When the cyber attack is a considerable threat that every organization has to deal with in today’s world of technological development, cloud-based networking systems have a significant role to store data and computing power. Therefore, to protect sensitive information and to prevent cyber attacks, cloud firewall management is very much effective and necessary. Cloud Firewall Management is essential to mitigate the business risks in an organization and to prevent unauthorized network access that can lead to a cyber attack.
Firewall devices and network security management:
Elements:
Network security devices mainly consist of network firewalls and applications, however, there can be other devices such as antivirus scanning devices, intrusion detection, and protection systems, pen-testing devices, and vulnerability assessment appliances, and content filtering devices. A firewall has a configured policy and an application firewall monitors and prevents the system service calls that do not match the configured policy. Therefore, the purpose of an application firewall is to control network traffic and access from an application. A firewall device can be a physical hardware device, or software device, or both to monitor the network traffic.
Challenges of network security management:
The network administrators have to face several challenges in managing network security. In order to deal with the challenges, they must have comprehensive and clear visibility of the network behavior. They should be able to systematize single and multi-vendor device configuration, implement global network security policies, outlook network traffic, and create audit-ready compliance reports. Thousands of firewall policies can be there to dealwith over the years, however, the security policies have to be continuous across each network. Firewall policies are important to address because if there is a conflict with new rules that can affect the performance and security of the network.
Rules with challenges in cloud firewall management:
Inbound and outbound firewall rules:
Inbound rules play the role of protecting the network against incoming traffics, for instance, malware, disallowed connections, denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. On the other hand, in order to protect the outgoing traffics from the network, the outbound rules play a significant role. There are several firewall rules regarding traffic source, traffic destination, service, allowance, and denial of the traffic.
Challenges:
In order to establish an effective network security policy, firewall rules play a significant role. It is important to note that the management of firewall rules and the changes in the rules is very much risky because it can cause the blocking of legitimate traffic and making them offline, or even it can result in hacking. Therefore, while managing the firewall rules, one needs to take care of several things such as i) assessment of the risk of the firewall’s policy, ii) maintenance of the optimized firewall rules, iii) management of the firewall changes, iv) demonstration of the regulatory and policy compliance.
Firewall policy and challenges:
Elements of a good policy:
The purpose of an effective firewall policy is to document the rules across multiple devices. Therefore, the policy needs to clarify the existence and intention of each rule. A good firewall policy deals with documentation and tracking the purpose of the rule, how it affects the application, services, users, and devices, the expiration date of the rules, and authorization of the rules. In order to manage the change requests, a firewall policy consists of formal change procedures. A good firewall policy has to have explicit drop rules, not the ‘Accept all’ rules in order to allow specific traffic in identified services and to block unauthorized traffics. Therefore, to have detailed information about the traffic, every cloud firewall management consists of a built-in reporting tool. It is important to reviews the firewall policies regularly in order to avoid false positives and to remain up-to-date.
Challenges:
The challenges regarding the firewall policies, firewall rules, firewall compliances, and changes are not only associated with the firewall technology but also reflect how the integration of the firewall configuration is effective with the business security policies. Due to the emergence of a number of applications and devices, the management of firewall policies has become difficult as it can result in the offline of the entire network and jeopardize the security against cyber attacks. If the implementation of the firewall policy management solutions is poor, it can result in substantial business risks and several damages can occur, for instance, a) Redundant firewall rules can result in cyber-attacks and the access of illegal network, b) Due to the government and industry regulations, differences can occur in firewall compliances, c) the interruption in the business application can occur due to the inappropriate modification of firewall rules.
Therefore, in order to make effective firewall policies, as an administrator, it is important to understand the firewall rules quite well and make effective decisions on the firewall policies on the basis of the infrastructure. The time period of implementation of the security policy changes depends on the firewall policy management tools. In order to simplify and automate the whole process, it is important to use the tools of highly customizable and smart workflows.
The management of changes in Cloud Firewall Management:
In the information-driven businesses of today’s world, the management of changes in the cloud firewall management deals with several risks of losing data and cyber-attacks. Therefore, in the context of overall network security and firewall policy management, the configuration of the firewall is an important aspect. Therefore, the administrators need to
i) identify all the firewall through leverage topology awareness that has received the impact of changes,
ii) assess the impact of every change in each firewall and ensure continuous compliance and security with regulatory standards,
iii) resolve change requests with the performance of actual changes,
- iv) Document the whole change in firewall management workflow.
Instead of the traditional network perimeter, now, firewall service providers are providing cloud services that rely on the firewall functionality to the cloud. In this today’s world where the business is dealing with the threats of cyberattacks, cloud firewall management can provide protection and rapid response to any security incident through clear and well-maintained firewall policy rules.
