Firewalls are designed to provide access control. Although there is risk associated with any access, by limiting what access is permitted the risk is limited and understood. A firewall Cleanup now prevents the risk.
This whitepaper addresses the one-time or potentially periodic process of firewall cleanup. However, a more effective firewall management strategy should be considered to prevent the recurrence of this problem. Poor firewall management defeats this purpose by ineffectively controlling access and limiting visibility into what access is actually permitted. The increased cost associated with security management is also due to this.
Therefore, poor management is a firewall policy with unnecessary rules that result in excessive complexity, overly permissive access, unnecessary risk and performance degradation. All of which is said to lead to higher costs that can be avoided.
These problems can be addressed with both short-term and long-term activities to clean up the firewall now and prevent this situation from returning. Find out the implications of firewall policy complexity, why it remains a problem today and how to resolve it.
