Tufin Orchestration Suite Reviews

We use it for rule re-certification and rule review. Twice a week, we use the Tufin report to see what changes or adds were done to the policies. Finally, we also use it for rule automation. We have it integrated with ServiceNow for rule requests.

It has improved our organization through the beginning of automation. It has also helped in terms of auditing. Tufin is a convenient way for us to show and prove what changes were done, when they were done, and by whom they were done.

Tufin also helps ensure that security policies are followed across our entire hybrid network. We use the USP, Universal Security Profile, which is governed by our cyber team. That team sets up the parameters and then, through the automation, when a request comes in, the first thing it does is check if it meets or violates. If it violates, it sends it right back to the requester. Another way we do it is that when somebody puts a request in, it goes through the USP. Then the cyber team combs through it to make sure that whatever service they're asking for can happen. For example, if someone wants Dev going to the internet, of course that's not going to happen. They'll filter all that out before it comes to us. Once it comes to us, we'll implement it, and then we comb through all the reports and make sure that nobody missed anything.

It also helps expedite changes.

The reports are very valuable. In terms of cleaning up firewall policies, we use Tufin to gather information in the reports. However, we don't automate Tufin to do the work. It's still done by a firewall engineer.

But the best feature for me is being able to look up objects within all of our policies, because we have a little over 12,000 rules and over 30,000 objects. When one person says, "Hey, where's my server?" I can just go to Tufin and say, "Hey, where is that server?" and very quickly it tells me where it is, what policy it's on. That is a life saver. Without that, I'd be a janitor.

The visibility it provides is also very good.

The change workload process is flexible and customizable. For example, we have it working with ServiceNow. When somebody requests to have a rule in place or requests a firewall, they will first go to ServiceNow and put all their information in. ServiceNow then sends that over to Tufin and Tufin does its magic - verifies the USPs and does the design. That part is simplified. However, there are little mechanics in between that could be a lot better.

We use the solution to automatically check if a change request would violate any security policies or rules. Our cyber team is on it as well. We comb through all the changes done for that rule and verify. Before we do a push, we verify that there was no compromise to our security posture.

For me, there are two things that can make Tufin a bit better. This could be something on my end that I don't understand or maybe it can already be done and I don't know, but the two things that I am hoping to get out of this couple of days here at Tufinnovate 2019 are: have a better focus on automation - automating a lot of the processes; and automating rule re-certification, or at least finding a way to simplify it.

In my industry, the banking industry, we're heavily regulated. Auditors are everywhere and they want everything accounted for. When I do a rule re-certification, I have to justify why that rule still there, who is using the rule, what's going on. Or if it hasn't been used, I want to get rid of it. But I don't want the onus to be on the firewall team. I want that onus to be on the person who requested the rule. I'm trying to figure out a way that I can have Tufin say, "Hey, look, John or Joan, your rules haven't been used in a year," or "Do you still require these rules or these servers?" and it would give them buttons to click, either "yes" or "no".

If they hit "no," Tufin would say, "Thanks very much," and disable them for 30 days, in case they made a mistake, and after 30 days, it would remove them. That type of automation would save us so much time. Right now, there are three people doing that job.

As an example with rules, when I look at a rule it will tell me how many days it was hit, when the last hit was, when it was last modified, but I can't get a creation date. What date was it created? It must know when it was created because it created an OUI for the rule. I asked support and they said, "Well, go here, go there, do this, spin your head and tap three times, and if you're lucky..." And I'm thinking, "Can you not just tell me the date it was created?" Then I could filter on those as well. Right now, I can't filter on rules that are over five years old, for example. Even when they're in use, I still want to see old rules. Maybe they've got old services that shouldn't be working anymore.

I would also like to see better logging.

SecureChange could be a bit better, at least with integration with ServiceNow or some of the other ticketing tools.

The scalability is amazing. We have it in two data centers. We have full redundancy with it. I have no qualms about its scalability, whatsoever.

Technical support has been very good. I've dealt with Professional Services and I dealt with a programmer when we did our ServiceNow with Tufin. They were really good; two of the best guys. Top-notch. My Professional Services guy is awesome. He's my go-to guy. The other gentleman, whose name is Neil, was really good. He was very kind, very accommodating, top-notch.

The switch to Tufin was done before I got to this company, but if I had to guess, I imagine somebody tried to jump out of the window or thought, "I'm going to go nuts if I have to look up one object in a pool of 30,000 and 8,000 rules." It's over 80 firewalls.

The initial setup was complex because we had to integrate with ServiceNow. That's what made it complex. Tufin would say, "Hey, we can do this," and ServiceNow would say, "Yeah, we can't do that." Or ServiceNow would say, "We do it this way," and Tufin would reply, "Yeah, that's not going to happen."

If it was just a stand-up and write some custom workflows, that would have been a lot easier.

We had a vendor or reseller with us, but they didn't have much experience with the size of network we have, so they were more listening in and trying to get experience while things were going on. I'm okay with that. At the end of the day, it was the Tufin guys who actually brought it all together.

If we look at the cost of a firewall engineer and the time saved as return on investment, we have seen a return. If we didn't have Tufin at all and the work that I'm doing now had to be done manually, those hours are about a four-to-one ratio. So that is a return on investment.

The cost is too much. For us it's around $40,000.

I've already recommended Tufin to other people, absolutely. There was another company that has Check Point, I'd meet with them at Check Point expos and we'd talk. I would tell them I'm doing the rule re-cert with the bank and tell them, "Get Tufin." The first thing you want to do is get SecureTrack. Get it set up, get it working. Then you can grow from there. If you don't know what's going on with all the policies, you're blowing your brains out. I always recommend Tufin.

We're working on getting the solution to help us meet our compliance mandates. That's one of my projects, starting this year.

In my opinion, the solution’s cloud-native security features are good. I just don't have anything to compare them to. I can't say I have worked with AlgoSec or FireMon so I can't compare Tufin and say, "Oh, you guys are much better than that guy." Tufin is the only product I've worked with in policy management.

Tufin is better than the way we're using it. I firmly believe that we're not using it to its full capability. It's like having a Ferrari in the garage but using it to go get groceries. Someone might look at it and say, "Oh my God, we could be on the Autobahn, flying." And I say, "Yeah, I know, but I need groceries." I don't think we're using it to its full potential. However, from what I'm seeing now, and in future developments based on this conference, it's going in the right direction.

I would rate it at eight out of ten. We are strictly a Check Point shop for firewalls. We don't have other vendors. I can see where, if I had Palo Altos and Fortinets and Ciscos, Tufin would be Godsend. I wouldn't have to go combing through every vendor. Whereas for us, it's already together. That may be why I don't rate higher.

The primary use case of Tufin is firewall management, firewall reviews, and eventually, to do rule deployment.

It was more to start standardizing our prior work changes. The initial first step is to understand and make sure that whatever change goes in is complying to our policies and standardized. The eventual goal is to get everything automated.

We are using SecureTrack at the moment, but we do have licenses for SecureChange as well.

We use this product to sharpen our change cycle. A request used to take quite a while as we did manual assessments. A lot of that is now done through SecureTrack. 

At this stage, we are doing only manual checks. We are only using SecureTrack to verify the flows through Tufin. At a later stage, when we will also automate certain types of rules to be done through SecureChange, this will tremendously help us. We are not there yet, but this will help us in terms of time and resource costs.

In the past, we would do certain things because of private knowledge of people's own understanding of the network. We don't have to rely on just that piece of it, because of the topology. We now know which firewalls come into play. 

We use Tufin to help us clean up the firewall policies. It provides very easy reporting. We get all the aged or unused rules listed very quickly, as soon we run the report. It's a quite easy way of doing it. However, we have not automated our process. We are hoping that at some point that we will be in a position to automate that process.

We use the solution to automatically check if a change request will violate any security policy rules. If a request comes in, and it is from an Internet zone going straight out to an inside secure zone, then we definitely flag it. There are other policies that we find in our USP, which we flag. These are the type of things that we check.

We definitely use the compliance reports, which has simplified things. However, we haven't fully integrated it into the GRC process with Tufin yet. The desire is to make sure our GRC resources are fully aware and engaged in our Tufin deployment.

We are leveraging some components to provide reports for our GRC process, but there is no plan to integrate those processes. Those are run by different teams. We were planning to integrate our ticketing system (ServiceNow) with Tufin, which is ongoing. We are working on that now.

The central repository of information provides a consistent way of doing things, eventually shortening the time period to make changes. This is the most valuable thing at this point in time. 

I'm very happy with the visibility component. It gives us a reasonable insight into the most of the application flows. Obviously, most east-west application flows are missing from what we have. That is a component which we will need to eventually fill in the gaps.

Between the cloud and physical data centers, we definitely share Tufin policies. That definitely gives us visibility into both.

I would like to drive value from is to getting to a point where we are almost like a DevOps operation for security changes.

We have put in a lot of requests. Some of them are high level related to cloud. Others relate to some of the reporting structures that we have. E.g., some of the automated reporting capabilities for specifics on certain regulations. Certain countries have certain regulations, and with GRC, if we can associate that on certain regulations, then we can spit out reports from that.

We would like to see integration of the different versions of this product, e.g., SecureChange and SecureTrack. They eventually need to start amalgamating all these into an end-to-end product for visibility. 

We do have an ongoing issue with capacity. If one of our resources is working on it, nobody else can do anything. If a particular report is being run on the server, nothing else seems to work. We haven't done anything about it as of yet. Maybe some of my team members have opened tickets to Tufin for it.

I am not sure about the scalability. The product that we have deployed for our main process gets bogged down in terms of its response. Maybe, we need to deploy a slightly smaller box. Eventually, we need to discuss this with Tufin is to see if we can move over to some sort of VM environment where we can add more processing power to it. 

We have a global implementation.

Whenever we have had a problem, some of my engineers contact Tufin and they have been very easy to get a hold of. From my team, they have not had any problems with the technical support.

We were using Tufin before, as well, but it was not the same. It was separated into localized instances and regions.

We sort of saw that the volume of changes were coming in high. The patience from the business side was getting low to invest the time that it used to take to make firewall changes. Therefore, it was inevitable that we need to purchase a solution.

Our initial setup was complex from two dimensions, because we were deploying it globally and had to have a centralized view, but a distributed approach. We had it in Asia and North America (US and Canada), causing a slightly complicated approach.  Prior to Tufin, we had three instances which were separately managed, so we did not have end-to-end visibility. Therefore, we rearchitected the Tufin environment and created one global Tufin instance. The retail instances became local collectors, which reported back to the single environment.

From the start of the project to the end of the project, the deployment took us a while, at least five to six months. Most of the time involved was not because of Tufin. It was primarily for us to handle all of our separate service providers and outsourcers globally, so they could all provide us with read-only access to the firewalls that they manage.

We deployed the solution in-house. It was pretty straightforward to deploy.

The solution has helped us reduce the time it takes us to make changes from weeks to days.

Engineers are spending less time on manual processes by about 15 to 20 percent. I would like to get a bigger number.

We didn't buy this based on ROI, so we didn't measure ROI. Overall, from a time savings perspective though, it is definitely there.

The licensing costs are around $250,000 to $300,000.

There are ways to deploy the license to different types of firewall. However, if we decide to change the physical brand of the firewall, we need to go back to Tufin and modify the licensing. This is a hassle.

We did not consider anyone else, because we already had an unused, unimplemented Tufin license. We eventually thought to start consolidating everything into one place.

We decided on Tufin because:

• It was an existing tool.
• It served our purposes. It provided us the essential components for managing a varied environment of different types of firewalls. 
  
• We felt that there was enough potential in the organization to grow with us and provide capabilities, like cloud, VM environments, etc., under the same umbrella.

It gives us visibility and the ability to make changes automatically with less mistakes. Overall, it's a decent product.

Tufin is definitely a good contender to come as a winner. It has the potential to look not only at firewalls, but also network devices and other cloud-native solutions. It is a pretty broad base product, which will eventually be a good future tool to have in a toolkit.

We haven't used the workflow from Tufin. We use our own ticketing system for that. We are busy integrating our ticketing system with Tufin right now using an API. We are just in the process of doing that.

Tufin helps us understand and ensure that security is being applied. Tufin is not a security tool. It just gives us all the information about security, firewalls, etc., and that they are doing their work. From that perspective, it would be a long stretch to say that Tufin provides us security. However, Tufin provides us the information that we have security across hybrid environments.

All of our cloud-native security features are directly taken from cloud management tools. We don't have anything deployed yet from Tufin for cloud-native security features, but there is a desire for that.

The primary use case is monitoring routers, switches, firewalls, but mostly routers and firewalls.

We are just using SecureTrack, either version 18-2 or 18.3.

We use it to aid with firewall reviews. We don't have SecureChange active, but we can take the info and use it to help. We have found a lot to work with.

Tufin has been helpful with making sure all parts of our organization are following change management:

• If you are changing rules, then you have tickets, and there is the approval process associated with it.
• Seeing people are sticking with those temp rules, if they end up staying there for awhile. 
• Sometimes, there are just bad rules where something that should've been "deny" and should not be allowed.

Those are more direct examples without getting too far into the weeds.

It is greatly aided in helping us meet our compliance mandates. There used to be manual reviews for certain compliance requirements. Now, this solution helps automate a lot of that, and even the parts which are still manual. It's a lot more comprehensive than trying to read raw text files of the configs and making sense of those.

The solution helps us ensure that security policy is followed across our entire hybrid network. It is like a centralized single pane of glass where comprehensively shows things, especially coupled with the Network Topology piece that they have. You can say, "Here's where the DMZ is, and here's that. These are the amount of firewalls crosses this through." Whereas before, it was this big spreadsheet of all the firewalls and zones. Except for like two or three legacy knowledge people, no one really understood how it flowed before Tufin.

It has helped us troubleshoot, e.g., why isn't this still working? "Oh, they put it on the wrong firewall or they typoed it." The solution has helped with that.

The firewall reviews for compliance used to be a more labor intensive process. It used to take a few months, and now, it's down to just a couple of weeks.

It provides a comprehensive overview of what our network looks like in terms of what is allowed and what is not, then how the traffic' is flowing with the Network Topology Map.

With the Unified Security Policy, the more you improve it, the more you will get out of it.

For the things that Tufin is able to work with, it is really great. It sort of provides a comprehensive view. It is easier to explain to people who don't really work with firewalls everyday:

• Why this is an issue.
• Why certain things are an issue.
• Why some things are the way they are.

I wish they had a credentials vault or something. Right now, you have to manually add a username and password per device, and if they are using something like in a centralized, like an AD account, that password rotates eventually. Now, I have to go back and change information for all these hundreds of devices. Whereas, if they just had some credentials vault for credential one, two, and three, then you could just reference them per device and change it in one place. It would make our lives a lot easier.

I wish there was a read-only admin option. I don't like that you have to be a full admin just to see the Network Topology Map. That option is great out there if you are a user, multi-domain user, etc. However, that piece is very helpful for us, but I also don't want to be handing out admin access to every single person so they can see that network tab. 

Tufin covers a lot of vendors, but there are still some that they don't, like Radware. Some of these vendors that they don't cover are at critical points in our company, as far as explaining the full picture of our routing. Since it can't show the full picture, it can't support that. 

The stability is pretty good. We have run into repeat issues with Palo Alto Panorama, where it doesn't seem to play nice if we change the vice group names in Palo Alto or if one of the Palo Alto servers is down, but it is in Panorama, because we're pulling everything through Panorama. Sometimes, it'll freak out and cause everything else to stay and be unable to get configed. Then, our Palo Alto products will sort of cease, usually a good majority of them, which is not ideal.

So far, scalability has been doing well. 

The technical support is very good. They respond pretty fast. They are always available whenever I need it. It is usually my fault when there are delays because I just don't respond to an email. I forget, then a few days go by and email again like, "Oh, shoot." The technical support has always been on top of things.

Someone before me had stood up the actual server on the network. They had one device, and it was monitoring. Then, I took it over. I've expanded it out to over 400 devices.

They made getting new monitoring devices in pretty easy. From the monitoring devices tab, it was pretty straightforward. You pick the vendor, then under there, this is a drop-down. I struggled a bit under the Cisco tab where they have a router, then a Nexus router. They have a lot of different vendors, and figuring out which category it falls under was confusing. The help docs don't exactly specify between the two or what commands it will be running. This is usually more for our older devices. 

We had Professional Services hours. However, as far as getting the actual devices and scaling it out, that was all just me.

Understand your DNS or network segment. What all these different subments and how they will fit into what categories, because you are going to directly take that info when you build out your USP. If it's too messy, your USP is not really going to do anything. You need to have a good dictionary for the USP to follow.

We aren't really using the cloud-native security features in our current environment.

We do risk, cleanup, and change.

It reduces human error and speeds up the whole change process.

The change workflow process is flexible and customizable. There are five default workflow processes out-of-the-box. However, every customer is different. Everybody has a different request process. That is why it's so customizable. You can add another step, you can delete a step, or you could put in an exception. It is very flexible.

We use this solution to automatically check if a change request will violate any security policy rules. E.g., we will not be allowing SSH to the Internet. That is one change request where we can be like, "Put that right on top of the policy." 

This solution has helped us to meet our compliance mandates, especially with the default out-of-the-box templates, then you can create your own.

This solution helps us ensure that security policy is followed across our entire hybrid network. You can have a Unified Security Policy which reaches across all networks, so if you are having a change submitted, it doesn't matter if you're enforcing it or not. You can get an alert saying, "This is a violation." That's a value-add.

• Cleanup
• Visibility
• Scalability
  

Cleanup is its most valuable feature. We use Tufin to cleanup our firewall policies. You can see unnecessary, unused objects. A lot of times, you will create a host, then it's not used. It's like, "Delete that, because we don't need that in the database." Or, it's a rule that is not needed: unused rules.

Its cloud-native security features are good. They add even more visibility to your environment.

I would like more out-of-the-box workflows in SecureChange with more default config, so you don't have to create those workflows yourself. This would be the biggest thing.

I would also like more enforcement. Right now. it's a lot of alerting. You see it in Tufin, but you have to go to Check Point or whatever device to make the actual action.

We already know the user interface is getting redesigned in TOS 2.0. That's naturally been the customer complaint in my experience, "Where are things in the GUI? The GUI is cumbersome." Now, I'm used to it, but when your first learning it, it is unintuitive.

The stability is very good, especially now that they are developing a lighter weight operating system on top of the OS with 2.0 coming out this year. 

The current version is slow. I deal with a lot of large environments, which is mostly what Tufin has. It is slow because it is a database, Tomcat Server, and web server. Reports are slow. If you're generating manually on the fly, you can set them to run at night, then it's not a big deal.

The scalability is good, because you can have a central server, distributed server, and remote collectors. You can have remote land sites or branch offices. You can have the collectors collect the data for you. You don't have to rely on just one server.

The technical support is very good. It is a lot better than the firewall vendors themselves.

There were not enough resources to do the changes themselves. We definitely went offshoring. Now, you see a lot of that coming back because there is not enough people. We needed a system to do it.

At first, the initial setup is complex. Once you know it, the initial setup is straightforward.

First, you have to install the operating system. Then, you have to install the application, where there are certain version requirements. You can't just go right to the latest OS version. You have to go back to the older one, then upgrade those as well. It is a little cumbersome.

I am an integrator. Sometimes, we have to use Tufin on the back-end.

We have seen ROI just in the time savings and knowledge. Knowledge is power. Having the solution do it automatically for you without you doing the work is huge. If you are spending $50,000 a year, it could have cost you a $100,000 in man-hours without it, especially if you are working with a team..

This solution has helped reduce the time it takes our customers to make changes by 50 percent.

Engineers are spending less time on manual processes by 50 percent.

While licensing varies greatly, it is about $50,000 a year.

We did consider other vendors, but Tufin is the market leader. We only deal with the best of breed. We like to go with the best.

Do a proof of concept or proof of value. You will see the value right there.

The visibility is top-notch. I know the vendors as well, like Check Point and the firewall product underneath it. I know with Check Point, specifically, and I have seen some issues with it. However, overall, there is still a lot of value in the cleanup.

The primary use case is processing change requests.

While our organization has implemented SecureChange and SecureTrack, we are not using either tool rather extensively. Therefore, we are trying to put together a plan for the organization to adopt these tools more firmly.

The idea is to be using SecureChange as the primary portal for entering change requests on both the perimeter and shop floor network firewalls. The way we are approaching this is to do a pilot first among a few sites, then bringing it out to a larger group once we feel more comfortable with how the pilot went.

The pilot will probably last for a couple weeks. After that, we will roll it out in buckets or groups to the rest of the sites. Then, the primary use case will be using tool for change management and SecureChange, while SecureTrack will be used by our security monitoring group who is tracking for threats.

My engagement to date and going forward will be to assist in the planning of the rollout and helping with the rollout. I make sure teams and users who will be using this tool are actually using it, including processes from: 

• Submitting a firewall change request.
• Price or rule requests.
• Opening a port.
• Firewall maintenance or maintenance processes, e.g., rule cleanup.

The additional visibility into network path analysis is really helpful. The ability to provide assistance with role clean up will be helpful as well.

Part of the work that one of our firewall implementation teams is doing is a justification process right now. I think that a clean up is included as part of that effort.

One of the things that we really like is the ability to customize work flow. It seems like there are ways to make a workflow robust and capture multiple different types of things that you would want to do when you are maintaining a set of shop floor network firewall rules. These include things decommissioning a server and performing a common rule maintenance process, like a recertification process. 

The linkage between SecureTrack and SecureChange is nice. The way that you can identify a rule in SecureTrack that needs to be recertified, then create a ticket in SecureChange, which can essentially implement that, and complete the recertification process for workflow. This helps us keep organized, in a big way, a complex, large set of network firewall rules. Otherwise, there is no way for us to track who the business approver or owner is for each of those rules and when the last time each of the rules was looked at. In terms of keeping this set of rules clean, it goes a long way in helping with that.

I had been impressed with the depth of capabilities within SecureTrack, particularly, in terms of generating insights for a user and firewall operator. With SecureTrack, I've been impressed with the level of flexibility with workflow design and its ability to generate different work streams and flows through the tool that are customized for our organization processes.

One of the things that came up this week was the ability to decommission a server, which we thought was interesting. We had a workshop recently that talked about all the things that need to be thought about when managing firewalls. People said, "A lot of times, things get forgotten when you are decommissioning a server." E.g., making sure rules are taken away and taking out the rule set. The fact that there is an automated workload for that can be helpful.

From the training that I've done at the conference, I like the ability to visualize the network paths between different endpoints and servers. I thought that was cool.

I have been impressed with the range of capabilities. The ability to connect with other services and software solutions via APIs is very impressive. In terms of breadth of market coverage, that seems pretty robust.

I would like a USP that was a little like an interface and a bit more intuitive. It seems like the 2.0 version did that better. 

I know when I was performing a search, like in the policy query area, some of those options as your typing could be better defined. That was one thing that came up. I would like it if there was some way to provide real-time feedback or context for each option as you are typing in search fields and search parameters.

Even somebody with relatively little experience like I have should be able to come in and have more intuition towards how to operate the solution. That would be a bit more helpful. There are things that could be explained a little better for somebody brand new to this system, which could be helpful, especially if it was in real-time while you were working in the system. Having the ability in real-time to be able to understand search query suggestions would be helpful.

A limitation right now for compressed firewalls is the limited ability to see above a site level in terms of the Topology Mapping in the policy display. While Tufin's actively working on a solution, or at least they have this in the queue, from being able to view this on a higher level and how all of our site networks are connected, this ability would be useful, as we expect to have these compressed firewalls in place for quite some time.

The Tufin products seem very long-term oriented. The ability to be customized seems good. It seems like there is a good roadmap for what features need to be added.

We did a USP upload earlier this week into SecureTrack, and the upload process was okay. Some of the definitions around the columns and the formatting could be more clearly defined.

The scalability seems good. It is overwhelming to think about how to define a USP potentially for the amount of networks that we have for shop floor firewalls. However, in terms of scalability, it seems like once the information is in there, it can operate well and help speed up change requests.

I don't think we've worked a lot with the technical support teams yet.

It was clear that no one was managing the shop floor network firewalls. 

Right now, there are no tools to do that. As we are hardening and locking down firewalls, the requirement to maintain and manage them becomes increasingly more challenging.

I don't think there was any tool before Tufin. The rules were historically stored in CSM and operated out of CSM. Before that, there wasn't any other way to perform a regular analysis and maintenance of firewall rules in this way from a security and policy perspective.

The initial setup seemed like it required a lot of effort. I wasn't super close to the project during the initial setup. Now that I've gone through the training it seems a little less overwhelming.

For the initial setup, I was only involved slightly on the SecureChange side. The API integration process with BMC Remedy seems difficult. I don't know if that is a result of the way the SecureChange application is designed, or if it's a result of a challenging resource environment for focusing on the implementation and the integration of it with Remedy. But, it seems like a challenging effort.

We used WTT for the deployment. My coworker, Dorothy, had a good experience with them. They were engaged before I joined the project.

The rollout was accomplished largely with an in-house team. The vendor that we purchased it through provided a little bit of support, but very minimal. Then, there is the team who is doing implementation with a lot of the firewall rule changes. Booz Allen has been helping a lot with the rollout, as well. I have been helping to design the rollout and adoption.

For our current implementation, which is temporary, once we move the cleanup process from this implementation team to the permanent team that is when I will be performing the work. That is when I'll be a bit more involved.

The company a good comparison of the different tools. I don't know if they were working with Booz Allen at the time, but Booz Allen seems to feel pretty strongly about the quality of Tufin and their user experience. It does seem like Tufin has reputation regarding its user interface that it is more friendly than other competitors.

I am aware of two other competitors who were possibly considered.

There is a plan for clean up as part of our regular process. There is a process drafted and an intention to do that.

It seems flexible and customizable. The bigger question is whether it will integrate into our existing process effort for change management. There is an existing risk assessment process that sort of fits up into our Remedy change request process, so now we have to think about how does the Tufin change management portal and SecureChange fit into that as well.

Once the USP is defined and we feel comfortable with that, we plan to use the solution to automatically check if a change request will violate any security policy. However, we are not doing that yet.

The program that I am supporting is not engaged in any of the firewalls affecting the cloud, so I didn't have a lot of context with that.

Once we have it up and running, this solution should help reduce the time that it takes to make changes and our engineers should spend less time on manual processes.

I did training at Tufin two weeks ago.

My company primarily uses this solution for reporting and enforcing policy. My role has to do with developing applications to allow integration with our other tools.

When I was using Tufin for analysis, there was a tool that would tell me which rules could be consolidated. It was amazing and helped me to clean up the firewall policies.

We use this solution to automatically check to see if change requests will violate any security policy rules, but I do not have any specific details or examples.

Tufin is the only multi-vendor firewall tool that is available, and it helps to bring everything together and report on what all of the rules are.

This solution helps to ensure that security policy is followed across the network because it is the main tool that non-technical security people use to keep track of firewall rules. Without it, they wouldn't even know where to begin. 

In my current role, the most valuable features are the API and the accessing. In my previous job, the analysis was my favorite.

I would like to see API access into every aspect of Tufin. For example, every feature and everything that's in the database, I would like to have programmatic access to. This would give me the ability to do anything that the product can do but from a script. This way, we are not beholden to the GUI in any way. If an operation requires that somebody click somewhere into the interface, manually, especially if it's just part of many other things that they have to do, then we want to fully automate that.

Some of the manual processes are taking longer because, without the proper API access, there are a lot of tickets coming in. These are from people who need to perform a task, but only a handful of them have access to it. This is because we're too afraid to give access to all of the people who actually need it.

In every instance that I've ever worked with it, it was stable.

I have not dealt with technical support.

In my previous company, I handled the deployment of this solution myself.

Turning on certain options in the solution comes at an additional cost.

My advice for anybody who is researching this solution is that if they are a larger company with a lot of money to spend, and they have a heterogeneous network with more than three different firewall vendors, then they absolutely need it. There is no competitor or really anybody who is even close.

For what this product does, it does well. There are, however, things that are missing.

Overall, I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

Currently, we're an electric utility. We use it for NERC CIP for validating rules into ESPs, which makes it easier for us to pull out the rules and justifications for auditors.

We are using either Tufin 18-2 or 18-3 and testing 19-2.

As a company, we don't have anything in the cloud.

It has helped us immensely on the compliance side. We are able to look for overly broad rules. E.g., rules with any-any using the USP to see if we have violations. This was pretty impossible to do before by just looking at the CLI on the firewall and spreadsheets.

We use Tufin to clean up our firewall policies. The biggest use in the last couple of months has been to pull rules out of firewalls rather than putting them in. We're cleaning up and pulling rules out.

We use this solution to automatically check if a change request will violate any security policy rules. Even though we've been using the product for several years, we've just now started rolling out SecureChange, updating our USPs, and building USPs. We are using those to do security checks.

This solution helped us meet our compliance mandates. With the USPs, we can control what is being put in, then we know when violations are occurring ahead of time.

The ability to write reports to figure out what ports and services are allowed into specific zones. For instance, we know that there are certain devices which are only allowed to have interactive remote access into an electronic security perimeter (ESP). We've written reports which can tell us if someone inadvertently opened something up that shouldn't have been, then we can pull it out. Now that we are using SecureChange, it can alert us to that fact as the rules are being built, which is huge for us.

The visibility is huge. In order to figure out what was going on previously, we would have to pull stuff out of firewalls and put them in spreadsheets, then do sorts. Now, it's all right there in Tufin. We can write reports to look for what we need, ad hoc searches to find object groups, and know which firewalls are on. This was almost impossible to do previously.

It makes it a whole lot easier for rule clean up because we can find rules that haven't been used. We can find rules that are too broad and pull those out, putting more specific rules in, which could be done before but this cuts the time way down to do it.

The change workflow process is getting better. I wish it was a little more customizable. Right now, my biggest issue is that it wants to optimize everything we put in. Sometimes, we need a rule to be more readable, and we want it to go in a specific way. Sometimes, it's difficult to get Tufin to accept that. It wants to optimize and reduce the number of ACLs. On the compliance side, sometimes you just want more ACLs, so it's more readable for an auditor.

I got a sneak peek of a release or two. There are some new features coming out that we could use today. E.g., SecureChange won't allow us to put in more readable ACLs rather than try to compress them. Sometimesm we don't want it to full optimization of a rule set. I would love the ability to tell it, "Thank,s but no thanks. I don't want to optimize this rule. Please put it in the way that I want it." Right now, that's hard to do. It's almost impossible.

It is a very stable product. There have been a few times where we have had to call support and have something fixed. It has happened, but it's very rare.

It seems to scale very well. We have had the same servers in for four years now, and everything's keeping up. We haven't had any issues yet, and we are probably monitoring around 400 firewalls today.

The technical support has been very responsive. If they can't figure it out, they are not afraid to go to Israel, back to the developers, and find an answer to the problem. Typically, within a day or two, they have the answer and we are back up and running. They've been great to work with.

We knew that we had to invest in something which could help us clean up our rule sets. 

We took baby steps, so the initial setup was pretty straightforward. We just started with SecureTrack, getting it talking to the firewalls, and initially using it to document justification for rules on our compliance firewalls. We have been doing more with it over the years.

We used Tufin for the deployment.

This solution has helped us reduce the time it takes to make changes. We have been using SecureChange for the last six months, and it has streamedlined the process. We can usually do changes now within two or three days, where sometimes it used to take a week or more.

Engineers are spending less time on manual processes. We can push the changes to the firewalls. The engineers don't have to log onto the firewalls, then cut and paste.

I just wrote a purchase order for it. It is a $150,000 a year.

We looked at three solutions at the time, then chose Tufin. We felt that Tufin was one of the more customizable solutions and had the best price. They came in cheaper than everyone else, and at our company, that means a lot. Thankfully, they were the best. We felt they were best of breed at the time.

Give Tufin a good, hard look. From my experience, it is the best of breed.

Right now, we're focusing the implementation on our NERC CIP firewalls (the compliance stuff). We have some other teams who will be working on the corporate side and certain clean up rules along with the rest of the corporate firewalls. We are not there yet, but we're working on it.

The primary use cases are firewall support and generating rules.

It is definitely a time saver. We can process more rules on a daily basis. It allows the customers to request their own rules. Sometimes, they need a little help, but they can submit it. As long as it passes the risk analysis, because it has to get through our NSA group. We just apply and push it that night.

We use Tufin to clean up our firewall policies. It benefits us, because you can run a query for whatever your cleanup criteria is, e.g., "Has it been hit in 90 days?" It displays the list, then you can see the rules right there. If you want to get rid of it (or highlight it), then it creates a ticket that goes ahead and flags them all as disabled. While you can delete them, we always disable first. Then, we have a strip that comes back, and if it's been disabled for 90 days, then the system will remove them.

The change workflow process is flexible and customizable. When we first got it, Tufin created a workflow based on our requirements. Since then we have modified and tweaked it. We added in Palo Alto, and we just keep adding steps. We can also add scripts. We have multiple scripts for a workflow, which makes it very flexible. You write the script and plug it into the workflow, then it's working.

We use the Unified Security Policy to automatically check if a change request will violate any security policy rules.

This solution has helped us ensure that our security policy is followed across our entire hybrid network. It is the same Unified Security Policy editing each request. It is the same set of rules. If it's good enough for Check Point, then it will be good enough for Palo Alto, and it's all zone based.

The rule provisioning is the most valuable feature. We had a ticketing system, like Remedy, which had a homegrown product. It would take your source destination port and do a bit of analysis, then give us a ticket with the spreadsheet. Then, we had to take the information from the spreadsheet and enter it into the firewall. Now, with Tufin, it identifies which firewalls, generates the rules, and you just apply them. It is a big time saver.

When it comes to searching our firewalls for things, I prefer the Policy Browser as opposed to going to the GUI. It seems just easier to search. I can start off with our Provider-1 for Check Point, search there, and get the information. Then, I can change the little drop down to say, "Okay, now go search Palo Alto." I don't have to change my search criteria, the platform pulls it right up.

We like what we have seen out of SecureTrack 2.0 with its improved search capabilities, where you can do greater than, less than, not equal, etc. Right now, if you're in there and you want to do a search, you have to write it in a specific way, since you can't use a not statement, less than, or greater than. Therefore, it will be a lot easier to maintain your USP because it has the new editor. It looks more like a spreadsheet online. I am just a little disappointed to hear because we are using SecureChange that we can't go to SecureTrack 2.0 yet. We have to wait for a couple of more versions.

On Palo Alto, we were told that you want to go with the panorama. Then, all the gateways are under it, so everything you create has to be as a shared object. When we first brought this to Tufin, Tufin said, "No, it's more secure to only have local objects." However, it sounds like Palo Alto has now convinced Tufin that shared objects is more the way to go. Otherwise, you have a lot of stuff filtering down to all the firewalls. Tufin gave us a script to plug into our workflow to make things shared, but I am expecting this will become more a part of our base product.

They have found some things, like our database is huge, which they finally realize. I guess they didn't really have in their plans to do much with shared objects on Palo Alto, but they are saying that this is what is really making our database swell. They are saying it's on their side and are putting in their fixes to fix it, which is good.

The topology needs improvement. If I click on the network tab, I can go get a cup of coffee, come back, and my topology is still not painted. Maybe, it's just because we have so many devices, but looking at the topology, it is too slow. The problem is that when I click on the network tab, I do not want to see the topology. I want to click on the "Next" button, so I can put in the source and destination, so I can see the path. However, I still have to sit there and wait for the topology to load, and it's frustrating. I'll click on topology and try to click that "Next" button in time to where I can get around it. But, typically, you have to wait for that topology to paint. When it paints it, it's just a bunch of black smudges because there is just so much there. It can't paint it to where you see something. I can always zoom out, or something like that, but it's really worthless.

It seems stable. We've had problems always with the same box, which is our SecureTrack primary. We are probably on our seventh one. The last one, Tufin took it to their site. They shook it out, tested it, and beat it up, then gave it back to us. Since we were already on the standby box, we just had it up there running. It was in the HA cluster. As soon as somebody did some switch work, it failed over. Within a couple of hours of being on that box, it crapped out. 

We have definitely added gear, so it is scalable. We've added two more distribution servers and probably seven or eight more collectors. It is definitely scalable.

We'll get somebody who is our main person, then all of a sudden they will be doing something else. One guy used to be our support person, and now, he is a TAM. 

We are a tough account. With some of the issues that we have, the support team has told us, "You are the only ones who have ever had this." We are like, "Really? Why?"

They usually come up with a solution. It may take a little longer, but they do come up with a solution.

The previous solution was written in-house. 

We had a product called Skybox and whoever wrote the app would query Skybox for compliance, etc. Then, it would generate a spreadsheet, and we had to work off the spreadsheets. They sort of knew that this wasn't very efficient.

The guy doing the initial setup made it look very easy, but it took us a little while to get up to speed on it.

We used Tufin for the deployment.

This solution has helped reduce the time it takes us to make changes. Previously, it was taking up to seven days. Now, unless there is an issue with the request, we usually have it done in a day.

We did PoCs. We looked at FireMon, AlgoSec, etc. Tufin came out on top, so we started implementing it, as it was the product that we chose.

With AlgoSec, you had to pay them for all of your workflows. So, if you wanted the workflows, you had to pay them. I don't know how quick that would be as a turnaround, because we would have had to do the whole, "Here's what I want." We didn't like that at all.

Tufin has been a good investment. Unfortunately. We've got some people in our organization who are in love with Skybox and think Skybox can do no wrong. They are trying very hard to replace Tufin with Skybox, even though Skybox hasn't even done any provisioning. I think they're just misguided. It's a product that they love, and maybe it is good at compliance, but as far as provisioning, I haven't seen it. 

Give Tufin a good look. The Tufin team is always trying to stay on top of it. When Check Point came out with a R80.10, it wasn't very long before Tufin could generate rules or provision to R80.10, which was good. Now that R80.20s are out, they can provision to those. I think R80.30 is close, but I haven't heard them saying that they can provision to that yet. They can also provision to the latest versions of Palo Alto. Since those are the two that we have, I don't know about Fortinet or Juniper, but I'm sure they're trying to stay on top of those as well.

We're not really using the cloud parts of it yet.

Our engineers are spending less time on manual processes. However, it does depends on what you call engineers. Our firewall engineers don't do much with Tufin. We had a dedicated engineer, but he changed groups with the promise that he was still going to support Tufin. He wasn't over there very long and now no longer does anything with Tufin. We are pretty much on our own. We came up with our own solutions. We have some people who are good at writing scripts and are pretty self-sufficient.