AlgoSec Reviews

One of the use cases for the solution is when you have many firewalls from different vendors and would like to handle all the configurations from a single pane of glass.

We are an AlgoSec distributor, and another use case that is very important to our customers, especially in the financial sector, is generating compliance reports. AlgoSec has very comprehensive compliance reporting. Most of our customers who use AlgoSec care a lot about compliance reports, whether ISO or PCI or other types of compliance.

AlgoSec saves time by providing an analysis of all the firewall rules. For example, I might find 10 unused rules, or rules without objects or without a subnet. To get that information manually can take time. I might have to go through a firewall and check the rules and it would take at least 10 minutes for 10 rules. And a manual process can result in errors. AlgoSec saves time because it can detect all unused rules and I can just remove them via the AlgoSec platform through FireFlow. Removing those 10 rules manually can take about 20 minutes, but through AlgoSec it takes one or two minutes.

The solution can find all the misconfigurations in firewall rules and it can delete or modify them automatically, with no human action needed. As a result, there will no longer be errors in the firewalls. FireFlow handles the workflow of adding and removing policies. Sometimes, an engineer may not have solid experience when it comes to firewall rules. If he goes to the firewall portal itself and tries to add or remove a policy, this policy may cause errors or potential risk. AlgoSec handles this process instead. It helps eliminate human error.

Also, if you have a network engineer with less experience, he can still go through AlgoSec and submit rules. AlgoSec supports another tier of engineers who approve the policies. This is all done using FireFlow.

We use the AFA (AlgoSec Firewall Analyzer) and FireFlow. AFA is the most popular feature in our region and FireFlow is good for managing workflow.

AlgoSec Firewall Analyzer can detect misconfigurations and unused or permissive rules, as well as rules without logging. Through a single dashboard, I can see all the problematic rules from all the firewalls. It's very simple, with AlgoSec, to get an analysis of all the rules, and that helps with visibility. AlgoSec can do a risk assessment for each policy or rule in the firewall and detect the severity of each rule, whether low, medium, high, or critical. I can get a quick overview of the risk policies that a customer needs to change because, perhaps, there is a rule where the risk is high.

The AlgoSec dashboard is very simple. I can find all the information without any effort. All the tabs are clear and straightforward.

I can apply changes to rules through FireFlow. For example, when I detect many unused rules, I can remove them and, using FireFlow's process, it is very simple to do so.

It is very easy to generate a compliance report for ISO or PCI. It can be done with one click. Some organizations may have a baseline for compliance. The beauty of AlgoSec is that it can adjust compliance according to the corporate needs or environment, when standards vary from one region to another.

When it comes to visibility, the solution can make a network map for all the devices in the network, whether routers or firewalls. I can run queries to detect network policies. For example, if a customer cannot access the corporate stack or the application site, using AlgoSec I can detect which firewall, and which policy inside the firewall, may be fully or partially blocking access. This is a very important feature and most of our customers use network mapping to create visibility into the network.

AlgoSec integrates with most of the leading firewall vendors, but one issue is that AlgoSec doesn't support Sophos and Forcepoint. AlgoSec competitors, like FireMon, support Forcepoint. I have told AlgoSec a number of times that we have many customers that use Forcepoint. I have asked why they don't support integration with Forcepoint. They have said they don't care about Sophos, Forcepoint, and SonicWall. They don't consider those vendors to be leaders in the firewall market and they don't have plans to support them.

I have been using this solution for about two years.

Sometimes a customer's platform is down, but overall AlgoSec is stable.

Support from AlgoSec is good. When I create tickets, they support us and solve all the tickets. There is no delay in support.

One of the things I don't like about AlgoSec is that when a customer has an issue with the platform, it takes time to resolve. Issues often need more than tier-one or tier-two; they're often not easy for the customer to resolve. It requires the AlgoSec team to solve issues with configurations or performance.

For example, AlgoSec upgraded the platform six months ago and it was mandatory for all customers. On my side, it was not easy to perform the upgrade and I had to request support from AlgoSec.

Positive

The solution is mainly used for auditing firewall rules and inter-zone connectivity within the client environment. 

Another use case we have at the moment is to audit all changes done on the firewalls across the environment. We are also using Fireflow which significantly reduces the administration effort and time required to analyze, plan, and implement firewall changes on a day to day basis. 

Compliance reports are a big help and ensure that the client environment is up to date in terms of their security standing.

AlgoSec has definitely helped to improve the process of auditing all firewall rules and access. 

From a security standpoint, it has significantly improved an organization's standing from identifying all risky items in a given firewall policy as well as change audits, among others. 

Using Fireflow has also significantly reduced the amount of effort and time required to analyze and plan firewall changes that normally happen on a near-daily basis. 

Change audit has also reduced the effort during audit season especially when clients are running multiple-vendor firewalls.

Risky rules and compliance profiles are very valuable. With these reports, we are able to identify gaps in the client's firewall policy and this allows us to effectively remediate such gaps. 

The time and effort saved by using these compliance reports or profiles are definitely welcome. Another feature that we would use on a near-daily basis is the Fireflow and simulation query functionality. With the simulation query, one would not need to log into a specific firewall vendor console to verify if access is allowed or not; we run it through the simulation which saves us a lot of effort.

Support could be improved. Support of the KB database is extensive but still does not cover all subjects, at least from my experience. 

Another area of concern that I think could be improved is the licensing system. With the version we are currently running, it is a bit confusing since, for some reason, AlgoSec license usage is handled differently between firewall vendors. It may be a bit challenging to properly size the purchase of a new license - especially if a client is running multiple vendor firewalls in the environment.

I've been personally been using AlgoSec for more than ten years now.

The solution is very reliable. No issues encountered during daily operations.

I haven't personally done a lot of scaling projects with this product.

The technical support is all right, however, it can be improved.

Neutral

We did not previously use a different solution. 

The setup is pretty straightforward and AlgoSec did provide support during the process.

We worked in-house, with AlgoSec, and with a vendor found that both are highly knowledgeable.

I'm not part of the business team and do not analyze this aspect.

I am not part of the team in charge of licensing. 

We also looked into FireMon and Tufin.

I am part of the team providing managed security solutions and we have a number of clients that have a lot of network and security devices in their environment.

We use AlgoSec primarily to provide solutions to our clients in terms of how we can help tighten their security and optimize network performance.

AlgoSec Firewall Analyser makes this easily possible and with the help of AlgoSec's readily available reports, we are able to provide to all our clients the security and compliance report.

Before AlgoSec, our firewall rules got pretty big over time and it came to the point where it was barely manageable. Duplicate rules and objects were everywhere and there was nothing we could do about it. Performing a manual clean-up was a nightmare and near to impossible.

AlgoSec Firewall Analyser improves the firewall rules dramatically by identifying rules and objects that are not needed and consolidates rules and rule re-ordering.

It also helped our team to optimize performance and further secure the network by identifying risky rules.

I always find the policy optimization by identifying duplicate objects, shadowed rules, and unused objects pretty useful. By eliminating all these duplicate objects, unused rules, and unused objects, firewalls and other security devices will use fewer resources to process certain tasks/requests.

This will benefit both the security engineer managing the security devices and the client as they will spend less time in dealing with optimization and therefore can focus more on other important matters.

AlgoSec firewall analyzer is already an awesome product but there are still some areas that definitely need improving.

For instance, the risky rules reporting should have more information available in the risky rules report - especially when you export the data into a .CSV format. .CSV format being a text-based visualization, some information and formatting cause the reports to lose meaning and only become just another character in the file since it cannot port over some properties (like severity represented by colors).

I've used the solution for more than ten years.

We did not use a different solution previously.

The setup is pretty easy and the cost is really worth it.

We did not evaluate other options. 

We started deploying the application in January of this year. Currently, in our contract, we have a license for AlgoSec FireAnalyzer and FireFlow. So, at this moment, we are only working with AlgoSec FireAnalyzer. 

We are using AlgoSec to have a good view of our environment in terms of the risks and compliance and to implement rules. Our environment at this moment is only on-premises. We have servers, routers, firewalls, etc.

The visibility that AlgoSec provides about our environment is very important. Without it, we won't have visibility into various risks to our environment. AlgoSec can show us these risks and allows us to improve and close some rules. It improves the security of the network, and we can protect the data of our customers more efficiently.

It is helpful in improving the security and compliance of our environment. We can optimize our environment by improving the rules that are not used or are duplicated. FireFlow is useful in creating and implementing new rules. It allows us to automate rules implementation and have more control over rules.

Its reports are very important for compliance and understanding and mitigating risks. They show us the rules that are open or that can create risks for our environment. This information is very important for us for optimizing our environment and correcting the policies.

In our environment, we add rules in the firewall based on user logins, but currently, we can't do that with AlgoSec. AlgoSec can't create rules based on user logins. For example, generally, when we create a rule, we put IP Address, Destination IP Address, and Service Port. However, in our environment, we put IP Address, User Login, Destination IP Address, and Service Port, but AlgoSec doesn't support a rule in this format. We opened a ticket regarding this with their support two months ago, and they said that they will be able to add it in the future, but they don't know the timeframe. We are currently in the process of making changes in our environment for such rules, and after two months, we won't be using the rules that are based on user logins. We will make them consistent with the market, and we will use only the IP Address, Destination IP Address, and Service Port for rules. So, it won't be a problem for us, but this can be an improvement for other clients.

It is quite new for us. We starting working with it just a few months ago.

Its stability is good. We never had a problem where we couldn't access the platform. It is always available, and we don't have any problems related to the downtime of this platform.

At the moment, it gives us what we need. Next month, we will add new technologies to AlgoSec.

AlgoSec has a great team. They are professional and have good knowledge of AlgoSec. We have a good relationship with them, and we got good support from them.

We never had a solution like this. It is the first one in our environment.

We started its implementation in January with the help of a partner company. It was very easy to implement, and we didn't have to contact AlgoSec.

We completed the deployment in February. We put it in our environment and started the server. After that, we did the configuration and started to add our devices to AlgoSec.

We implemented it with the help of a partner company in Brazil called Logicalis. When we have any problem, we talk to them, and they are able to help us.

I would recommend this solution because AlgoSec provides a lot of reports and views of your environment. You won't be able to get this view through a firewall manager. For example, the CheckPoint firewall manager won't provide what AlgoSec provides, especially related to the compliance of your environment.

We have implemented Cisco ACI in our environment, and AlgoSec will help us to work with this new technology implemented in our environment. We will integrate AlgoSec and ACI next week.

I would rate AlgoSec a 10 out of 10.

We use:

• FireFlow 
• AFA, AlgoSec Firewall Analyzer
• BusinessFlow

I use AlgoSec to optimize the firewall rules and to analyze the logs of a lot of firewalls, like Palo Alto, Check Point, and Fortinet. 

When a user creates a ticket in AlgoSec, I validate the ticket or don't. It's opened flow in the firewalls also. 

I also use it to implement and push the rules in the equipment. 

I have used it for compliance and analytics. I audit Cisco ASA equipment. I do a compliance report for every piece of equipment. I do some reports and also weigh any risk on each piece of equipment. Some rules use, for example, a critical port. If it shows to be a risk, we'll take action. For example, we can optimize a permissive rule and create new rules to have a more secure flow.

I use FireFlow to help users when they create a ticket in AlgoSec. I help them with information like the IP source, IP destination, and endpoint. 

AlgoSec also helps users choose the right equipment. There are a lot of stages and at every stage, I can choose the equipment. We have a lot of equipment and a lot of firewalls so that we can identify equipment. I also use the map to see the flow from the source IP to the destination IP so we can discover the network. It's essential to have a picture of the flow in terms of the equipment, services, and protocol.

We have critical security policies. With AlgoSec, we can create a security policy to manage critical applications. I have worked in the bank and they have critical applications. We created some security policies for those applications. Controlling the flow is critical for our customers. 

In the beginning, we compared tools like AlgoSec, Tufin, and Skybox. We did some research. There was budget to purchase the resource. We did comparisons and found AlgoSec to be the best solution.  

It's easy to use. It's not very complex. You can do a lot of things with AlgoSec.

AlgoSec should be optimized. There is a lot of RPA and we have scripts in AlgoSec that need recertification. With AlgoSec Firewall Analyzer, we can see lots of objects and lots of rules that tell us we need to clean the equipment. It will give us a solution but it doesn't always work. The solution that it gives us is not always accurate from the scripts.

For example, because we have a workflow, when the user creates his ticket, the ticket was automatically dispatched to different teams. We have a security team and another team to implement and push the rules. The ticket automatically will get sent to the wrong team and then we need to send it back to the user for them to update. 

I have used AlgoSec for two years. I use AlgoSec in French.

I find AlgoSec to be stable. Sometimes there are days that it doesn't work. We connect to AlgoSec via the web. Some days we don't have access to it and we get in touch with the support team to help us. This happens around once a month. 

It is scalable. 

I reach out to support when I have questions. I send emails with my questions. 

The initial setup was not complex. It was easy.

In terms of pricing, it is more expensive than other solutions. It's expensive because we also have the AFA module. 

AlgoSec is better than Skybox and Tufin. We have a lot of AlgoSec licenses. It offers the ability to do optimization and varied tasks.

AlgoSec offers diagrams about different pieces of equipment but Tufin and Skybox don't offer these features. I can also control external IPs. We can see the configuration. All equipment has configuration and AlgoSec enables us to log that traffic. We have control over the flow.

I would rate it an eight out of ten. It's practical and easy to use. Many enterprises use it in France. Anytime we have questions, the support team is responsive.

We use it daily to check existing rules created on all our firewalls and existing flows that are allowed, and if we can improve the performance of our firewalls by just doing the rearrangement of rules, etc.

We got more productive and agile using the product since the most time consuming job of our team is the creation of firewall rules, analyzing what is already created based on the requests of our users and internal costumers. The solution provides us an in-depth detail of what we have already in production and what we can do to resolve tickets/requests in the most effective way.

We now have more visibility into our firewall and security environment using a single pane of glass. We have a better audit of what our network and security engineers are doing on each device and are now able to see how much we are complaint with our baseline.

The product gave us more agility in the process to analyze and resolve tickets by requesting permissions to access services not enabled by default. At the same time, providing visibility of what we can improve on the scenario that we are already running on it.

The quick wins that the product can help us to achieve. With a few rule arrangements, we can improve the rule processing of the firewalls, increasing their performance and reducing possible bottlenecks, but keep us under the defined baseline of the company.

Also, the gain on the agility of checking what we already have created. The rules that can accommodate new requests instead of creating new rules have definitely helped us to resolve tickets in a faster way, achieving the expected SLA from users and internal customers of the company.

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 and make us preserve the investment in case we change the running environment.

Five months.

It is very stable without any major issues.

We don't see scalability on this product as a showstopper. We are confident that we can grow without any impact.

Very good. They helped us on everything that we needed.

We stopped using FireMon due to the price and lack of features.

No.

Through a vendor who fulfilled all our expectations.

It is fair. 

For cloud environments, it can be expensive. The model adopted to use as licensing for the cloud environment should be reviewed since it sometimes can increase the value of the service/product in an unexpected way. For example, they should instead use the amount of instances, which should just take into consideration the number of Security Groups and ACLs.

No.

We use this solution for rulebase analysis. AlgoSec provides great unified visibility into all policy packages in one place. Also, the compliance feature is quite useful. 

It is great for checking rules/objects across numerous policies/domains, as well as generating advanced reports about risks, trends in recent changes, covered and unused rules, and if you want to go really deep in rule base optimisation - unused objects. This helps our team to keep network access up to date and secure. 

Growing big requires an increased level of automation and less manual tasks, and this is where AlgoSec comes into the picture.

It has being used for CheckPoint environment with numerous domains, hundreds of Firewalls and numerous policy packages, and Algosec able to provide single point of review. Security risks reports and rules analysis are very handy to optimise company's security posture and operational excellence. 

The most valuable feature is the rule base optimization, which provides extremely valuable information about inactive rules, and rules that can be optimized or unified.

In addition it is about tracking insecure changes and getting better visibility into network security environment - either on-prem, cloud or mixed.

We are also going to implement full change management via Algosec as it allows to eliminate human error, ease on security governance and improve general ROI.

In my opinion, the user should be granted more flexibility to choose exactly which devices per CMA should be analyzed.

The process to replace a decommissioned device with a new device is not straightforward.

With the upgrade to CheckPoint R80.xx we have started to see some issues, although this version was already some time on the market, hence I was surprised that there was no full compatibility achieved. Nevertheless, working with support and professional services solved our problems.

I have been using this solution for one to three years.

This solution is stable. There has been zero technical support interaction during last two years.

Support is build in tier model so the case can be always escalated to more advanced level if needed

We did not use another solution prior to this one. However, it was picked up after careful review and comparison with similar products.

The setup was long in the past but recent upgrades were flawless and support engineers knowledgeable 

Our company have close relationship with Algosec team and they are always showing great level of expertise along with the will to develop custom solutions in case of need

The pricing for this solution seems to be reasonable for the functionality.

We have evaluated number of solutions which are available on the Market. In my opinion several of them were concentrating to much on security operations and SOAR while not having that much functionality related to managing rulebases. Solid firewall change management is something must to have as it is provide strong basis for security governance, improves company's posture and allow to reduce risks in rapidly growing companies associated with multiple changes which might be not properly assessed or implemented as a security exception.

As my company uses basic package, I quite happy with the functionality.