Firewall protects the enterprise network and plays a critical role on perimeter defense. The majority of data breaches take place due to misconfiguration. Consequently, it becomes very important for enterprises to leave admin access in the hands of experts and not to leave security in auto-pilot mode. A real-time dashboard is absolutely required to monitor network firewall traffic continuously to identify and respond to threats before the damage is done.
There are couple of best practices that must be implemented to operate firewall properly:
- Change control policy: Firewall rules or policy changes are very dynamic in nature and are mostly inevitable when it comes to accommodating new changes in the infrastructure environment and responding to new threats or vulnerabilities.
- Perform periodic audit of the configurations: Auditing is a requirement to keep firewall patches up to date and to make sure that a device is compliant with standards like SOX, PCI-DSS, and HIPAA.
- Firewall rule consolidation and optimization: Over time your firewalls will accumulate thousands of rules and policies, and many of these rules will become out of date or obsolete. This adds complexity to daily tasks, troubleshooting, and auditing, and may also cause performance issues to firewall appliances. It's always recommended to consolidate rules in a group based on application and remove unused rules from policies.
- Threat detection signature updates: Threat detection is based on patterns found in an attack. In an ever growing internet environment, new threats are detected every day. Because of this, it becomes important to update signatures and fine tune policies to avoid false alarms.