We performed a comparison between AlgoSec and FireMon Security Manager based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Firewall Security Management solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.
"We have critical security policies. With AlgoSec, we can create a security policy to manage critical applications. I have worked in the bank and they have critical applications. We created some security policies for those applications. Controlling the flow is critical for our customers."
"Detection of malicious activities and malware is much better than other options."
"Proactively assess the impact of network changes to ensure security and continuous compliance."
"We can easily and quickly identify all of the rules on the firewall and avoid the individual review and analysis of each rule."
"The solution is easy to navigate."
"It gives us 100% visibility into our network security policies. It has given us a couple of surprises. Over the years, the network that we are administrating has been subject to people who have an idea of how a network should be set up. That differs from technician to technician or engineer to engineer. So, we are finding little pockets of hidden little self-engineered configurations and the way things were done that nobody knew about. Once the engineer left, the knowledge of that setup disappeared. You don't know about those until something either goes wrong, or you get something like AlgoSec to discover it for you, and it says, "Hey, there is this going on over here.""
"AlgoSec supports a wide range of devices and is constantly working to include support for many other vendor devices."
"The solution provides us with full visibility into the risk involved in firewall change requests. This is very important for us because we are regulated according to the FDA. It shows us which changes have been made and why. So, it has worked very well for our compliance needs."
"It is the single place where we go to review all of our firewall changes. The solution makes it easier for us to track all the changes made. It is a central place where we can look at all the firewall rules, because we have three different firewall vendors. It save us time and creates efficiencies by looking at the general picture."
"In one report, FireMon tells us there are, say, 1,000 rules that can be taken out and it gives us the ability to disable those for a year and to track when we made our changes. After a year, we can go back and eliminate the rules, to bring the configuration down to an almost human-readable level."
"Policy test, access path analysis, and change reports."
"The technical support is very good. They've always been helpful."
"The firewall assessment feature is great."
"I like the Security Manager console where we can see any changes that have been made or pull the results of an assessment and control the policies that we implement."
"Vendor agnostic when it comes to integrating with other product."
"The most valuable feature of FireMon is its ability to configure multiple devices and consolidate them into a single desktop, which allows us to manage all of our security devices, such as Palo Alto and Zscaler, from one place."
"We are using AlgoSec directly against our Cisco Firepower. At first, AlgoSec didn't work with Firepower. It didn't know how to read the logs. So, improvement has been made. Now, the feature that was available on the older generation firewall is available on the current one, but this is a problem which has already been dealt with."
"Creating more intuitive menus could be helpful, especially for first-time users."
"Lacking in support of other platforms."
"The customization of dashboards should be simplified and more user-friendly."
"It would be easier if the network maps could be updated using the GUI portal instead of from the OS."
"Some features require a learning curve and may necessitate support from AlgoSec, which can be challenging at times."
"The initial setup can be complex for beginners."
"The risky rules reporting should have more information available in the risky rules report - especially when you export the data into a .CSV format. .CSV format being a text-based visualization, some information and formatting cause the reports to lose meaning and only become just another character in the file since it cannot port over some properties (like severity represented by colors)."
"We've had recurring issues managing FireMon's internal backups. Sometimes, the space allocated for the backup is full, and there is no process where it deletes files that are older than I certain date. It's just waiting for the storage to get full and then it's cleaned up. It isn't something that creates serious issues for us."
"The initial setup can take some time, including connecting it and configuring it. It's not something that is easy for anybody to do. There is time and energy required because of the number of systems you have to configure to get it to work properly."
"The cost of the solution is pretty expensive. It would be ideal if they could work on their pricing."
"We have not used the Policy Planner but even so, we have identified areas of improvement with it during our testing. For example, it could be better when it comes to ease of integration or ease of policy automation. Another problem is that there is a console where it has too many options and is not very straightforward. Essentially, controlling it could be made more seamless."
"Some of the things that you want to do in FireMon are not exactly straightforward, like creating certain reports or controls. Some of the functions could be a little more user-friendly, such as creating certain filters."
"Some of the core functionality in our environment doesn't seem to work. We will get buggy code releases. They need to work on their Q&A of every code release."
"The training for configuring new users or operators is confusing because the UI is not user-friendly and has room for improvement."
"A phone app would be nice. This is the reason why it is not perfect yet."
AlgoSec is ranked 1st in Firewall Security Management with 173 reviews while FireMon Security Manager is ranked 4th in Firewall Security Management with 53 reviews. AlgoSec is rated 9.0, while FireMon Security Manager is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of AlgoSec writes "Helps identify risks, reduce attack surfaces, and streamline policy changes". On the other hand, the top reviewer of FireMon Security Manager writes "Makes compliance much easier compared to doing it manually, and automates policy changes across environments". AlgoSec is most compared with Tufin Orchestration Suite, Skybox Security Suite, Palo Alto Networks Panorama, ManageEngine Firewall Analyzer and Fortinet FortiManager, whereas FireMon Security Manager is most compared with Tufin Orchestration Suite, Skybox Security Suite, Palo Alto Networks Panorama, ManageEngine Firewall Analyzer and RedSeal. See our AlgoSec vs. FireMon Security Manager report.
See our list of best Firewall Security Management vendors.
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Thank you, Sunil and Carlo, for your insightful responses.
I really appreciate that and will investigate further.
Best regards,
John
It’s been too long since I evaluated AlgoSec to give some solid feedback here. I can say that mapping in FireMon is terrible if you have a complicated network, otherwise, it works pretty well.
FireMon performance- make sure you get the best server, you can break them out and put certain roles on different boxes to get a lot of expansion possibilities though it might not be necessary this depends heavily on the size of your configs. If you have 1,000 firewalls with 100 rules each no problem but a handful of firewalls with 900k+ rules can become problematic.
We have not pulled MPLS configs into the system but their protocol support (FireMon) seems top notch.
DR, well you can distribute the environment all over the place so it’s really up to you with Firemon how robust your DR is. I’ve never had a failure requiring a massive restore, even our older servers running their pre-web UI version is still running fine.
Unfortunately we chose Tufin over both those products, sorry I cannot give you a comparison on either. For us, Tufin simplifies the needs we have for Risks/Cleanup/Violations in our FW policies.
We also leverage compliance policy for best practices. You can also take advantage of the reporting functionally which suites your environment or infrastructure such as:
- New Revision
- Advance Change
- FW Modul Change
- Object Change
- Expired Rules
- Rule and Object Usage
- Policy Analysis
- Security Risk
- Rule Documentation.