FireMon Security Manager for AWS

My main use case for FireMon Security Manager is bringing visibility throughout the heterogeneous environment that I manage, enabled by the flexibility of the licenses and compatibility with a variety of vendors, including Cisco, Palo Alto, Fortinet, Huawei, and cloud and VMware environments.

The visibility I gained with FireMon Security Manager became evident when we needed to change our firewall vendors from Cisco to Fortinet, allowing us to perform reusable checks on the rules across all devices while transitioning smoothly to the new vendor.

FireMon Security Manager helped us further by providing visibility on changes made outside of our scheduled change windows, integrating with an ITSM solution via API to track changes initiated through tickets and ensuring compliance with our internal protocols.

The best features that FireMon Security Manager offers include license flexibility, vendor compatibility, real-time information, and change checks, which enhances my day-to-day work by consolidating my entire environment into a single pane of glass.

The visibility, topology, compliance, vulnerability management, and daily filters provided by FireMon Security Manager have made our daily operations much easier, significantly saving us time and enhancing our security practices.

I can add that we can integrate FireMon Security Manager via API with almost any solution, and its add-on, FireMon Insights, allows for the creation of diverse KPIs and dashboards tailored to our environment's needs.

Since adding FireMon Security Manager inside our environment, our security perspective improves daily, giving us visibility on every change made and allowing us to address any potential security vulnerabilities timely.

I think FireMon Security Manager could improve with a SaaS delivery model for easier connectivity and perhaps provide more regular updates and flexible dashboard options for better usability.

I believe the solution is straightforward, and while it includes many integrations, additional technical information on its internal workings would allow for more flexibility and deeper integrations with our environment.

I have been working with FireMon Security Manager for the past ten years, as it is the second solution that I started working with here at AtivaSec.

I previously used AlgoSec and Tufin, switching from AlgoSec to Tufin, and when Tufin lost support in Brazil, I transitioned to FireMon Security Manager, which has proven to be a much better option.

I did not evaluate other options before choosing FireMon Security Manager, as I had worked with other solutions and found FireMon Security Manager's compatibility with multiple vendors to be a significant differentiator.

My advice for those considering FireMon Security Manager is to conduct a POC, share your use cases with the FireMon Security Manager salesperson, and utilize the available templates for assessments.

I have shared everything about FireMon Security Manager, and I think it is a great solution. I have given this review a rating of ten out of ten.

I use FireMon Security Manager as a compliance tool to check rule compliance and firewall rule compliance.

I use FireMon Security Manager as a compliance tool to check rule compliance and firewall rule compliance. Overall, it is good and working fine. As soon as we deployed it for that purpose, we could see the benefits immediately. We could see what rules should be blocked and everything.

The only feedback I would like to give is that we were requesting them to move to SaaS so that the upgradation and everything would be a little more automatic or maybe just easier.

I have been using FireMon Security Manager for around four years.

I have not observed any lagging, crashing, downtime, or instability with FireMon Security Manager recently. Previously, we used to have some issues with respect to upgrades two years back; it was failing, but now it seems pretty smooth since the last two years.

FireMon Security Manager is good in terms of scalability. We are requesting a few things now, and we have requested new features. I have gotten an update from the TAM that the engineering team is working on that, and it may be coming soon. With respect to scalability, FireMon Security Manager is fine and good.

I think FireMon Security Manager is pretty good. I have a support manager, Gary, who helps us. He is a TAM for us, and he supports us very well.

I have contacted the technical support or customer support of FireMon Security Manager regularly. The TAM with whom I am connected supports us, and his support is really good. He gives us proper support; whenever there is a query or any issue, we send an email to him, and he gives us support whenever required. We are completely satisfied with that.

Out of 10, I would give the support of FireMon Security Manager a score of 10. It is really good.

I cannot say that MFNA, Micro Focus Network Analyzer, is exactly similar to FireMon Security Manager because as of now, we have that tool, but it is strictly for configuration. There, we check the configuration part, not the rule of the firewalls. It strictly checks the configuration, so it is not really similar. FireMon Security Manager is better. I think we are exploring to check configuration from FireMon as well, but we are not checking it yet.

The initial deployment of FireMon Security Manager when I first started using the product was fine. It was easy and not so difficult.

Definitely, some time had to pass before I saw the benefits of FireMon Security Manager.

I do not have much idea with respect to pricing of FireMon Security Manager.

FireMon Security Manager does not really require any maintenance on my end to continue working. There are just regular updates whenever a new OS comes up, but apart from that, I do not see any maintenance that is required.

I think FireMon Security Manager's reporting is good. In our case, we do not use the report from FireMon Security Manager. We fetch the data from the API, and we have different dashboards, so we do not use reports directly from FireMon.

I do not have any idea about partnerships; I think I am just a customer of FireMon Security Manager.

I would rate this review an 8 out of 10.

FireMon Security Manager integrates reasonably well into my security stack. We are able to onboard the devices quite easily, but some advanced features of the firewalls take time to support. Sometimes when a new feature is introduced on the firewall side, FireMon may take some time to incorporate it.

If I were to speak to someone looking to buy FireMon Security Manager, I would say the biggest win is the reporting feature. If your environment is not very large and if you don't have a massive amount of rule sets, then you can go with FireMon Security Manager. It works well with the reporting, and you can use it for getting the reports and presenting them for audit and compliance. It can be used effectively, but if the rule count is huge, it is not very scalable. If your environment is large, then you may get some issues with getting the reports; sometimes the report won't load if the rule count is very high.

What I like the most about FireMon Security Manager is the reporting feature; it gives all the rules in one console, so we are able to see all those rules without logging into each firewall. Reporting allows us to fetch the rules, for example, risky rules, and other similar information very easily in one place.

The reports from FireMon Security Manager for communicating risk reduction, compliance status, or overall security posture to my higher-ups are very good. We are actually using it to get the reports and present them to senior officers.

FireMon Security Manager should have tested more use cases. Sometimes organizations will have a larger number of devices and a larger number of firewall rules. Sometimes FireMon could not handle such an amount of rule sets, and it will cause some issues with normalizing flows data.

One thing about FireMon Security Manager is that the releases are quite frequent. We need to upgrade more frequently. They release every quarter, but the frequency is comparatively high when compared to others. For FireMon Security Manager, we don't face many outages, but we need to upgrade it frequently to get the patches and the fixes for the issues.

In my career, I have been using FireMon Security Manager for five years.

I have seen lagging, crashing, or downtime; sometimes some service crashed, and I needed to restart those services, identify those services, and restart them. It is not very frequent, but it happened.

Regarding the overall scalability of FireMon Security Manager, I would say it is not very scalable. If the rule count goes on increasing, sometimes, for example, if we have a firewall and it's used for all the sites, the device count increases and the rule count increases massively, FireMon sometimes cannot handle it effectively.

The speed of support for FireMon Security Manager depends on the severity of the issue. If it is a minor issue, then it will be faster; if it is a major issue, sometimes it will require their development team to get involved. In those cases, it will take a long time; it could sometimes take months to solve the issue.

For the support of FireMon Security Manager, I would give a six or seven on a scale from one to ten, with ten being the highest.

Previously, I used AlgoSec in my previous organization, but I didn't use it as extensively as FireMon Security Manager, so I don't have much to compare the two.

When I first started using FireMon Security Manager, it was moderate. There were people from FireMon giving us the knowledge articles and how to navigate things, so it was not very hard to learn. It is moderate; someone with two to three years of experience can understand it easily.

Overall, I would give FireMon Security Manager a six out of ten for everything.

I am a partner for FireMon Security Manager and typically perform implementations for multiple clients. I use FireMon Security Manager to deploy rules, perform cleanup of rules and firewalls, and create reports based on daily changes or firewall triggers so that administrators and higher management teams can be notified. I can generate compliance reports in a fraction of a second at my convenience. I use the reporting features of FireMon Security Manager to communicate risk reduction, compliance status, and overall security posture to my management. I have scheduled reports for perimeter firewalls that notify the admin and management team when changes occur beyond restricted times, such as during nighttime or in production environments. On a daily basis, these scheduled reports provide details about what changes have been made and which personnel made those changes, with everything delivered to the management and admin inboxes so they are aware of who made what changes on the firewall. This provides evidence for future investigations if any issues are triggered. If someone mistakenly made changes or reverted changes and then deleted the audit logs, I can still map or review what changes were made through FireMon Security Manager for investigation purposes.

I particularly like the SQL query feature of FireMon Security Manager that I can use for rule searches. I can search based on command, source, destination, rule name, or rule number with multiple search field parameters that give me leverage to filter rules and obtain output at my convenience. The output can be delivered via email as well as in PDF or CSV format. This is a very good feature because I have not found this many filters on any other tools to get rules filtered from security devices.

I dislike that as soon as I upgrade the security devices' version, it takes time to get the device pack for that compatible version. I want to highlight that FireMon Security Manager should work in parallel with the latest version of security devices, such as firewalls, and the device pack should be updated as soon as the OS is released. For example, with the device pack, we pull data from security devices and based on that analysis, FireMon Security Manager provides us with reports. As soon as the security device's OS gets upgraded, such as with Check Point, when a client is running on R81.20 and upgrades to R82 or R82.10, there is an error pulling the configuration that was working previously on R81.20. In that scenario, I have to log a case with technical support, which takes time for analysis, and it takes more than a month to get the compatible version of the device pack to pull configuration from the upgraded OS of the firewall.

I have been working with FireMon Security Manager for more than two to three years.

Downtime in FireMon Security Manager is not significant. I can say that quarterly, once in a while, it is not accessible, but most of the time it is accessible with no crashes. I have seen improvements since I implemented FireMon Security Manager. It has improved quite a bit from previous versions. The page loading time is very minimal now, whereas previously it took more time to load the pages.

The scalability of FireMon Security Manager is good.

I have contacted the technical support and customer support of FireMon Security Manager. The quality of the support is good and the speed is also good. I receive responses within a timeframe, and as soon as I send an email, I get a response within the next day if analysis of logs is required, or the same day if it is not.

Previously when I was not working on FireMon Security Manager, I used to work on AlgoSec. As per my convenience, I can say that FireMon Security Manager is better because it gives me filtering of rules at my convenience, which is not possible in AlgoSec.

The initial deployment of FireMon Security Manager is easy. Everything is visible in the GUI and documentation is readily available. If someone reads the documentation, they can complete the setup. However, they should be aware of how to access the console. Basic knowledge of networking is required to complete the setup.

The pricing structure for FireMon Security Manager is good. FireMon Security Manager is much better than AlgoSec.

I would give FireMon Security Manager a rating of 10 for support. For everything related to FireMon Security Manager, I would give it a 10. My overall review rating is 10.