

As such, you should automate the process to audit your firewalls because it’s important to continually audit for compliance, not just at a particular point in time.īasically, a firewall is a cybersecurity tool that manages connections between different internal or external networks that can accept or reject connections, or filter them under specific parameters. And that takes a toll on your information security staff.Īs networks become more complex, so does auditing. That’s because when firewall administrators manually conduct audits, they must rely on their own experiences and expertise, which usually varies greatly among organizations, to determine if a particular firewall rule should or shouldn’t be included in the configuration file.Īdditionally, because the documentation of the current rules and the evolution of their changes isn’t typically up to date, it takes time and resources to manually find, organize, and review all of the firewall rules to determine how compliant you are. However, these audits can also play a critical role in reducing risk and actually improve firewall performance by optimizing the firewall rule base.īecause of today’s multi-vendor network environments, which usually include tens or hundreds of firewalls running thousands of firewall rules, it’s practically impossible to conduct a manual cybersecurity audit. These audits ensure that your firewall configurations and rules adhere to the requirements of external regulations and your internal cybersecurity policy. Because of additional regulations and standards pertaining to information security, including Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS), the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX), the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and ISO 27001, organizations are putting more emphasis on compliance as well as the auditing of their cybersecurity policies and cybersecurity controls.Įven if your company doesn’t have to comply with industry or government regulations and cybersecurity standards, it still makes sense to conduct comprehensive audits of your firewalls on a regular basis.
