AlgoSec Reviews

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.

Our main use cases for this solution are:

• Firewall Rule optimization
• Topology mapping of various firewalls
• Automating the implementation of rules.
• Reports warning before time based rules expire. 

We also implemented the AlgoBot, which is extremely useful when checking if rules already exist or finding out easily where they need to be configured.

We have 20-plus firewalls from multi-vendors in several sites, both IT and OT. Therefore, an automated way to manage firewalls is a must, especially since staff is always on the short side.

AlgoSec has saved us a lot of time in managing our rule base which has become increasingly large. With 20-plus multi-vendor firewalls, it gets really hard to manage without a solution like AlgoSec. This has helped us to fulfill our internal SLAs for change implementation.  

The fine tuning of the policies is a lot faster and repeatable. 

The compliance factor has also helped us a lot where we can show auditing that we have a repository for all the changes made in the firewalls, who made them, and at what time.

Gone are the days where time-based rules expire without anyone noticing. We have now automated reports sent to the team. This allows us to ask the involved asset owners if rules can be disabled or need to be extended.

Most valuable features are the firewall rule optimization, topology mapping, and automating the deployment of new rules in several multi-vendor devices. 

AlgoBot is a brilliantly, simple idea that lets us give our IT internal customers a way to check if rules are already in place before asking for more.

With firewall rule optimization, you cannot only tune most used rules higher in the rule base, but also check for unused objects or rules to clean up.

The automatic implementation of rules in several firewalls simultaneously is also a great feature, especially in large environments or on short staffed teams. 

AlgoBot should be more developed by adding more features to the chat.

We will be integrating with Cisco ACI soon. Hopefully, new features with this integration will be developed as well in terms of automation.

I came across a difficulty recently with a BGP enabled firewall that had a large number of routes. This wasn't directly supported due to a 3000 rule per firewall limit.

We've been using AlgoSec for over six years.

It has been running flawlessly since installation. Even upgrades are pretty straightforward and have never given us problems.

We have added 10 more firewalls to our 14 existing and have had no performance or scalability issues.

We have had several tickets opened and the responses were fast. This enabled us to solve our problems quickly. The only complaint is about the license rekeying needed for when you need to change a firewall. That usually takes a bit of time.

We did use a different solution for several years. The features and usability made us switch.

If you are knowledgeable about the firewalls that you intend to manage, the initial setup is really easy. The most difficult steps are configuring checkpoints for LEA integration where you need to create the object in each firewall, establish connectivity, install the database, install the policy, etc.

It was initially implemented through a vendor. Their level of expertise was good enough to implement the solution effortlessly.

Cost is based on firewall. There are bundles, e.g., virtual firewalls might make the solution cheaper.

The licensing scheme should be done in a simpler way. For example, if we delete a firewall and want to add a new one, then the license doesn't get freed up automatically. You have to request a new license to customer support and install it. If you are testing new implementations, this can be cumbersome.

We evaluated the main competitor, Tufin, because we were using it!

We use this solution for Firewall Rule Management, to know who did what and why.

We use AlgoSec FireFlow to create Rules for the Firewalls with detailed information. It is used by end-users who supply the requirements for which this rule is needed, and then it goes to Security for approval.

We use AlgoSec Firewall Analyzer to get the audit reports on the firewall and to verify that change, which was approved by the Security and Network teams, is implemented in the right way.

It is a great tool for audit purposes.

Also it tells us if our firewall is compliance with PCI or not.

We use this for Compliance purposes also.

They are both integrated with each other.

This solution is helping us in the long term for managing the firewall configurations.

AlgoSec FireFlow Network Security solution is an end-to-end solution that ensures that firewall changes are approved, necessary, and implemented in the right way.

If some change is not implemented correctly then it warns you right away.

Also, while migrating from Cisco to AlgoSec, we can see the hit counts on the security rules and when the last time each rule was used. Depending on this information, we only use security rules that are more recently used when configuring new firewalls for migration.

For Palo Alto Firewalls, we have configured a lot of virtual routers as part of the network. This segmentation allows different network traffic to be isolated from a security point of view.

For us, it is a great management and audit tool.

This appliance has a lot of great features to offer.

You can buy the physical appliance or VM depending on your company requirements.

Features we like are:

1. Multi-approval AlgoSec Fireflow rule creation system. The end-user can only implement the rule if it is approved by all of the IT groups.
2. Very good integration with other vendor's products like Cisco or Palo Alto Firewalls.
3. This Appliance gives you the full Network MAP, which is obtainable from the Routing table.
4. It is easy to find whether a security policy is blocked, as well as where and by which device.

We love all the features of this device. It can be a bit expensive for small companies but they also have a VM model for that.

It seems that AlgoSec created a VSYS (Virtual system) for each virtual router name, even though our firewall has only a single VSYS. We are ok to work with this, but if this can be fixed in a future release then that will be great.

We have been using this solution for three years.

We have had no Hardware or Software issue so far with this Product.

This Appliance never went down and whenever we did any software upgrades it went very smooth. Also in our environment we had no issues due to any software bugs.

Their Software is pretty stable and bug free.

We love the scalability of this product.

This solution has Five Star technical support.

It is great to work with its Customer and Technical support team.

We used a different solution prior to this one and we had issues integrating with our new firewall vendor which was Palo Alto

The initial setup is straightforward, and we had no issues during the installation.

We performed the implementation in-house.

It seems we have recovered our money on this appliance, so it is money well spent.

Initial setup was not that hard. Vendor did this for us.

Licensing depends on how many firewalls your company has.

They have license options for small to big customers depending on the network.

Price is fair for Licensing and Product.

We evaluated a few other options, including Tufin, before choosing this solution.

My advice is to go with this product. It is easy to set up and use. It has great features and very good technical support to back it.

So far, we find ourselves below limitations on this appliance with the version we are currently running.

Overall, this is a Great security management product with good automation options to help your security teams function.

We utilize this solution to manage policies for our firewalls. At first, we used it to keep a record of our policies: Who changed something, when, and whether the policy is allowed or not. We now use it to map our traffic flows and to flag a policy that is not allowed by the criteria we have set for our different types of firewalls.

We used it initially to go through all of our policies on over 800 firewalls, to organize the policies and map out our policy flows to certain zones. That enabled us to know how to structure our policies.

We spent a year going through our firewall policies to clean them up because before, when we were on Cisco ASA firewalls, we had a very hard time regulating what types of firewall policies were being created, and it was even harder to review them. After we moved to Palo Alto firewalls, we decided that that was the best time to load our policies into AlgoSec and review them. That way we not only converted to a more capable next-generation firewall, we could also ensure the policies were strong.

AlgoSec has helped significantly with our firewall compliance. Before AlgoSec it was a very manual job to go through firewalls and look for risky rules. Now, we get alerts when a risky rule is created. This allows us to maintain compliance and run compliance checks monthly. As a result, we have saved many hours of work by our operations folks. They were the ones who had to manually review all of the firewall policies and create evidence of their review in a very scrappy fashion.

With AlgoSec, we can show a view of firewall compliance that is clean and easy to read and present. This also helps our business units ensure their policies are clean. With that data, we are able to show management that the firewalls connected to our network, but owned by other business units, meet our standards.

We like that we have been able to identify risky rules, based on the criteria we have set. We also like the ability to push policies from AlgoSec to the firewalls to ensure risky policies are never created in the first place. That's a feature that will help us in the future as well.

We are moving towards an automated environment so the ability to work with Ansible, ServiceNow, and Palo Alto gives us the ability to automate our firewall policy creation. And it does so in a manner where we do not have to worry about a policy being created that may put our organization at risk.

Support for Layer 7 policies, including User-ID and threat profiles with Palo Alto firewalls, has been a pain point from us. We would like to include the additional info specifically because we believe it changes the riskiness of the rule if it is only set for a specific user or a group of users. For example, if we have what looks like an "allow all" to a certain /24 network, but for only one user, we would give that a different score than if no user was identified.

AlgoSec has been very stable for us.

It scales well.

We have had our issues resolved very quickly.

We used Tufin. 

The initial setup was very simple. We just set up SNMP.

We used a vendor team and they were great.

The ROI for us is the great assurance we have in the security of our firewall policies.

Be sure to scale properly.

We evaluated Tufin.

This solution will help you significantly with compliance, the part of your job that may not be your favorite.

We use it to find unused objects and rule cleanup. However, we also found a use case by letting developers read access so they can see rules and open ports so they can request firewall changes as needed. This opened up time for our firewall engineers because they did not have to answer questions anymore to developers. 

By letting developers access AlgoSec, we cut down the questions and time we had to spend explaining what ports are open and where. They can now see in one panel. Since there are multiple firewall vendors, they can see what rules apply where using one tool.

I think finding the firewall's rules with the highest risk is valuable. In the old days, we had to run reports and look through rule bases trying to find risky rules and that can also lead to human error. Now we see it via AlgoSec. It also helps because we see those risks across multiple vendors. 

I would like to see more object-based reports on groups and object usage. When cleaning up old rules, it is easy to disable the rule and then delete after a while. Trying to find unused groups or used objects in groups gets a little harder and I would like to see an easier view into those objects. 

We have never had an issue with its stability.

This product does scale very well and we never had a problem with performance.

Whenever we did have a question on setup or changes, the tech support was very willing to work with us even on basic questions. 

We have used Tufin which does a good job looking at groups and objects but AlgoSec adds more of a risk approach to it. 

It was very easy to setup and easy to get firewalls working with the manager. 

We were able to set it up in-house without any help. That is how easy it was.

Our ROI was seen very quickly since we gave developers the option to look at rules. IT opened up so much time where our firewall engineers had to deal with questions and explanations. 

I would start with only a few firewalls and then grow. You can get your feet wet and add more firewalls in next year's budget. 

We evaluated Tufin. 

The solution is pretty solid and intuitive.

I use AlgoSec for compliance reports and security purposes. I also use it for monitoring. Monitoring is the best part of using AlgoSec, as I can monitor and connect again in security mode.

AlgoSec has improved the functionality and the comfort of my organization. Whenever I have any issue, there is a chat box from the AlgoSec team that can help me whenever I need it. It's very easy to use, and I have done integration with it.

AlgoSec allows me to monitor who is making a change on my Check Point device. It is very easy to monitor.

I cannot think of anything that could be improved. Everything is good.

I would like for there to be more AI functionalities.

I have been using AlgoSec for about two years now.

There are zero stability issues. It's stable.

It is scalable.

The customer service and support are satisfactory. I am satisfied with it.

Positive

The initial setup was straightforward and took about forty-five minutes. I didn't have any issues when implementing it. 

There are two of us in our team, myself and one colleague.

The pricing is moderate. It's not that cheap and it's not expensive.

I would recommend Algosec to all. It is very easy to deploy, scalable, and enables us to monitor.

I would rate AlgoSec a ten out of ten.

App Flow, Firewall Analyzer, and FireFlow are utilized. For gap-cleaning efforts to improve the firewalls and to gain visibility into firewall rules, we use AlgoSec. In order to maintain a clean environment, have a set of firewalls that are optimized, and then automate the deployment of firewall rules, we also employ the solution as a firewall assurance tool.

Our goal is to increase our understanding of firewall regulations. We utilized this tool to conduct a gap-cleaning project and tidy up our firewalls. Furthermore, we rely on this solution as a firewall assurance tool to ensure our rules are optimized and up to date. Additionally, we use this tool to automate the entire process of deploying firewall rules, ensuring a smooth change process in FireFlow, and allowing us to automatically deploy the firewalls on our appliances.

Security policy management entails far more than simply inspecting a device and applying certain rules. It is all about improving and automating time-consuming security processes so that staff can concentrate on more strategic responsibilities. AlgoSec FireFlow, for example, enables enterprises to process security policy changes in minutes or hours rather than days or weeks. It automates the entire security policy change process, from design and submission to proactive risk analysis, implementation, validation, and auditing, using intelligent, highly customizable processes.

The most valuable aspects of the solution include:

Dealing with misconfigurations. Automating manual processes reduces misconfigurations and prevents nearly all firewall breaches caused by misconfigurations, rather than flaws.

Automation as a strategy. Network policy automation is not an end unto itself. Rather, it supports the business strategy of maintaining security, ensuring SLAs, increasing cooperation, and reducing friction between departments. It improves competitive differentiation through better customer engagement, e.g., by moving applications to the cloud. Network policy automation aids regulatory compliance, and frees IT time from housekeeping so it can be applied to digital transformation and supporting strategic initiatives.

Understanding visibility requirements. With the help of advanced NSPM tools, network administrators and security managers can gain a deeper understanding of their network devices and business applications. By analyzing traffic flows across various vendor devices and hybrid infrastructures, they can identify security vulnerabilities, simplify troubleshooting, and uncover new applications and services.

To provide comprehensive instructions on product integration, a manual page can be added to the dashboard at the integration point. This will make it simple for the system administrator to incorporate new goods, even if they are unfamiliar with them thoroughly. Every time we integrate a new product, we shouldn't have to wait for coordinated work with a product specialist.

Due to the fact that AlgoSec's user interface is less friendly than that of other programs, it might not be appropriate for persons with little experience in security or IT. It does, however, allow for more customization. As a result, the interface can be regarded as more sophisticated.

I've been using this solution for the last two years.

For cybersecurity, AlgoSec automates application connectivity flows reliably.

The scalability is available via:

High-Availability. AlgoSec appliances can be clustered for fault tolerance, ensuring availability if system components fail.

Disaster Recovery. AlgoSec appliances can automatically synchronize data with offsite appliances to provide redundancy and ensure data preservation in the event of a failure at the primary site.

Geographically Distributed Architecture. AlgoSec appliances can be deployed across distributed sites for the local collection of logs and rulesets.
This data is then efficiently transmitted to a central appliance for processing.

Load Sharing. AlgoSec appliances can be clustered to share data workloads across multiple appliances for faster data analysis and reporting.

It was a wonderful experience dealing with customer service and support.

Positive

The initial setup is straightforward.

We implemented the solution in-house.

We've noted ROI in the following ways:

Automation. By analyzing the firewall rulesets, the network topology, and your corporate security policy, FireFlow can save more than 50% of the time required to process a firewall change. From automatically pinpointing the exact devices that need to be changed, to proactively assessing the risk and designing the change in the most optimal way. With AlgoSec’s ActiveChange technology, administrators can also automatically execute the change on the firewall and save even more time.

Accuracy. As much as 30% of requested firewall changes are not required, and many others are implemented incorrectly. FireFlow can automatically identify and close “already works” requests, and also ensure changes are performed exactly as requested.

Auditing. In order to meet regulatory and internal security requirements, IT find themselves spending a lot of time ensuring each change is properly documented to address any questions an auditor may have. FireFlow maintains a detailed history of every step of every change request and saves precious time. It even identifies changes that were performed without a formal request.

AlgoSec is a useful firewall management tool for organizations that require management of multiple firewall levels.

We use it for planning firewall changes and traffic simulation queries.

We use AFA (AlgoSec Firewall Analyzer) and FireFlow. Our network environment is mostly on-premises.

It has improved the way our organization functions in that, for our change process, we now require all changes to be planned using AlgoSec so that the security team has visibility into the changes and we're aware of any risks. We also are using the covered rules and risky-rule detection to improve our security posture.

We haven't fully implemented the processes, so we haven't measured any reduction in human error as a result of using the solution, but subjectively, it has reduced human error.

It has also helped to simplify the jobs of our security engineers.

The most valuable features for us are the functionality it provides for our two main use cases: planning firewall changes and traffic simulation queries.

We haven't used it yet to prepare for audits and ensure our firewalls are in compliance, but I think it will be very helpful for that. That's one of the main reasons we bought it.

We are using it with a couple of Cisco technologies and we're also sending events out to our Microsoft Sentinel workspace. We have a couple of other security technologies in there as well. AlgoSec integrates well with the Cisco ACI environment and with our Firepowers, our FTDs. There are still some bugs but it generally works well.

The overall visibility it gives us into our network security policies is pretty good but it has some bugs and shortcomings. It doesn't support all features on our firewalls. For instance, planning changes, which include net rules, doesn't work. It didn't integrate so well with the ACI network. It doesn't work with all firewall rules or with net rules on our firewalls.

For about 70 percent of firewall changes it does show us the risks, while for 30 percent of the changes, we can't plan because of these bugs and shortcomings.

I have been using AlgoSec for about a year.

The stability is good.

We've had no problems in terms of scalability.

I'm sure we will continue to add firewalls to it and we want to do more with the FireFlow.

Their technical support is good but it can be slow.

Neutral

The initial setup was straightforward.

We have about 10 engineers using it, and just one person who looks after it, maintenance-wise.

We used their personal services to help us set it up. We had an onboarding package. It wasn't me doing the configuration but it seemed straightforward with their support.

Our experience with them was good overall. We had some frustrations and surprises in the early days with the product not being completely compatible with our environment. But over the last year, they've been fixing the bugs which is making it much more usable. When we started, it had a lot of problems with our environment. We were only able to plan something like 40 percent of the changes, and the traffic simulations weren't working with our network environment. But now, we're up to close to 70 percent.

It took about nine months before it was properly integrated and enough of the bugs had been fixed for it to be helpful.

We are not measuring the effort saved or the errors avoided, but we think it's a good investment.

Initially, it was more expensive, but we managed to negotiate the price. It's about average now.

In addition to the standard fees, we bought the Jumpstart package to help us configure it.

We looked into Tufin. We chose AlgoSec because of its support for Cisco ACI. Tufin was just releasing that and we felt that AlgoSec was a more mature product.

At the moment, it hasn't reduced the time it takes to implement firewall rules in our organization. It's being used to improve the quality of the changes we make and improve visibility. But we haven't fully implemented the FireFlow features. That's our problem, rather than the tool. We just haven't finished implementing it.

We're only using AlgoSec for on-premises, but we do have environments in the cloud and we plan to use it for those in the future. It would help us manage these multiple environments in a single pane of glass, but for the moment we aren't using it in that way. However, we do have a number of firewalls that we have onboarded from acquisitions, so we are not just using it for our data centers. We're using it for smaller acquisitions' firewalls as well to understand the security posture of companies that we are purchasing.

My advice would be to make sure that the solution is completely compatible with whatever infrastructure you have. We should have spent more time evaluating its support for our infrastructure to avoid some of the problems or surprises we had when we implemented it.