Organizations must ensure that appropriate security policies are in place to protect their investments and optimize their security effectiveness. However, as networks expand and grow in complexity, network operations teams are challenged to manage large numbers of firewalls and network devices from multiple vendors. They must address issues such as fragmented infrastructure, functional silos, staffing issues, fragmented management, and inconsistent policy enforcement.
Additionally, information technology (IT) teams are unable to fully utilize their existing firewall investments and may face compliance issues, audit failures and cyberattacks.
A Cybersecurity Insiders report shows that 58 percent of organizations have more than 1,000 firewall rules and 18 percent have more than 5,000 rules, demonstrating the complexity of managing firewall rule sets for many organizations.
As networks become more complex, organizations continue to struggle to secure a vastly expanded hybrid attack surface. To effectively protect organizations, it is now more important than ever to have strong and accurate security processes in place. Therefore, implementing best practices for firewall rules is critical to thriving in this new era of increased cybersecurity risk.
Benefits of Firewall Cleanup
Simplifying and optimizing firewall rules can bring several benefits to an organization. First, a sanitized firewall can significantly enhance security by minimizing the attack surface and reducing the risk of unauthorized access, data breaches, and cyberattacks. An effective set of firewall rules can also significantly improve an organization's defense posture and guard against potential breaches.
In addition to improving security, firewall rule optimization and cleanup can lead to better performance. Firewalls can process traffic more efficiently by eliminating redundant or outdated rules, reducing latency and increasing network throughput. This enables faster and more reliable network communications, ultimately increasing productivity.
Compliance is another key aspect. Many organizations are bound by regulatory compliance requirements, and a cleaned up firewall can help ensure compliance with these standards.
By aligning firewall rules with regulatory requirements, organizations can reduce the risk of non-compliance, penalties and fines. A clean firewall also provides better audit trails and documentation, simplifying compliance reporting and demonstrating compliance with industry regulations.
Cleaning up your network firewall involves a few basic steps to ensure the firewall is optimized for better security and performance.
Here are four steps to clear your network firewall:
Clean up overlapping rules: Review firewall rules and eliminate any hidden and redundant rules that have the same purpose or allow/deny the same traffic. Eliminating these rules will help minimize the attack surface and reduce the risk of unauthorized access, data breaches, and cyberattacks.
Remove Duplicate Objects: View objects used in firewall rules (for example, IP addresses, port numbers, etc.) and remove any duplicate or unused objects. This helps simplify firewall rule sets and prevents potential conflicts or misconfigurations.
Delete or disable unused rules: Delete or disable any firewall rules that are no longer needed or serve a legitimate business purpose. This reduces clutter and complexity in the ruleset and ensures that only necessary rules are active, improving the overall performance of the firewall.
Refine partially used rules and objects: Following the least access approach, refine any firewall rules or objects that are only partially used or not optimized, such as rules with too permissive settings or objects with unnecessary attributes. This ensures that rules and objects are configured for maximum security and efficiency.
To ensure the seamless integration of new rules and maintain an organized and effective network firewall, the implementation of change request lifecycle management is also critical. This approach goes beyond relying solely on regular cleaning and emphasizes the importance of ongoing order.
The process of maintaining a clean and optimized network firewall is an ongoing effort that includes regular review, optimization, and ongoing monitoring. By adhering to these proactive measures and continually revisiting and fine-tuning firewall rules, organizations can ensure that their firewalls remain effective at maintaining a secure posture and protecting their networks from potential security threats.