Historically, firewalls have served solely as the core component of an organization’s perimeter defense, providing network layer access control, logging, and network address translation (NAT) to segment networks.  

Next-gen firewalls (NGFWs), however, can do much more. These devices are very different from the routers you buy for your home and do more than just protect the perimeter. In an effective cybersecurity practice, NGFWs are tightly integrated with other components of your organization’s security stack, providing valuable data outputs that enable greater visibility and responsiveness to anomalous activity. However, the powerful capabilities of next-gen firewalls can only be realized if their features are turned on and properly configured to address the needs of your environment. 

Unfortunately, organizations often lack the expertise to properly configure and optimize these devices and take full advantage of their features, turning what should be a centrepiece of their security practices into a viable attack surface for threat actors. In fact, a 2019 report by Gartner stated that 99% of firewall beaches were due to misconfigurations.  

iON can help. Our Firewall Best Practice Assessment identifies the technology gaps in your next-gen firewall’s current security design and provides recommendations that include useful guidance for remediation tasks. The BPA assessment evaluates your current firewall configurations in two areas: enabling the best mix of features for your environment and aligning device settings and configurations with best practices. The assessment consists of four stages: 

• Architecture Review 
• Health Check 
• Configuration Audit 
• Final Report with Comprehensive Results 

Because best practices continue to evolve, cybersecurity advocacy groups recommend conducting best practice assessments regularly to stay abreast of new features and functionality as they are introduced. In addition to our own best practices analysis, our final reports include recommendations from vendors’ latest Perimeter and Data Centre firewall best practice documents to ensure your NGFW contributes to your cybersecurity practice to the fullest extent possible.  

If your organization has recently experienced a compelling event (e.g., a security incident, merger, or acquisition), wants to validate a third-party MSSP to ensure you are not being underserved, wants to automate security functions that typically require manual intervention, or simply wants effective guidance on enabling the features of newly-acquired next-gen firewalls, an iON Firewall Best Practice Assessment is the answer.  

To improve your organization’s security and resiliency while maximizing the ROI in your next-gen firewall, contact an iON Account Manager today for more information. 

sales@ionuited.com