Network Perimeter Security

In the past, your network perimeter marked a clear boundary between your IT infrastructure and assets and the world beyond. Today’s networks are different. They extend far and wide, reshaped by cloud computing, mobile working and connected devices. Employees are increasingly mobile, accessing resources from external networks and mobile devices. Data and applications aren’t necessarily on-premise either, as more companies store applications and data on servers they don’t necessarily own.

In short, your network perimeter is everywhere, and it’s vulnerable. Threats have multiplied as the number of access points to organizational systems has grown to include things like:

• Smart building systems

• Point-of-sale terminals

• Email systems

• File-sharing applications.

As a consequence, IT teams are challenged to constantly monitor, detect, and respond to potential threats—while continuing to provide end-users with fast and convenient access to applications and data.

Designing A Perimeter Firewall

At Burwood Group, our view is that yesterday’s approaches don’t work for today’s blurred perimeters. We help you design a perimeter firewall, based on best practices and best-of-breed technologies from Palo Alto Networks and Cisco, that protect your network traffic without slowing down the pace of business or compromising privacy.

Burwood helps you design and implement perimeter solutions tailored for your environment, including:

• Dedicated hardware for networking, security, signature matching and management functions that enable high-speed transmission of encrypted traffic

• Strong multi-factor authentication methods to limit information access only to  trusted users, devices and applications

• Segmented roles for different user groups and devices

• Enhanced security services embedded inside applications

• Network monitoring to detect traffic anomalies that may represent threats

• Tools for rapid deployment of policies to local and remote users

• Appliances to block a wide range of threats across all ports, and to limit the unauthorized transfer of files and data

• East-West server-to-server security

• Micro-segmentation, in which security policies are assigned to individual applications and workloads

Firewall Policy Management

Your IT team likely has a process for creating firewall policies. But do you have a protocol and tools to manage them? As security strategies become more complex, firewall policy management often falls to the bottom of the priority list—creating security and compliance risks. Burwood Group’s security experts can help you get your firewall policies under control and strengthen your front line of defense against security threats.

Firewall policies are proliferating at most organizations—from hundreds to thousands or even tens of thousands of rules—as IT teams respond to new threats, new data privacy and security regulations and new workplace technologies. Even a small organization may have multiple firewalls and associated policies. Left unmanaged, rules may be conflicting, misconfigured, redundant or unused. Policies may be outdated and no longer serving a business need, while creating an opening for malicious attacks.

Burwood Group can help you overcome the obstacles in the way of firewall policy management. We can help you choose automated configuration tools to help eliminate unneeded rules and test new or modified rules before putting them into practice. And, we can help you establish change management processes to control rule modification and creation.

Firewall Policy Management Capabilities

• Delete shadowed rules that are effectively useless

• Delete expired and unused rules and objects

• Remove unused connections

• Enforce consistent object naming conventions that make the rule base easy to understand

• Remove duplicate objects defined twice with different names

• Break up long rule sections smaller scopes

• Document rules, objects and policy revisions for future reference

With the right tools and change management processes, you can manage not only your policies, but also complex policy changes, compliance audits and multiple firewall devices. Rather than being an overlooked chore, firewall policy management can become a vital part of your security posture.

Start with a Network Assessment

Conducting a thorough assessment of your network topology and opportunities for improvement is an excellent path to determining perimeter security gaps. Check out our blog post: 6 Reasons to Initiate a Network Assessment Now.

Case Studies