The Future of Firewall Management – Why It Doesn’t Have to Be as Hard as You Think 

Ray Rowe – Technical Sales Consultant at Systal Technology Solutions

Over the last 4 to 5 years, we have seen an explosion of interest from customers requesting additional security measures because of enhanced risk and constantly changing threats to their network and infrastructure. While there is lots of advice out there from industry gurus and manufacturers around consolidation and single-source suppliers, a lot of customers already have hybrid solutions in place that have evolved over the years, and it is not a trivial task to rip everything out and start again while maintaining business as usual and working to budget.  

I joined Systal about 2 years ago, leaving behind a traditional managed network service provider and aside from being more agile and scalable, one of the key factors that brought me to Systal is our vendor-agnostic approach to network and security management. Our motivation is to utilise world-leading technology to provide our customers with the best services and solutions available and we have become adept at managing a broad range of security products from a wide range of vendors including Palo Alto, Checkpoint, Fortinet, Cisco (including Meraki), Paessler and Sophos.  

Firewall management is part of Systal’s heritage, and traditionally we provide remote monitoring and management (RMM) in the firewall space using traditional management protocols such as ICMP, SNMP and SYSLOG. These tools and processes are used to detect the “up/down” status of key environmental functions and combined with a rigorous change management wrapper, have been the way our customers have traditionally managed their firewall estate. The problem is that this reactive approach to management is no longer sufficient to provide a good level of service.  

Insights Paper: The Future of Firewall Management

With that in mind, we have written a paper- The Future of Firewall Management – to explore some of the underlying issues and requirements of firewall management with advice on how to best navigate your way through the vast maze of vendors and choices available with some simple steps to help you manage your changing environment today. Download your copy below: