ManageEngine Broadens Firewall Analyzer For Cloud Management And Tracking

Remote monitoring and management (RMM) vendor ManageEngine is hoping to add another arrow in the quiver of service providers focused on helping clients manage security in cloud and hybrid environments. The firm yesterday rolled out a new cloud control feature for its security log analysis and firewall device management software, Firewall Analyzer.

An agentless log analytics and configuration management tool for network security devices, Firewall Analyzer offers managed service providers the capabilities to fill in gaps in security monitoring and analysis, change management, employee monitoring, policy enforcement and capacity planning. The tool supports nearly all open source and commercial network firewalls, IDS/IPS, VPNs, proxies and similar security devices.

According to a recent survey by Firemon, 90 percent of organizations still lean on firewalls to provide access controls in cloud and virtualized environments. But as the boundaries of the corporate networks and corporate-controlled data are blurred by SaaS, mobile apps and employee-owned devices, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to shoehorn old control methods into new architectures. It’s one of the big reasons why shadow IT has become so prevalent these days, as employees find new devices and new cloud services to manipulate and transport data conveniently.

In fact, according to a poll conducted by security company Centrify at the recent Cloud Expo Europe, 67 percent of organizations admitted that cloud apps were being deployed without the IT department’s knowledge or involvement. More alarming, one in five respondents said that 10 to 20 percent of cloud apps were shadow IT projects.

It’s this gap that pushed ManageEngine to revamp its management tool.                 

“When security monitoring expands up to the cloud, which has no clear boundary demarcation, Firewall Analyzer has to brace up to meet the challenge,” said Pravinkumar Rajendran, product manager for Firewall Analyzer at ManageEngine.

The new cloud control features in Firewall Analyzer will make it possible for organizations to create audit trails and track a number of key metrics, including bandwidth consumption and events triggered by specific apps and app categories, as well as per user app usage statistics. The new features are currently offered in beta.

“The overall shift in IT demands intelligent monitoring and reporting of security events,” Rajendran said. “We foresaw this and strengthened Firewall Analyzer with new dimension reports to monitor mobile and cloud apps, app categories and app usage by users. With these reports, the security administrator can find out what is happening beyond the network but is still having an impact on the network.”