AlgoSec Reviews

AlgoSec provides a secure connection between applications and helps customers maintain regulatory compliance.

The benefit depends on the type of client. Our banking customers are impressed with the compliance features, automatic policy installation, and FireFlow. They also realize performance improvements of approximately 20 percent. 

AlgoSec has simplified the work of security engineers. If I had to give that a grade, I would give it a nine out of ten. We used the solution to implement and manage micro-segmentation initiatives. Still, it has been limited since this is a private cloud version, and many of our customers use regular firewalls. 

We deal with customers with a mixture of environments, including private cloud, public cloud, and on-premises. Many of them have on-premises and private cloud environments. AlgoSec provides a single pane of glass for managing these mixed environments, making management more effortless. 

The most valuable feature of AlgoSec is integration because it needs the be integrated with vendors' firewalls and other security products. AlgoSec has intelligent policy tuners. 

It's easy to integrate AlgoSec with solutions from other vendors. It's currently integrated with the products of three or four vendors. We integrate AlgoSec with AppViz and other products to get complete visibility into our network policies, and FireFlow helps us manage risks from firewall change requests. It has reduced the time it takes to implement firewall rules by about 20%, according to the ROI calculator on the AlgoSec website. It varies, depending on the structure of the customer's environment. 

AlgoSec also helps us audit complex environments to ensure firewalls are in compliance. The benefit is marginal if there is only one firewall and a few policies, but it's significant when you have three firewall clusters and 60 devices. 

The documentation could be better. 

I've been using AlgoSec for six years.

AlgoSec is stable.

It's a scalable solution but there is room for improvement in that area. It has a high-availability structure, but some features need to be distributed using a collector, for example.

I rate AlgoSec's support eight out of ten. I don't use it much, but it has improved greatly in the last two years. 

Positive

Setting up AlgoSec isn't complicated. You can install it in half an hour, but the configuration time depends on the environment. Sometimes, it takes a day, but it could take up to a week to analyze the files, etc. We have a two-person team responsible for deployment and maintenance, but we also have partners. In all, we have about 10 technicians supporting our customers.

I don't know about pricing because I'm a technical guy. I can say the licensing model is straightforward and should be in the future. It isn't an issue for our customers. 

I rate AlgoSec an eight out of ten. I would recommend AlgoSec, depending on the client's structure and requirements. It's a good solution for regulatory compliance and analytics. 

Firewall rule base management and FCR processing is the main reason we use AlgoSec.

We also use it for troubleshooting purposes and reporting. In that sense, there are three instances that are the main consumers of it. Our infrastructure management uses reporting to get insights, our Network and Security team does all of the FCR processing and troubleshooting of network problems, and our security department that also uses reporting and is part of the approval process for FCRs that are placed in AlgoSec.       

AlgoSec provided a much easier way to process FCRs and get visibility into traffic. With previous vendors, we had to guess what was going on with our traffic and we were not able to act accordingly.

By automating some parts of the work, business pressure is also reduced since we now deliver much faster. I received feedback from our security department that their FCR approval process is also now much easier. The network team is also now able to process FCRs much faster and with more accuracy.

Most of all, Technical Reviews are now top-notch and AlgoSec does part of the job automatically that had been done manually with our previous vendor.

We now process FCRs much faster, which helps us to deliver faster and implement reworks at a quicker rate.

With Business Flow and Firewall Analyzer, it provides much better visibility into traffic and process flows. Visibility into traffic was our main problem in the past since we had no clue what was going on but now, we have all sorts of analyses and reports. This makes our decision process, firewall clean up, and troubleshooting much easier.

All of the search options needed are there but the search menu could be a bit more intuitive. In other words, I can perform any search I want without any problems but combining different search parameters can sometimes be a problem.

Creating more intuitive menus could be helpful, especially for the first-time users.

For example, it would be useful to be able to save searches with complex structure so they can be easily reused with simple change of parameter. Also, "contain" criteria sometimes misses just like ability to search using any value in basic search box, instead of reaching out to Advanced search (it would be great if simple typing IP address, or Project ID in basic search box lists all rules containing such a value).

We have been using AlgoSec in production for about one year. Before that, we used it as a PoC for around six months.

We have had no issues in the past year.

This solution is very scalable.

We used another vendor prior to AlgoSec but we were not satisfied with the "intelligence" of the product when it came to the processing of FCRs.

We also evaluated Skybox.

I have not seen any major issues with AlgoSec and it is better than the previous product we used. I am glad to have it now.

We use AlgoSec to provide compliance and for the ease of automating everyday security tasks. We have more than five hundred firewalls and automation is a must. This was the best product in terms of the flexibility and visibility that we needed to manage them across different regions. We can modify policy according to our maintenance schedule and time zones.

AlgoSec has reduced the need for additional manpower and we can now use the time to tackle other security-related issues. For incident response, you can automatically isolate compromised servers from the network.

It helps remove rules with limited impact on other applications. By maintaining a clean security policy, it reduces the risk from the most common attacks and also improves performance.

AlgoSec has also helped increase collaboration between departments. It helps our network department to reduce third-party involvement in policy creation and management.

So far, we are using AlgoSec Analyzer and FireFlow. The Analyzer is more for compliance, risk, and auditing. FireFlow is more for automating rule changes and installation.

Right now I am loving FireFlow for its easy to use interface. You can also get as complex as you are comfortable with. You can add email, scripts, and hooks to certain aspects of the rule creation process.

AlgoSec now has cloud products that they are rolling out. This is the next space for which everyone is dedicating more resources. We would like to see them utilize the cloud to help with performance improvement, and with various processes needed on a daily basis. We have two remote agents that help with daily processing and would like to integrate more power from the cloud to be as flexible as possible.

We have around 200 firewalls that we manage through AlgoSec. We use it for automation purposes in certain cases. We have 10 to 12 team members who use AlgoSec.

We have around 100 plus on-premises devices. However, we are moving over to the cloud. At present, we mainly have Microsoft Azure, and we are going to deploy AWS and Google Cloud soon.

We use AlgoSec FireFlow as well. 

The amount of time spent on doing simple tasks, such as adding a particular rule or giving access to a particular person, or doing the same repetitive task has been reduced. We don't have to manually look into duplicate rules or look into traffic that is not getting hits. It will be automatically taken into consideration by AlgoSec, and the information will be given to us so that we can take action on that part. It saved us a lot of time.

When the staff is doing the same repetitive task all the time, there will be errors. AlgoSec helped to reduce human error and misconfigurations to a great extent.

One of the features that I like about AlgoSec is the topology table. It helps us understand where the traffic flows through, where it gets interconnected, and how the traffic flows from our device to the other device.

The other good feature that I have come across is that it suggests best practices. For example, we had a case where there was a legacy rule that was a wide-open rule. AlgoSec identified what IP traffic got hit and based on that suggested allowing those particular IPs instead of maintaining a wide-open rule.

In terms of the overall visibility that AlgoSec gives into our network security policies, I like the best practice assessment in terms of compliance. It helps us deal with wide-open rules and duplicates, and provides suggestions on how the rules can be written, restructured, and reordered.

AlgoSec reduced the time it takes to implement firewall rules. Also when it is upgraded, which we are in the process of doing, when a user tries to raise a ticket, that ticket will be associated with AlgoSec FireFlow. Then, the user will be able to access it themselves.

We work with multiple security vendors, but not all vendors integrate with AlgoSec. As a result, our team has both AlgoSec and Tufin. In terms of integrations, it's going well so far.

AlgoSec helped to simplify the job of our security engineers. For example, a new user who tries to gain access will have to raise a case, and automation will take that into consideration. It helped us to disable rules that are not being utilized, merge any duplicate rules, and reorder rules based on traffic hits to have a good flow. Any rule works from top to bottom, and AlgoSec will place the major items at the top. These helped to reduce latency as well.

Certain firewalls don't integrate with AlgoSec, and it would be great if this bug could be fixed.

AlgoSec looks into compliance and is helpful. However, it would be nice to have validations that can run before the changes are posted and implemented. Now, if something goes wrong the user would need to reach out to us, and then we would have to troubleshoot. Instead of that, if there are validations for simple tasks, it would be great.

I've also heard from our AlgoSec vendor about a feature that is coming up in the future. With the topology table, we can see the interconnected devices to understand the traffic flow. I was told that with this new feature, if we find a blockage, maybe on a firewall, that we would be able to go to that firewall and allow traffic through a specific rule. This would be done just by right-clicking on that particular device and getting the change implemented through automation. This would be a helpful feature.

I've been using AlgoSec for about a year.

The stability has been okay so far. There are a few bugs, but no device is perfect.

We previously used FireMon and switched to AlgoSec because we were not satisfied with it. FireMon was good but was not user-friendly.

I recommend AlgoSec because it has good features and is more user-friendly than FireMon. AlgoSec has fewer options in terms of tabs, so you'll be able to navigate and explore everything. From a technical point of view, AlgoSec is good for a newcomer. Therefore, I would give AlgoSec an overall rating of eight on a scale from one to ten.

The purpose of using the product was to attack and Analyse rule bases from a holistic perspective. The Firewall Analyzer has a rule base consolidator as well as a feature to make the rule base more permissive. It also helps to reduce rule base clutter, as well as legacy rules.

Traffic query helps us to quickly find rules that allow outbound access.

FireFlow is a useful ticketing system that integrates with many products.

We would like to use FireFlow's API to automate certain tickets that come through to leverage automation in our environment. 

An example is that we have a policy with 900 rules, which we were able to reduce to 500 rules. That's close to a 50 percent savings on the rule base.

We used the Unused rules function in Firewall Analyser to examine our rule base. This has drastic performance increases in our production firewalls.

Objects not used within rules can save even more when it comes to cleaning up rule bases. Where this is a very manual process without AlgoSec, engineers can have a level of automation by building useful reports to assist with clean up.

The most valuable feature is the Firewall Analyser, which has a number of fantastic features.

From a risk perspective, you can apply compliance Frameworks like ISO 27001 and PCI DSS against firewall rule bases to see if your rule base is compliant. If you are not then AlgoSec provides descriptive ways on how to adjust rules to make your rule base more compliant. 

Definitely, the policy-cleanup features are the main draw. Shadowed rules, rule duplication, rule consolidation, rules permitting too much access, and rule usage are very useful and help to clean up rule bases.

There are areas where auditing rule changes are not accurate. It is important to be accurate when using rule changes, as users need to be accountable for their changes; however, I cannot trust AlgoSec when rule changes come through on reports as they reflect incorrectly. I have taken this up with support and have never really had a resolution for this. 

I would like to see enhanced dashboards or build meaningful reports for executive consumption. 

AlgoSec is a fantastic product, and I would like to see more "granular" breakdowns of traffic on IPT traffic analysis for source and destination, as the way it does it currently does not allow me to self problems for rules with ANY in the destination.

We have been using AlgoSec for one and a half years.

The stability is good.

Scalability-wise, this product is good.

The technical support is always responsive and always willing to understand the issues. 

Our previous solution was not useful and did not have an intuitive interface. Support was also terrible.

The initial setup is straightforward. If you understand your infrastructure, it will be easy to deploy in a central location.

Our deployment was done through a vendor team and it took one week.

We haven't saved any money yet but we have improved the performance of certain devices.

I would suggest that you start with a VM, get a PoC with a temp license, and try it out. You will love it.

I would not like to disclose which other products, but I have used two other products that didn't even come close to AlgoSec's power.

Its a good production and good support, definitely worth it.

We are using Firewall Analyzer (AFA) to compare configurations from multiple firewalls, such as Cisco ASA, Palo Alto, Check Point, and so on. It helps us to streamline our firewall rules, identify risks, and provide better visibility. This product has significantly saved the time and human efforts in creating and deploying firewall rules. It is now easier for our cybersecurity team to analyze firewalls rules and ACLs, using them in a more efficient manner. Other features are also very important for us.

With the help of this product, we can manage all the network security equipment in a centralized way. We are also able to make requests to our security team about quick and valid changes requests, helping to minimize the workload in documentation, troubleshooting and so on. This helps to identify any wrong or unnecessary changes in the network security perimeter, making sure that all security policies and best practices are followed in our network domain. During change implementation, and especially after completion, we can validate, make sure that everything is working fine, and is up-to-date per our expectations.

It’s capability to build and present entire network topology via map makes team members to easily investigate the entire domain. Whenever new applications and services get on boarded and traffic rules and policies being created it automatically discovered those Apps and services and makes life easy. Each and every performance report can be fully automated using this and saves time in audit and compliance requirement.It also helps us to clean old and obsolete rules or those rules which are not in use otherwise it could be very difficult without this product as team have to log into each firewall and remove rules and policies

We are running multiple hybrid cloud solutions, working with cloud providers, and looking for API integrations with cloud and related interoperability. Sometimes, when we are trying to delete or disable any rule, it takes more time than expected. 

Sometimes, the web browser has issues with slowness. It can be worked out with a click or two. 

We are using Algosec Firewall Analyzer referred to as (AFA) since 2018.

This is very stable, robust product. During extreme load in business hours, it works well without any issues. 

It provides interoperability with all vendor firewalls and the scalability is much easier.

Technical support is always good whenever we contact the support team. We always get an immediate response and a solution within defined timelines.

Earlier we are not using any solution but always planning to procure solution that have ability to integrate multi vendor firewalls into single platform and after assessments and evaluations with OEM products we finally select Algosec as approved solution.  

Initial setup was very simple. Using Quickstart help, any member can take part in deployment and administration from basic to advanced level. 

Only the firewall integration could take time due to some complex interactions. 

We implemented using our own internal team and with the help of AlgoSec technical support team. AlgoSec technical support was excellent and prompt.

It provides an improvement in the firewall process load. It also helps with increasing CPU and memory utilization.

When it comes to the cost of support and licensing, it is much cheaper than other competing products.

We have tried FireMon and Tufin under a non-production environment, but the overall features of AlgoSec were best. Therefore, we choose this product for our production environment.

Excellent product to use and has tremendous support from OEM.

We have not faced many problems or issues using this product.

We also have not tested AI or ML capabilities and are very keen to start working with it now. 

Overall, it is well-maintained, robust platform tool for firewall management.

First and mostly, as a large company, we had some issues regarding the main rating companies as they found some issues compromising our assets. There are different management systems and models with human interaction and sometimes with a different validation. This was impacting our business, so we put a lot of effort into solving problems, case by case, with manual operations. AlgoSec came into action in order to avoid this and streamline our process.

AlgoSec is one security management tool with the main target to find any rule that is not in compliance with our internal standards. New rules cannot be configured in any firewall unless it has been validated from security.

We were able to identify every rule configured on each firewall in our facilities with AlgoSec. This included every risky rule, shadow rule, and non-compliant rule. After this, we were working with a fully cleaned-up process.

Now, any rule is pushed automatically with AlgoSec. In fact, every user in the company is raising tickets through it to request a new open flow across firewalls. If AlgoSec detects that this flow has no risk, it is automatically pushed onto the firewall. If not, it goes to a dedicated approval process.

Among all of the different AlgoSec modules, I think that FireFlow is the most valuable and we have integrated it into our internal processes. This is something that increases business efficiency and helps avoid bottlenecks in our NOC team. Moreover, we have eliminated any human mistakes that we have dealt with in the past and now we want to avoid as we are moving toward a completely automated network.

There are a few things that we have already raised to AlgoSec in order to improve the tool. First, as the highest volume in our network is SaaS traffic, we need to secure this connection. To secure SaaS traffic there are a few vendors such as Palo Alto and Zscaler, but AlgoSec is not yet able to push rules onto these clouds. It’s in the roadmap but this is something that blocks our whole design.

The network map design is not very useful for the administrator as the information displayed is not user-friendly.

It's been almost two and a half years since when we were looking for a fully integrated Security Management tool and we decided to run this solution in our multi-vendor network.

Stability is good, but we are still debugging tiny things because we have to accommodate the solution to our large IT infrastructure.

It will be good as long as they can move this solution to hybrid or fully cloud deployments. 

All issues raised so far have had a good response SLA.

We didn't use any security managament tool prior to this one.

This initial setup was tough because of the network map configuration. There is no visibility on the provider (ISP) because they cannot grant access to us. So, the configuration was mostly set up manually.

AlgoSec was deployed with the support of professional services coming from the vendor. This made the implementation smooth for us. The expertise was good, as they had experience with this solution.

We were doing some workshops with both AlgoSec and Tufin. 

We are using AlogSec mainly for firewall compliance reporting as well analyzing and evaluating firewall policy. That, in turn, means we can actively work on firewall policy optimization and elimination of unused and risky rules. We also using it for compliance reporting. 

The solution has helped us a lot in improving our firewall security optimization as well in evaluating security policy to eliminate the risky rules or secure them. 

Its reporting modules solve all our monthly and quarterly compliance-related reporting requirements. 

Currently, we are using almost all the features of the product to take as much advantage as we can of what it offers. But our primary use is compliance reporting and the Firewall Analyzer helps us achieve our various IT compliance requirements, like ISO-27001.

There is huge scope for improvement in the level of support, especially around the issue of resolution time. That is the only negative point I find in the solution. I hope you guys will work on it and improve your resolution time which will help customers to keep their AlgoSec device healthy.

In the six years we have been using it, we have never seen an outage or failure of AlgoSec or any other software-related failure. 

The product is very scalable. We have never faced any issues related to the scalability of the product. 

As an individual, my experience has been good, but in terms of technical-issue resolution, I am not 100 percent satisfied because of time the AlgoSec team takes to fix issues, some of the time.

Previously, we were using Tufin but we found that solution more complicated when compared with AlgoSec. 

The initial setup was straightforward because of the well-defined GUI platform.

We implemented it in-house.

Given that we have been using this product for the last six years, there is no question about ROI. If we were not seeing ROI, per our expectations, we would not continue with the product. 

AlgoSec is not much more expensive compared to other products available in the market.

We evaluated FireMon but it was more complicated than AlgoSec and did not fulfill our basic requirements. 

Overall, AlgoSec is doing a good job.