Tufin Orchestration Suite Reviews

We are using it mostly for reporting, as well as NERC CIP compliance for rule documentation. The primary use case is for doing rule cleanup, knocking down overly permissive rules, and cleaning up old unused rules. Basically, we are using the reporting functionality out of SecureTrack.

We use Tufin to clean up our firewall policies. We use an automatic policy generator. This is huge for us because certain rules, especially if they're overly permissive rules, have to have an analyst go through log file after log file, which is just impossible. Versus just setting Tufin, letting it run for a couple of weeks, then going back and looking at the results. That has definitely been a big win for us.

The policy comparison reporting has been a definite big improvement for our organization. 

We've used it to give read only access to look at actual policies for different departments who might not necessarily need access to the actual firewalls. This has created some efficiencies for us because an engineering team can go in and check to see if they need to engage us for firewall rule changes without having to engage us first, because they have the direct access. 

The solution has helped us meet our compliance mandates. We use the policy browser metadata to do documentation for rule justifications. That is what we supply to our external auditors.

The most valuable features are the rule set analysis reporting that you can do. We use it day in and day out for doing rule cleanup and policy analysis.

The policy comparison reporting is one of the more basic functions that it has, but it is very critical for us. We built it into our processes that before we push any change to production, an engineer will stage actual date rule changes and policy changes. Another engineer will go in and do a comparison report of the last push policy to the last save, making sure what has been changed is what is expected to. From an operational excellence, it's huge for us. We have huge policies. All it takes is one accidental right click, delete, or backspace button, which could impact our business. So, this is something that we use almost day in and day out.

We're definitely happy with the visibility. It gives us a lot more visibility and can do a lot more reporting that just wouldn't be possible for a human to do, who might just be looking at traditional log files.

We had a discussion in the Customer Advisory Board yesterday around use of SecureChange. We would like to have an opportunity for an engineer to choose if you want to make or take the policy which has been suggested by the designer functionality, making it more human readable or less human readable (more or less granular). This would be huge for the customers who are using SecureChange. They said this was one of their issues with it, especially for anything that was going into a regulator's or auditor's hands. The more human readable, the better that it would be, and this would definitely be applicable to our industry. It sounds like they are working on this issue, or they took the feedback, but that would be a big one for us in being able to make the jump to SecureChange.

Stability has been rock solid. We were joking about that last night. There was a good amount of time where we weren't running reoccurring backups on a couple of our older appliances. They ran into no problems, whatsoever, for hardware or software for years. So, we were sort of joking, "The product's so good that we don't even have to back ours up half the time." Thus, stability has been very good for us.

Scalability is to be determined at this point for us. Right now, we have five or six isolated instances, and we're going to collapse those down to a single front-end. Then, we'll scale up to how many devices that we're monitoring. At this point, we haven't had any issues with scalability, but we haven't really pushed the appliances too hard yet. 

Making sure that you are designing or coming up with a solution and architecture which is scalable and as holistic as possible. We had some discussions yesterday with some other customers, and having the complete visibility of your entire environment rather than just a subset like we do today at our company will make or break your functionality of the product. Being as all inclusive as possible is probably critical, especially if you're looking at things like SecureChange.

The few times that we have had to engage tech support, they have been good to work with. They were pretty simple cases in both instances for us.

Our engineers are spending less time on manual processes, specifically for the reporting functionality. For doing the rule cleanup and policy analysis, it would be a nightmare to do that manually. So, it is saving our engineering teams time from not having to do manual log reviews.

We are siloed. We have separate areas of responsibility for parts of the network. The pieces of the network that our team manages, and what our Tufin instances are monitoring, is all for the data control system for anything real-time, e.g., the gas and electric control systems. Therefore, we don't have complete visibility of the entire network because we are only monitoring that subset of the network.

We don't use any workflows because we're not using SecureChange.

We haven't used the solution’s cloud-native security features.

We are using SecureTrack and SecureChange to make policy changes.

For us, it's all the features that Tufin provides, including the 

• USP
• rule design
• documentation
• implementation
• auditing.

They're all important. We could not have one without the others.

In addition, it provides greater visibility, once the setup is configured correctly. It provides a real-time sense of how the policies are configured and whether there are any shadow rules. Another great thing is that it provides greater reporting based on how the rules have been set up.

There are at least two things that need improvement. One is the business workflow and the second is the integration with logging solutions.

The product is stable. Regardless of the software we are running, the current or the new one, it is stable.

The solution is scalable if we have to add more devices, more distinct resources, or also high availability. That's part of the solution. It's not like after-thought, it's there.

Tech support is very helpful. If there are any issues, we bring them to support and they get addressed immediately.

You should definitely be looking at this as in your top-two choices, before even considering any other solutions.

We are in the midst of a transition, going to a newer version. All the features which I talked about above, we want to implement them in a new production infrastructure. We are working with Tufin and Professional Services very closely, so we can enable it. There is the old way - the way we are using it - versus the way we want to. It is not there yet. 

Currently, it's not helping us meet compliance mandates, but the new way will definitely help us to meet them. In addition, once we go with the new way of doing things, the solution will ensure that security policy is followed across our entire hybrid network. At that point it will follow business practices.

The primary use case is tickets.

Tufin has made handling firewall rule request tickets more centralized and easier to manage.

We have previously use Tufin to clean up our firewall policies, but we are not doing that currently.

The workloads are the most valuable feature right now, as it stands.

We find that the change workflow process is flexible and customizable. We change our workflow several times a year.

The visibility is good for the most part, but there are limitations to it. E.g., there is a lack of certain routing/networking protocols across all the vendors that they support.

The solution is not sophisticated enough for us to automatically check if a change request will violate any security policy rules.

Tufin's cloud-native security features are lacking in support.

I would like the application to have faster response times. E.g., the dashboard may take up to two minutes to load. Or, when we do the topology seating its two and a half hours. I would like to get those times down and increase the efficiency of the product there.

I would like more support for Juniper and Junos Space. I would like more of the features which are offered for other platforms being extended to the Juniper platform.

The USP needs improvement. It is pretty much not usable right now for us. It is all IP-based. The issue with that is we may have one subnet, but we have multiple things that would go in different zones all in that same subnet. Therefore, to use the USP, we would have to bring it out in tons of /32s, and it's not usable. Whereas, it would be far better if we could just put tags associated with IPs, then do USP based on tags.

In the sense of operating, the stability is good, but in the sense of performance efficiency, it is bad.

The scalability is bad.

We did not have a previous solution that we were using. We were looking to work towards improving the whole requesting of firewall policies.

We used a reseller for the deployment. Our experience was not that great, which has more to do with how our supply chain works and why we picked them. However, I don't ever really talk to them or hear from them.

We have seen ROI from the side of operations, and we'll probably get to more of that as time goes on. However it took a while to get to that point.

The solution has helped us reduce the time it takes us to make changes by at least a day.

It did reduce the time part of engineers manually spending time on processes from the aspect of manually having to go through the network and finding the path that a request would take to know where to put the rules. We have had some issues with topology, so not all of our tickets get that advantage. Probably 40 percent of them are that way, so that's why right now it is not as big of a gain.

We did consider other solutions.

Do proper research. Look at Tufin and all of the other products.

The primary use case is role recertification.

We are trying to get into it for compliance, but we are having issues with that.

This solution helps us ensure that security policy is followed across our entire hybrid network.

We actually review our firewalls now. Before we started using Tufin, our firewalls never got reviewed and we had no idea what was on them.

We use Tufin to clean up our firewall policies. This makes it a lot easier to find out the things that are wrong.

It removes things which shouldn't be there. It has helped with that. Things that don't get used anymore and nobody tells us that they have been retired, it helps us identify those items. Then, once we get the compliance piece going, it'll help us make sure nothing violates policies.

The most valuable feature are role and objects usage for individual objects and app usage.

If we could get the compliance part working, that would help out a lot.

Currently, we have to get different data from different sections of the site. It would be nice if it was all combined into one.

A big improvement would be on the USP policy. If we could use Palo Alto to take those zone names and auto import them into the policy, then just do the policy based on the zone names instead of having to put in every single subnet.

The user interface needs to be redesigned because things are not where you would expect them to be.

Stability is sometimes good, and sometimes not so good. 

There is an issue with all of our Palo Alto devices, where if one gets disconnected in Panorama, they all show as disconnected or with errors or wrong arguments, which is very generic. They are supposed to have a fix for it now, but we haven't implemented it yet, because they are not releasing it until eleventh of this month.

We haven't had any issues with scalability yet. We can scale as much as we need to.

The technical support is good. The guy with whom we have been working the most with lately has been pretty on top of everything. We had a couple people in the past who were a little iffy, but we haven't had to talk with them in a long time. I don't know if they're still there.

Our licensing costs are pretty low. We were grandfathered in, so we are at about $35,000 per year.

Test every feature. Make sure the third party vendors that they implement into it function properly with it. We have had issues with our Palo Alto connections.

We just started a PoC on the change workflow process of the solution.

We are just now moving stuff to the cloud.

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.

The primary use case is data flow analysis.

We use Tufin to clean up our firewall policies of unused policies.

It gives our firewall administrators visibility into the total infrastructure.

The most valuable feature is troubleshooting.

I would like something that addresses security in the cloud.

The stability is bulletproof. 

It is extremely scalable. It really addresses the scale of a company's firewall footprint.

The technical support is excellent.

Our account manager and Tufin support have been a big help to us.

We were getting to the size where manual administration of firewalls did not make sense anymore.

The initial setup was straightforward, but time consuming.

This solution has helped us reduce the time it takes us to make changes. We have seen the reduction on the front end, when doing an analysis of the data flow.

We also considered AlgoSec.

I would recommend taking a look at the solution.

I use the solution daily and can see it anytime that I want. I find it invaluable in day-to-day management of firewall policy and policy changes.

This solution has sort of helped us to meet our compliance mandates.

The cloud-native security features will be more important in the future. I am just learning about them now.

I have not worked with SecureChange. I just took the SecureChange track, and from all of the exercises that we did, it seems like a very valuable tool after your firewall population reaches a certain density. If there are a certain number of firewalls, manual administration doesn't make sense anymore.

The primary use case is automation.

We are using the latest version.

We find that the change workflow process is flexible and customizable. If we want to change approvers, that is very easy. If we wanted to add a step or get rid of a step, this is easily customizable.

We are using the visibility with notifications on every firewall change and what those changes were. We have visibility to see who is making the changes, and when. This is the biggest thing because we are underutilizing the product right now.

This solution has helped us meet our compliance mandates. Everything is all auditable. Every change is tracked down to the person and time.

The auditing is a valuable feature. We can be audited, because it has the ability for approvals to be set up and to put in policies. It is all automated.

So far, the stability is good.

With scalability, we are going to run into some issues. We have been talking about converting over to actual hardware as opposed to virtual. Therefore, I don't think we are scalable at this time, especially with the updates coming. I'm told that they're going to need a lot more horsepower to push them. 

As far as scalability, it is great for adding network objects and so on.

i have not talked to technical support.

As we start to dive in, I'll be reaching out to the customer success team.

The initial setup was straightforward. We did it in three days.

We used a reseller for the deployment. They were very good.

There was one other solution that we evaluated, but it didn't stack up. Tufin was the best solution.

Everything is good right now.

Reach out to whoever does your implementation and support. Ask as many questions as you can and do research.

We haven't got to the point where we've used the solution to clean our firewall policies yet. That is the next phase.

This solution won't help us ensure that our security policy is followed across our entire hybrid network until the next stage.

We're not in the cloud.

We use SecureTrack and SecureChange to manage all of our firewalls. 

We use the latest version.

The biggest benefit for us was the time frame to complete a ticket. It went from approximately a week and a half to two weeks down to about three days.

We use it to clean up our firewall policies, which gives us better security policy and less junk on the firewalls.

Risk analysis is automatically in our policy.

The most valuable feature is automation.

The visibility of the policies are very good. It sees different things. The recordings are very good.

We use a lot of workflows and have a lot of custom things developed by Professional Services. It is very customizable.

We would like better communication on tickets, a better way to do metrics, and better communication to the customer. The biggest change that my team would like right now is communication on the process of the ticket, so the customer knows where their ticket is while their waiting.

At least in our environment, the dynamic learning of the topology needs improvement.

If you would have asked me two weeks ago, I would have said the stability was excellent. However, we had some upgrade problems. They were worked out and the support was excellent in helping us get it fixed. In general, the stability is very good.

We have a very big environment. The scalability works well.

Pretty good. They know when to escalate. We never put in easy tickets, They know to escalate quickly if they have to. We have our own technical account manager too.

We invested in SecureChange to do automated workloads. When we deployed SecureChange, part of it was to automate our workloads to have more time to do more things, like making the ticketing process shorter.

Firewall rule changes went from a week and a half to around three and a half days.

We have not recently evaluated any new solutions.

Tufin is not perfect, but it's really good.

Make sure you know your environment well. Tufin will help with knowing the firewall rules, but be well-documented before you start with your security policies.

The approval process is a lot more automated, but the implementation process didn't change.

We don't use Tufin in the cloud yet.

We don't have compliance mandates.

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.

We make use of the SecureChange and SecureTrack modules. In SecureChange, we use the Workflow, and we use the USP to see if there are any rule violations.

Using the workflow has made it easier to get approval from the manager or the CISO. Whereas earlier we used to send an email, it is now a very easy process to get approval.

I have not used the Tufin workflow to clean the firewall rules, but I have used the reports to assist me. I have built reports based on six months worth of data, then selected the rules that were not needed and performed the firewall cleanup accordingly. Now that we have SecureChange and the workflow, I think that I should use the workflow to clean the firewall rules. However, to this point, I have been using the Tufin report.

The rule cleanup and checking for rule violations are not any easier for a technical person, as they are firewall operators. At the same time, it is very much easier for the management team, such as the CISO or company managers, to perform these tasks.

With respect to visibility, many vendors claim that they are number one on the market. What I can say is that Tufin works with the Check Point firewall and the Fortinet firewalls, and this is helping us.

This solution has helped us with meeting our compliance mandates. Based on the company standards and guidelines, we configure the USP. When somethings violates it, we can make a decision whether to approve it or not, based on whether it is complying with company policies.

The most valuable feature is the workflow.

Using this solution makes it easier to manage the firewall policy.

The reports that this solution provides are very useful. The report includes information about duplicate objects, duplicate services, shadowed firewall rules, and the firewall rules that have not been needed for a specified number of days or months. It sets my Check Point database.

My team does not have a good relationship with Tufin because the provisioning team, and even our Tufin account manager, are not friendly or helpful to us. The product, itself, is fine.

I would like to see Tufin as a standalone product that does not strictly manage other firewalls, such as Check Point, but works independently. Ideally, it should not have to rely on other products.

This solution increases the time it takes to make changes. It is easy to manage the firewall policy with the Check Point management server, so the time spent with Tufin is extra.

The fact that all of the firewall policies are pushed to the CMA is a major drawback of the schedule window.

Tufin is very stable, and I would say that there are no major outages. Sometimes the connection between Tufin and the management servers gets broken, and I don't know the reason, but apart from that, it is very stable.

We can add as many firewalls as we need to, as long as we purchase the licenses, so it has good scalability.

Technical support for this solution is the worst. I would give it a zero ranking. Compared to Check Point and Fortinet, Tufin technical support is the worst.

Even the provision service team does not like to respond to email, which is poor service.

Prior to this solution, we used email to request approval, and it is now handled by the Tufin workflow.

The initial setup of this solution was straightforward.

Our licensing fees are more than $100,000 USD per year.

We did not evaluate other products before choosing this solution.

I do find that the change workflow process is flexible and customizable, but not fully. I would say that it is seventy percent customizable, as there are pros and cons in the workflow. You cannot fully customize the workflow by yourself. There are certain limitations in the workflow, such as the inability to create a Firewall object or an IP object. You can only create or modify the Firewall object group. The other problem is the schedule window, as it pushes all of the firewalls on the CMA.

For us, this solution is a supplement. Tufin is partners with Check Point and Fortinet firewalls, but I can manage firewalls without using it. At the same time, while it is not mandatory, it is helping us.

For anybody who is considering this solution, I would say that Tufin helps you to get approval and it will help you to push your firewall policies. In the long run, when you have to manage hundreds of firewalls, it is a good thing to have.

I would rate this solution a six out of ten.