AlgoSec Reviews

With AlgoSec, I hope to achieve network visibility, application connectivity, and so on, which is the way it was designed.

I am hoping AlgoSec will help solve specific problems by clearing and speeding up change management while providing needed network visibility and simplifying management.

AppViz stands out to me, and I think all of the features are interesting; AppViz is a really cool thing.

My experience with using the best features AlgoSec offers is minimal, but I am most excited to try AppViz.

Based on my initial impressions, I think there's room for improvement, but I haven't encountered anything that stood out as confusing or challenging.

I have not been using AlgoSec for very long.

My experience with customer support has been perfect.

I would rate the customer support a 10.

Positive

I previously used Skybox before considering AlgoSec, but I decided to switch because Skybox ended.

I evaluated other options before choosing AlgoSec, but I don't know the names of them.

My advice for others looking into using AlgoSec is that it's great, so do it.

I choose to rate AlgoSec 10 out of 10 because it is the best solution for our use case.

I was indeed offered a gift card or incentive for this review.

I have no additional thoughts about AlgoSec before we wrap up.

AlgoSec is a very helpful product in carrying out security operations effectively.

It has a user-friendly interface, and we don't encounter any problems during or after installing updates.

We can get quick support from the manufacturer in case of problems.

The ability to automate policy analysis, optimize configurations, and visualize security risks allows organizations to mitigate threats and reduce the risk of security breaches proactively. 

By providing visibility into security risks, compliance gaps, and application connectivity requirements, AlgoSec helps organizations strengthen their security posture.

This product has had many benefits in improving my security posture by fixing many vulnerabilities.

Lack of sufficient resources or expertise to leverage AlgoSec's capabilities to their full potential might hinder the expected improvements.

The ability to automate policy analysis, optimize configurations, and visualize security risks allows organizations to mitigate threats and reduce the risk of security breaches proactively. AlgoSec's reporting and compliance features help organizations meet regulatory requirements more effectively.

AlgoSec offers a centralized platform for managing complex network security policies across heterogeneous environments. This feature enables users to visualize, analyze, and manage policies from a single interface, enhancing efficiency and reducing errors associated with manual policy management. 

AlgoSec's ability to integrate with various security and networking solutions enhances its overall value. Integration with firewalls, cloud platforms, SIEM tools, and other security devices ensures a cohesive security ecosystem and enables better threat response and mitigation.

Enhancements that allow for more automated policy management, change workflows, and orchestration can significantly streamline network security operations. 

Advanced analytics and reporting capabilities that provide deeper insights into network traffic, security policy effectiveness, compliance, and risk management can be beneficial. 

Features that allow security policies to be defined and managed based on specific applications' needs would be ideal.

I've been using the solution for two years. 

One of the standout features is its ability to provide visibility and control over security policies. The product offers a centralized dashboard that gives an overview view of the entire network infrastructure, including firewalls, routers, and switches, regardless of their vendor or location. This unified view enables administrators to easily manage and modify security policies from a single platform, eliminating the need for manual, error-prone processes. 

AlgoSec also provides a powerful rule analyzer that detects and highlights any redundant, overlapping, or conflicting rules, helping organizations optimize their security policies for maximum efficiency. AlgoSec also allows administrators to define and enforce a standardized change management process, reducing the risk of unauthorized or misconfigured changes.

AlgoSec's compliance management capabilities have helped a lot in my organization. It offers predefined compliance frameworks, such as PCI DSS and HIPAA, and assists organizations in mapping their security policies to these standards. AlgoSec can generate comprehensive reports that demonstrate compliance with regulatory requirements, simplifying the audit process. 

It also provides continuous compliance monitoring, alerting administrators of any of policy violations or any changes that may impact compliance.

The visibility of security policies and automation is the most valuable feature of AlgoSec. It offers a range of automated workflows and processes that accelerate security policy management. For example, it can automate the process of rule recertification, ensuring that rules are regularly reviewed and validated. 

AlgoSec also facilitates policy optimization by automatically suggesting rule modifications based on industry best practices or specific compliance requirements. By automating these repetitive tasks, AlgoSec frees up valuable time for security teams to focus on more strategic initiatives.

AlgoSec offers almost everything that clients want and has a robust set of features. That said, there are a few areas where it could improve. The user interface, although functional, could benefit from a more modern and intuitive design. Additionally, the initial setup and configuration process may require some technical expertise, which could pose a challenge for organizations with limited security resources. A simple tutorial about the initial configuration on Youtube could provide a lot of help. Even a self-guide link inside the GUI would be helpful.

I've used the solution for two years.

The initial setup was complex.

The implementation was handled in-house.

We use the solution for rule optimization. We had almost 100+ firewalls in our network. AlgoSec helps us to manage the firewalls more effectively.

AlgoSec made our work simple in managing the multivendor firewall rule. Audit-ready reporting is an awesome feature.

The most valuable aspects of the solution include policy optimization, rule cleanup, and network discovery.

They need to do some improvements in multi-vendor firewall policy migration. They need improvements in network discovery. The solution could fix some bugs in the A32. Fireflow needs to be a little more user-friendly.

I've used the solution for the past four years.

The scalability is good.

We previously used Firemon. AlgoSec has more functionality and is user-friendly to manage our firewall more effectively.

The initial setup is good.

The ROI is good.

AlgoSec provided the best price and the team helped effectively with the support and A32 migration.

We did look into Tufin.

The solution is the best in the market.

My main use case is as a firewall analyzer module where it can be further broken down as follow: 

1) Network topology visualization: visualizes a network traffic path during troubleshooting

2) Policy optimization: uses optimization and clean-up recommendations to perform annual housekeeping of the firewall

3) PCI DSS compliance: follow the out-of-the-box checklist to prepare for a PCI DSS audit

4) Risk reduction: uses the recommendation of the risky rules to address all the critical and high-risk rules

5) Monitor changes:  monitor for firewall-config changes in real-time via email alerts

The solution has improved our organization in multiple ways. We can:

• Easily understand and provision application connectivity to accelerate application delivery and minimize outages

• Process firewall changes 4x faster, and eliminate misconfigurations and rework

• Proactively assess the impact of network changes to ensure security and continuous compliance

• Simplify and automate internal and regulatory firewall audits, and reduce time and costs

• Streamline communication across the application, network and security teams

• Deliver a tighter security policy that provides better protection against cyber-attacks

The product is great for:

1) Network topology visualization: reduces network troubleshooting effort which contributes to quickly restoring network or application outage.

2) Policy optimization: reduce/consolidate the number of rules created prior to the existence of AlgoSec Firewall Analyzer in order to free up hundreds of rule capacity before reaching the max rule limit of the firewall.

3) PCI DSS compliance: helps to highlight the area which firewall admin need to take note and address in a streamlined and structured manner.

4) Risk reduction: helps to quickly identify the risk that exists in existing rules and provide useful recommendations that help the firewall admin to remediate with ease.

5) Monitor changes: helps firewall admin to comply with security requirements of providing real-time security alert whenever a change is made, with detailed info on what was the value before and after.

The FireFlow's out-of-the-box workflow configuration/customization wizard could be improved to be more user-friendly and have a shorter learning curve. The current configuration wizard is quite complex and complicated, which will result in the need to engage with an AlgoSec professional services team to perform even the simplest workflow adjustment.

I had tried AlgoSec's direct competitor's workflow configuration wizard and found it to suit most organization requirements even though the customization capability may not be as advanced as AlgoSec.

I've used the solution for six years. 

The setup is fairly straightforward.

We did also consider Tufin.

We have actually played around quite a bit with the network flow piece of it (with the routers). That has helped us troubleshoot a few things with data flow and where it might be stopped or redirected to an incorrect location.

We use the following components of AlgoSec: AlgoSec Firewall Analyzer (AFA), FireFlow, and AppViz. We have a very limited cloud deployment at the moment.

We have a very complex network environment. It requires very specific compliance protocols to be put in place, including HIPAA compliance, PCI compliance, and HITRUST compliance. Therefore, we have very specific rules that we have to adhere to. We have 13 sites with very complex setups at each site to allow for redundancy and security, utilizing multiple vendors and technologies to achieve that. 

We are currently developing and going to have a hybrid deployment for the cloud and on-prem. Right now, 98% of our stuff is on-prem, and that will change. We are probably going to be about 75% on-prem and 25% in the cloud, which is very complex. This will allow our external vendors and external clients in as well as all our internal resources.

They have compliance rules built right into the system. Right out-of-the-box, you can run a compliance check against your environment that tells you exactly what needs to be fixed and why. Their compliance check is phenomenal. They even have a base compliance check. So, you can set your own standards to make sure that all your equipment meets those base compliances that you have for internal standards.

AlgoSec has reduced the time it takes to implement firewall rules in our organization. While our usage of it has been fairly limited to what we have tested so far, it has probably reduced the time by about 30%.

It gives us 100% visibility into our network security policies. It has given us a couple of surprises. Over the years, the network that we are administrating has been subject to people who have an idea of how a network should be set up. That differs from technician to technician or engineer to engineer. So, we are finding little pockets of hidden little self-engineered configurations and the way things were done that nobody knew about. Once the engineer left, the knowledge of that setup disappeared. You don't know about those until something either goes wrong, or you get something like AlgoSec to discover it for you, and it says, "Hey, there is this going on over here." 

It has helped us figure out how it was set up and why it was set up that way, then allowed us to engineer it so it fits a little better into our standards. We found a couple of secrets in our network that nobody would have known about. If we had an outage on those, nobody would have been able to figure them out without a tool like AlgoSec. This would have been a complete outage for our organization. Since we are healthcare insurance, that is a significant amount of money.

It has helped to simplify the job of our security engineers. We have a snapshot of where we are at with the correct data that we need to be able to fix the issues that we have. We keep finding little secret pockets of out-of-standard configurations that need to be addressed.

AlgoSec absolutely provides us with full visibility into the risk involved in firewall change requests. There is a risk analysis piece of it that allows us to go in and run that risk analysis against it, figuring out what rules we need to be able to change, then make our environment a little more secure. This is incredibly important for compliance and security of our clients. We deal a lot with patient health information that needs to be secure for physicians who are dealing with it and the patients themselves.

The most valuable for us so far has been the firewall rule analysis. Just to be able to get to a point where our infrastructure is secure and stable. The analysis runs everything that we actually need. When we run a report, we need to look at the report, then go back to the analysis because the analysis has all the information for us. We just have to match up the analysis to the report.

We have a security vendor who runs an analysis on the logs that we send them. We have multiple vendors who come in and do an annual security assessment. We have multiple vendors who come in and do an annual penetration test. We have vendors who deal with the end clients as well as vendors who deal with the servers for security, in addition to our firewalls, routers, and public interfaces. AlgoSec takes all of the information on our network, puts it into one single pane of glass where we can go and request what we need from the vendors. Plus, there are reports in AlgoSec that we can run and send out to our vendors so they have an eye into what we are looking at.

The reports are lacking information when they come out. They will not pull the URL or application information from Cisco FTDs. I know this works for Palo Alto Firewalls, which we currently do not have. If they could improve the integration with Cisco FTDs as a whole, that would be immensely helpful.

We are actually in the process of purchasing AlgoSec. We have gone through a proof of concept with them. Right off the bat, running through that proof of concept with them was absolutely fantastic. Usually, they have an offsite proof of concept server that you connect up to, then kind of take a look at their technology to see how everything works and if you like it. However, we have a different setup onsite for some of our firewall rules. We wanted to make sure that their application/appliance worked on our internal environment. They were more than willing to set up an onsite PoC for us so we could make sure everything did work.

The stability is fantastic. We haven't had an issue with stability at all.

Two people are needed for maintenance (someone for backup plus me). Maintenance on it is fairly limited. It is very automated in the way that it handles all our data and firewall needs.

The scalability is easy, just add more licenses if needed, then turn up another virtual machine. It is pretty straightforward.

There will probably be a dozen of us actually utilizing AlgoSec. This will mainly be the network and security team, then the security team themselves.

During deployment, the technical support fixed our issue within 30 minutes of the phone call.

We are in the process of doing microsegmentation right now. That is one of the reasons why we started looking into a utility like this because we needed to get that current snapshot of where we are at and where we need to go. AlgoSec is beyond phenomenal for helping to create and manage this type of initiative. With the automation piece and the fact that we can take a look at the traffic that is currently running through our firewalls and automate the rules being created for that. This will take a lot of manual work off of our shoulders that would have taken many man-hours to be able to implement.

We ran into some errors/issues, so it probably took us a week to fully deploy it. The process was straightforward except for the typos that we had in the programming. Without those typos, it would have been up within half a day.

We had an implementation strategy that we laid out beforehand and went forward with that.

James, the AlgoSec engineer who was working with me, spent about two weeks on and off with me trying to get the solution up and running, and he was successful at it. This was so we could utilize their proof of concept in our environment to make sure that it would fit our needs.

Because we went from having no unified tool to having AlgoSec, it has improved our security platform by probably 80% in just the short time that we have had and used it. It is invaluable. There is no question in my mind that it is a tool for anybody who has multiple sites, firewalls, and routers. It is something that everybody needs to look into getting because it is invaluable.

Even if we were to pay the first quote that we got, AlgoSec would be worth it. Just having the automation and that overall look into your security platform, you can't be without it.

We are working with our finance department right now to be able to purchase it. The AlgoSec team is doing everything that they can in their power to get the costs down to where our budget is. They have worked a lot on it. They have cut the cost in half for us so far by questioning, "This is in the quote. Is this something that is actually needed?" They have pulled some stuff out and cut our costs down by 50% for the product itself.

There were four of us involved in the evaluation of the product.

We compared this tool to two other different tools. Even with their higher-end solution, when we had the full budget for this, AlgoSec was less expensive than some of the other top tools. We looked at FireMon and Tufin. The reason why we said, "No," when we had budget to FireMon and Tufin is because they were not pulling in the application data or URL data. 

AlgoSec actually pulls application data and URL data in. AlgoSec is a little easier to use than the other solutions. Cisco recommended AlgoSec to us.

Don't trust what you think you know about your network. There are surprises everywhere, and sometimes it takes a utility like this to find those.

Don't don't hesitate. Go get it. If somebody came and asked me for an analysis tool, AlgoSec would be at the top of my list.

The integration is fine.

Migration to the cloud is on our roadmap. 

We have not set up any automation quite yet, but that is on the roadmap. That will make the tool even better.

I would rate this solution as a nine (out of 10).

We use AlgoSec Firewall Analyzer and FireFlow. 

Our primary infrastructure is all on-premise. We tend to leverage only SaaS components of the public cloud. We have over ninety sites including branch offices and Data Centers.

We have over on hundred firewalls and we are a PCI compliant organization. So, we use it for all of our change control around all of our firewall ACL deployments, as well as our risk profiling. We use Fireflow for the change management and audit control. The IT security department uses it for ACL reviews and ACL change requests.

Specifically, with FireFlow, we've managed to integrate that into our overall change advisory and request for change control process: requests flow through a ticket, through AlgoSec Fireflow, through our IT security department for approvals. We've taken advantage of all that. We generally do not have any out-of-band changes and those that happen are logged, tracked and reported on.

The Active Change component has helped reduce human error and given people more confidence the ACL changes have been applied as they requested.

AlgoSec has helped to simplify the job of our security auditors. Primarily, from an audit perspective, it's much faster than it ever was because they can review the ACLs all in one tool now, as opposed to asking for plain text CSV dumps of firewall rules. They can also respond a lot faster now to requests for ACLs as to whether or not they're valid or required because they can review the traffic simulator.

AlgoSec enables us to manage our dispersed environments in a single pane of glass for the firewalls. Seeing all of those firewalls in one view, we no longer need to use things like the Cisco ASDM for day-to-day ACL management. 

AlgoSec gives us a high level of confidence that our ACLs and our risk components are actually in line with our expectations. Because we run a lot of our firewalls as an internal change control boundary, we rely on them heavily to segregate security zones. It gives us a high level of confidence that things like third-party networks that ride on the backbone are segregated and appropriately defined.

The features I find the most valuable are the:

• Duplicate objects
• Unused rules
• Duplicate rules.

The traffic simulation has been really valuable, especially with other business units that aren't familiar with the firewalls but are looking to see whether or not traffic they're using or going to be putting on the network through projects is going to be impacted.

The overall visibility that AlgoSec gives into our network security policies is high. Our firewalls are our primary control boundary on the LAN. They give us the most amount of visibility we can get at that layer without microsegmentation.

AlgoSec provides us with full visibility into the risk involved in firewall change requests. That feature is important to us because we're a heavily risk-averse organization when it comes to IT control and changes, It allows us to verify, for the most part, that the controls that IT security is putting in place are being maintained and tracked at the security boundaries.

It has reduced the time it takes to implement firewall rules. We can sometimes do 20 to 30 ACL either adds, removes, or changes in a week. In some cases those changes are now down to minutes. Prior to AlgoSec, we would have to do all the manual verification which meant potentially logging into every related firewall, checking every ACL, and making sure that we got the placement correct.

We have a fairly complex routing environment that AlgoSec struggled with. The initial period when we were doing an installation with their support desk was fairly challenging.

I have been using AlgoSec for about a year and a half to two years.

We have not had any issues with stability.

So far, we haven't had any issues with scalability. We're at 100+ firewalls, all of them logging directly to the product without issue, and we're using it daily.

We've had a mixed experience with their support. It's swung the gamut from someone who will just reference their own publicly available knowledge base right up to someone going directly to the developers. That process has felt inconsistent. I never know which one I'm getting.

We were not previously using another solution. We chose AlgoSec because we knew that we were going to be managing ACLs globally at a rapid rate going forward and we needed a solution for that.

For our implementation strategy, we used their JumpStart process where they actually had an AlgoSec representative come to us and get us through the implementation. That resource was here for about a week. By the end of the week, it was up and running enough for us to complete the more organization specific components of the implementation.

We had three staff involved in the deployment and there's typically a team of about five of us involved in the daily maintenance and operations. We were all part of the JumpStart. 

About a dozen people now use the tool regularly and that number continues to increase.

For us, on the network team specifically, we're a small team relative to the number of devices that we manage. Having so many firewall rule changes come in on a regular basis, we were likely going to lose a body if not two, just to managing ACL adds and changes.

Initially, the licensing was a little bit unclear. We run a of our firewalls with high availability solutions and how licenses got presented and accounted for was unclear. Overall though, the licensing is pretty straightforward.

The licensing and support cost is fairly significant, likely out of reach for any small and most medium sized businesses without a significant security requirement.

We looked at Tufin and FireMon. At the time, FireMon was cloud-based and we had a policy that didn't allow us to use it.

We had met with AlgoSec a couple of times over the years at Cisco Live. We were familiar with their platform.

My advice would be to be ready to find out the things you probably didn't know. For us, there were a lot of rules that were implemented that weren't being used, a lot of objects that were duplicates.  We were unknowingly hoarding all kinds of configuration data that was no longer relevant.

Overall, I would rate AlgoSec a solid eight out of 10.

I started working with AlgoSec to integrate change opening tools with some clients as I work at an AlgoSec reseller.

I have customized hooks so that custom actions could be triggered within AlgoSec, before implementing the active change I worked to generate scripts to clean up the checkpoint firewall rule base based on AlgoSec reports. My experiences with AlgoSec have always been with end-user support, especially when it comes to software development. That said, I've also done an installation and helped the customer create the approval flow.

AlgoSec has been a partner in my company for many years, with which we can improve our customers' experience.

It adds many facilities in the management of network equipment, due to the ease in analyzing the rule base. It helps firewalls to have a better performance since the rules are positioned more efficiently and unnecessary rules and objects are removed.

The training provided by AlgoSec helps a lot in the development of employees who work with the tool.

I recently discovered the "ask the community" option and it made problem-solving a lot easier.

All of AlgoSec's features are very good, however, in my point of view traffic planning and risk analysis are the most important, with them we can have a view of which items will be affected by the change, which objects need to be created or used, which rules will be affected, with that we can have a much more optimized base and easier to maintain.

With the risk analysis, we can customize it according to the company because each client may have a different risk scenario.

The possibility of customization also makes the job much easier.

Plugins for integration with other tools as ServiceNow, for example, would be ideal. This would facilitate the work without needing a developer to carry out integrations, mainly for market tools.

We need a screen to view system logs. This would facilitate the problem analysis process. The possibility of placing buttons in another system to trigger actions within AlgoSec would be great. For example, placing an HTML button in ServiceNow that triggers the active change. Being able to view the ticket flow within other tools would be useful.

I've used the solution for three years.

I've always worked with the standalone version.

I've always used Algosec.

I have not looked into ROI.

The costs are paid according to use.

I did not evaluate other options previously.