and maintain the required SLAs for uptime.
Use case for Fortinet-AlgoSec solution: Micro-Segmentation
By leveraging the joint Fortinet-AlgoSec integrated network security solution, organizations can easily define and manage micro-segmentation across entire networks.
The Fortinet solution delivers automated cybersecurity threat detection, security incident response, escalation and remediation. Fortinet’s award-winning FortiGate enterprise firewall platform provides end-to-end security across the entire network. Utilizing Fortinet’s NGFW, AlgoSec makes it easy to define and enforce your micro-segmentation strategy inside the data center and ensure that it does not block critical business services and meets compliance requirements.
Once the micro-segments are established, AlgoSec seamlessly and automatically integrates with your Fortinet NGFW and manages network security policy across the micro-segmented network inside the data center and across on-premise and public cloud networks outside of the data center.
As part of this process, AlgoSec proactively checks every proposed firewall rule change request against the segmentation strategy to ensure that the change doesn’t break the strategy, introduce risk or violate compliance.
A joint solution validated by hundreds of customers
Hundreds of enterprise customers agree that AlgoSec and Fortinet are best together in their multi-vendor environment. With this visibility, customers can auto-discover application connectivity requirements, proactively analyze risk from the business perspective, and intelligently automate time-consuming security changes and enhance them with business context, all with zero-touch.
To find out more about how you could benefit from our joint solution, visit link or the AlgoSec website.
