To secure your IT network, you need an efficient Firewall. To make the Firewall efficient, you have to tune it properly. But, even when you configure the Firewall to tune the performance, you have to be cautious. Check the configuration changes at every stage. Look out for conflicts. Audit the users involved. Overlooking any of these will lead to a gaping hole in the Firewall, which will in turn make your network prone to vulnerability.
There are enough stories available in the industry. In many companies, because of a critical configuration change, there were instances businesses got disrupted for long hours. Subsequent loss of time to find out what went wrong. So, the sure short way to avoid all these losses and embarrassments is to keep monitoring the change in configuration. Even, one of the industry expert, Kevin Beaver, vouches for this. In fact, he even added it as one of the points of best practices.
Careful monitoring of configuration changes of the firewall device will ensure that nobody plays with the configurations intentionally or unintentionally. To have control over the changes, you should get the reports on basic (default) configuration changes, running configuration changes and conflict of changes. It is better if you get alerted for these changes (more so for any critical conflicts).
Latest release 7.1 of Firewall Analyzer takes care of this critical requirement of yours. It offers Change Management feature for Firewall Devices. This feature takes the application one more step towards complete Firewall device management solution. Check it and find it out for your self.
