Tufin Orchestration Suite Reviews

Primarily, it is being used as a type of security auditing control on our firewalls. We are in the middle of a new project acquiring dedicated new hardware while building out SecureTrack and SecureChange. After this initial project, and building out all that infrastructure is done, then there will be a project to kick off some of the automation and orchestration type stuff to try and improve some of those processes for the IT group.

The goal is to use it to revalidate, clean up, and optimize firewall policies, but we are not there yet.

The company has had the product in place for a while. 

I am giving up the web proxy stuff, so I can become the SME on the Tufin.

The plan is to integrate it into things, like ServiceNow, then use the automation. That was one of the strengths in the decision to stay with Tufin and invest more resources into it. 

My hope is to use this solution to automatically check if a change request will violate any security policy rules. It is not doing any of that right now.

Right now, our compliance mandates are all over the place, but previously, what they were doing is they were just taking screenshots of something, and I don't know how we passed our audits.

I was shocked and appalled that the current network team isn't even using it right now. In previous roles in previous companies, this product (or one of the competing products) was like the lifeblood of how we worked. It was like step two, after picking up a ticket. We went to use this tool to see where we needed to make changes. That they're not doing that explains why they're probably having to do rework 60 percent or higher limitation tickets, because they're missing devices or it is not being implemented properly.

In our current environment, the most valuable feature from Tufin is their Network Map because our network team can't give us a network map. Tufin has given me more than what the network team have ever given me, as far as documenting the network infrastructure. So, I'm thrilled.

The visibility is good.

The biggest area where I see a need for improvement is some of the documentation and training stuff. It does a really good job of hitting the big concepts, but it needs like another layer deeper of actually getting into some of the details of how to do some of the things. Conceptually, I understand how the product works, but now how do I start building stuff and integrating it into my environment. 

Just being a bit more upfront and honest about issues, as far as like HA, distributed stuff, and the need for load balancers, if you want to do HA. Nobody ever likes talking about the fact that their solution really isn't truly HA, you got buy an F5 to sit in front of it if you want to do HA, or something like that. Everybody shies away from talking about that, but if you get that out upfront, then the engineers can be prepared for it, then they can try and figure it out and make it work. This is not unique to Tufin. Everybody is like, "Oh yeah, we do HA." Then, three months later, after you have bought some stuff, now you're just like, "Oh no, we got to have an F5 in front of this. That didn't even come up in our discussions. So, how do I get resources away for that? Because I don't have an F5 in this environment, and I need one." 

I just found out some of the things that I need to use right now, like the reports from the report package are only available on 17-3 and above, and I need that as soon as possible. Hopefully, we will upgrade to 19-1 or 19-2 even before I go to bed tonight.

It is sort of an uphill battle right now to ensure that it has all the visibility that it needs, so we can be assured that it is doing what it will do.

The stability is solid.

The scalability is good.

I have not used the technical support yet.

I've used Tufin, Firemon, AlgoSec, and all the other solutions at other companies before, and seen what we've been able to do with them. So, when I came to this company, it was just like, "Okay what's our tool? Oh, it's Tufin. What do you mean nobody's using it?"

The initial setup is not even complete yet. We bought some stuff, then had it shipped. There are some additional discussions which are going on next week after this, where there will be some design tweaks which will occur. At first, we were thinking of using VMs for the distributed stuff and collectors, but we can't get those level of resources from the server team. So, we will be better off just buying smaller hardware boxes and having them completely managed by us that way it will be easier. Also, we'll be able to complete it much faster in our environment.

We are using a reseller, but I'm not exactly sure how that relationship even works right now. It is really early. Our stuff has been bought and shipped. We are still trying to complete internal documentation, so we can start doing stuff.

I wasn't part of the bake-off. I think the company went in the right direction, and I am glad that they didn't even look at FireMon.

While our UK side has Skybox, which I have never even seen, the orchestration piece was really the key to solidifying us on the Tufin solution.

I was talking to somebody earlier today who said that Skybox has a more powerful Network Map than what Tufin has, but I haven't even seen Skybox,

If someone was looking for this type of solution, I would tell them, "Here are the top four solutions that I know of and the places that I worked on each of them. Here are the benefits, gossip, and downsides that I've seen for each one." Tufin has the best solution as far as it being self-contained, reliable, and integrating with the other things that you want it to integrate with. The customer service is also not arrogant like some of the other solutions.

We need to utilize it to its capacity and capabilities, and we're not doing that yet.

It will eventually reduce the time it takes to make changes. I don't know how much time it will save, since a lot of the manual processes are done by another team. I am still building my team underneath me.

The cloud stuff is great, but I am sort of scared to look at it because we still trying to work out our traditional stuff being compliant and under control, then doing what it's supposed to be doing. I can't even imagine what the developers are doing in the cloud stuff.

We implement Tufin for other customers and help set it up. 

I'm not the end user. I just set it up for the end user.

We are using the latest version from 2018.

We use Tufin to clean up our firewall policies. They already have the compliance policies sort of prepopulated in there to point out violations.

Most customers will go through and check the USP to see if it violated with the designer tool.

We are in the process of working with a customer right now to set up the Unified Security Policy (USP). We got all the violations from the first phase and will go through to do the mediations, then run the scan again to show the progression of the clients.

The preconfigured PCI compliance USPs are the best part for me. These make things a lot easier.

The visualizer for the Network Topology is really good. You can see all the routes throughout your entire environment.

The change workflow process is very easy to customize. You can do a workflow however you want, so you can have an approval every single step. Or, you can remove approvals on certain steps, automating some steps.

It capabilities are very good.

Sometimes, the user interface is a little cumbersome, trying to navigate between them. In the new version, it looks like they resolved those issues. 

We have had a couple issues with the VMs, but I think it was just because they were starving for resources. A recommendation on what the virtual appliances should have for resources would be appreciated.

We have done PR strategies and added Tufin appliances. It is super easy to just back up and restore to a new one. You can get a new appliance up and running in 20 minutes.

We worked with their professional support before, but we have not worked with their Professional services.

The initial setup is straightforward.

We are a reseller.

We've install it to make money.

Tufin does make the process faster for customers, depending on if they use SecureChange to automate their process. Everything is all in one then.

Licensing is on a customer by customer basis.

Try Tufin out. Make a PoC of it. That is how we sell most of our products because it works well.

Our customers do not have a hybrid network.

The primary use case is firewall analysis.

We use SecureTrack, which is great.

The solution has helped us to meet our compliance mandates. We have to be PCI and SOX compliant. Some of these rules and systems might meet those requirements. Knowing which system can talk with which system is definitely helpful in that sense.

This solution has helped us reduce the time it takes to make changes.

Comparing the rules and policy browser is valuable to me. It gives me the ability to pull running configs and be able to analyze them without having to go directly into the firewall.

The visibility is great.

When you make changes, you have to enter the password each time for each firewall. This is sort of annoying.

They are sort of at the pilot stage on some of their products. I saw the Orca and Iris products yesterday. My initial impression of these products were that they were good products, but I felt like some of their features overlapped with SecureTrack and SecureChange, which they are already doing. So, I just wondered what direction they're going in? I understand that they are cloud products, but are these security products going to overlap each other's features at some point? This is my initial concern.

It is very stable.

It seems pretty scalable. From what I have seen in the training, you can use it on multiple firewalls. It seems like a solution which was built for very large enterprise level networks.

I haven't dealt with the technical support yet.

If you want to be able to manage your firewalls efficiently and securely, then use Tufin.

It is a pretty solid solution. As with any security solution, I think is it is growing. It seems like it is at a good point. It could still use some work, but it's growing, and that's good.

We saw in the training yesterday the changes for part of SecureTrack 2.0, which isn't out yet. Those changes, that they will be implementing, look very good from what I can see.

The primary use case is locking down the firewalls to Zero Trust and automating the risk assessments.

We use Tufin to clean up our firewall policies. It very easily shows us what is not used, so we can take it out. It shows us head counts as well, so if something is used once or twice a year, that might not be something we want to keep. Thus, we can have the conversation. We also like how it has a business owner of the firewall policy, so we'll be filling that in. So, those people will be involved ongoing with the approvals.

This solution has helped us meet our compliance mandates by providing visibility into firewall rules.

Today, we can check to see how our lockdowns have gone and what unusuals are still there. We have a long way to go, but we've done a lot already.

We were hit by the NotPetya attack. Therefore, our whole company and all its sites were down for several months. So, you don't have an attack like that and not need something like Tufin. Other companies can prevent these attacks, or at least slow them down, by having this type of a tool. We will never go back.

In the future, we will be using this solution to automatically check if a change request will violate any security policy rules.

1. Being able to see all the firewall rules in one place. 
2. Being able to query them. 
3. SecureChange will automate and put the rules into Remedy.

The visibility is incredible. It has never been there before.

The UI was a little clunky at the first. It was confusing. They are working on that. The new one is better.

We haven't really overburdened it yet. What we have has been very stable. There have been no issues that I have seen.

It seems very scalable.

We have 40 consultants and too many people.

The regular technical people seem okay when you put in a help call, and they do get back to you. We actually had a key issue, which was a bug, that the development team didn't want to fix. We escalated it, then it got fixed. So, the management level seems very responsive at least, but at a support level, they are just regular support people and not outstanding.

I asked our firewall team if they had the tools that they needed to do their job, and they said, "No."

We did not have a previous solution.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. The problem was getting people to pay attention to it.

It is a lot of work to implement.

We used Tufin for the deployment.

We have not seen ROI yet. What we are going to see is fewer cyberattacks. When you have a multimillion dollar cyberattack, you don't care about three million dollars in a one time cost.

Engineers are spending less time on manual processes by weeks. Huge amounts of time have been saved.

Our licensing costs are three million total and then we pay for maintenance, which is an additional cost for three years.

We did a comparison of three products and Tufin was recommended at the time. We got quotes from Tufin and another product, and Tufin came in under.

I just talked to two people who switched to Tufin from another product. It seems to be the leader of the pack.

Tufin seems like a high quality product from a company that cares. It focuses on exactly what we need.

We would like to get to having Tufin make changes on firewall rules, but we are going to need help convincing our management of that we should be using Tufin to do that. It looks very promising, but we can't use it for that yet.

We haven't implemented the change workflow process yet.

While we didn't buy it for the solution’s cloud-native security features. I'm interested in that, but it is not in my mandate right now.

The product has been fabulous.

We use it with SecureTrack, mainly for auditing purposes. We also use SecureChange for workflows on temporary firewalls.

We use Tufin to clean up our firewall policies. From an auditing perspective, it is centrally managed in one place for all of our firewall vendors.

One of the biggest quick wins that we had with Tufin was cleaning up our firewall policies and rules. We cleaned out a lot of rules which helped our devices, longevity-wise, as well as speed-wise.

• Easability
• Audit features
• SecureTrack
• Change of work allowance
• It is very open to changing it and making it do what we need it do. 
• We get a holistic view of the infrastructure, as well as automation workflows.

The visibility is great, so far. We are still building it out because we have a lot of firewalls from different vendors. Overall, it's a good product in the way it works.

The change workflow process is flexible and customizable. We use this process a lot. We have developers do custom integrations with different vendors, especially ones that are technically supported, as well as doing some custom integrations with our Juniper products, which are not officially supported.

The solution’s cloud-native security feature is definitely welcome. We are starting to embrace the cloud. We are a little more legacy and timid in our approach, considering the amount of data that we have and the way that we want it to be accessed. However, the cloud-native applications are going to be big, so I definitely think that's a welcome feature that they're working on.

We would like Tufin to have interoperability with Juniper products, along with official support.

They could maybe update the interface. However, I know there is an interface update coming, I just haven't seen it yet.

There is room for improvement, as far as making the product easy to use and having training available.

In my training with the workflow, it always kicks me back every time that I do a step backwards. I think that automatically it should take you to the next step in the workflow, that would be appreciated.

So far, the stability has been great. One of my colleagues just did an upgrade from the previous version to 19.1, which had a bit of database issues. Those have now been resolved.

The scalability seems good. We have a distributed system right now, and it seems like it can scale up or scale out, as needed.

So far, the technical support has been good. I haven't had to deal with support a lot yet. We have weekly check-ins with our account manager where we go through what we can do with it. Overall, I think it's adequate.

We didn't have a previous solution.

It is nice to see the capabilities that Tufin has, and we look forward to building it out.

I wasn't there for the initial setup, but from what I've seen, it was pretty straightforward for the engineers who set it up.

The solution has helped us reduce the time it takes us to make changes. From the auditing perspective, it definitely saves a lot of time. Once we get our USP built out with the automatic calculations, as well as having validation and seeing where the roles need to go in place, this solution will be very helpful. 

It is helping engineers spend less time on manual processes.

We did look at a few other vendors.

The power that Tufin has behind it is the reason they chose it. They saw that it had a lot of capability compared to its competition.

Check out this product and see what it can do for you. Talk with the marketing team and account reps and see what direct benefit the platform gives you. Then, see what strengths it has compared to the competition, as well as its value proposition.

We are not to the point of using the solution to automatically check if a change request will violate any security policy rules, but it is coming.

We are building the security policy part of it out across out hybrid network, especially with the USP.

Right now, we are just using it for SecureTrack. Next year, we have plans to buy the license for SecureChange as well.

I think we're using version 18, and we are in the process of upgrading it to 19-2

We got Tufin from a company that we acquired, so its helping us do mitigations there. Now, we are extending the scope and implementing it in our HQ, as well. It has helped for PCI and compliance.

The solution helps us ensure that security policy is followed across our entire network. It is important to configure and define all the networks right.

One of the primary reasons why we want to use Tufin is currently we are having issues with companies from overseas who manage our firewalls. It is very inefficient where they say that they have implemented the rules, then later on we find out the implementation has not been done properly and they are missing firewalls. Hopefully, once we fully implement this tool, it should be able to tell us if firewall rules are missing. It should be able to tell them before they communicate with us. After the implementation, we can verify and make sure that everything is working and do all the validations.

It is a great solution. If you have all the devices and firewalls in place, the amount of details that you get along with the network topology is very good.

If we had the budget and money, the SecureChange is really great. What you can do and where you can push everything from one console. You can create a change and do the whole automation: create the change, implement the change, and close the change. Right now, I have to go to two, three, or four different consoles. Whereas if I had SecureChange, I could do everything in one place. From an auditing perspective, it becomes easy. Right now, I have to give a change ticket number, then show the auditor and tell them to search for that change ticket number in a different place. If everything is in one place, that makes your life easier.

The change workflow process is flexible and customizable.

I would like more API integration, API integration with the cloud, and API integration with other chain management solutions. I would also like more scripts, which would help us not have to write scripts. If you give me all this, I can use the scripts to automate stuff, making my life easier.

I haven't seen the cloud integration yet, and I would like to see if we could audit the cloud firewalls, like the cloud-native, Azure, and Amazon. That would be nice. You want one tool to do everything. I don't want to use another tool, or manually go and audit the cloud firewalls.

I have seen some issues with the stability. One of the things that we noticed was when R18 was released about one or two years back, it couldn't discover the newer versions of firewalls, then we had to upgrade it. After the upgrade we ran into some other issues. However, it looks like with the patches it is getting there.

With the scalability, you have to use different components: the reporting server and distribution server. When we implemented it earlier, we didn't design it properly, which I feel is our issue. Once we design it properly, the way that we are implementing it now, I feel the scalability should be there.

I have used auditing tools in the past, so I was already aware of Tufin. When I saw the processes in my company where I worked were manual, I recommended a solution, saying, "We need to expand the solution from our other company to here, as well. It will simplify our processes."

The initial implementation was done at an acquired company, so it was already installed. However, we are doing upgrades now.

I think we will be using Tufin for the upgrades.

We have seen ROI:

• The productivity has increased. The team is more productive.
• It will decrease the time of firewall implementation, which will increase the productivity in the sense that now other teams don't have to wait for their projects. 
• This helps us simplify our processes.

Our engineers are spending less time doing manual processing. Their productivity has at least increased by 50 percent.

We haven't purchased the license yet for SecureChange. We do have plans to buy it next year.

The additional piece, which we are buying and doesn't include our other solution, is close to 300,000.

We did not have have time to evaluate other solutions. Also, we already had Tufin in place in our other company. 

This seems to be a better solution than AlgoSec, which I have used in the past. I have also seen FireMon, and Tufin gave us what we needed. I didn't see a reason to explore other solutions.

It is a great tool. It will help you increase your productivity and simplifies your workflow.

We should use it to clean up our firewall policies since the tool is there.

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.