FireMon is a real-time security policy management solution built for today’s complex multi-vendor, enterprise environments. Supporting the latest firewall and policy enforcement technologies spanning on-premises networks to the cloud, FireMon delivers visibility and control across the entire IT landscape to automate policy changes, meet compliance standards, to minimize policy-related risk. Since creating their policy management solution in 2004, FireMon states they've helped…
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Lacework
Score 6.0 out of 10
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Lacework is a cloud-native application protection platform offered as-a-Service; delivering build-time to run-time threat detection, behavioral anomaly detection, and cloud compliance across multicloud environments, workloads, containers, and Kubernetes.
FireMon is best used in a large environment (for example, I have >100 firewalls in my environment). It's best used when trying to improve security posture and showing changes in firewall security over time. It might not be the best choice for smaller environments or those that aren't concerned about security management.
Lacework is well suited for behavioral analysis. One thing to consider thought is in the early stages there will be quite a bit of noise generated by Lacework. There will be a higher volume alerts generated initially - until a good baseline is generated. Overall Lacework is good with alert handling - integration with Slack is good.
The shell is locked out and we can't run any general centos commands. The implementation and maintainence of the arch is very complex. Even with the right identifiers on log messages the log collection keeps failing. The warning messages on the device are ambiguous. The log messages on firemon are a bit confusing and don't show the exact issue.
FireMon has been relatively stable overall. However, there have been a handful of times where we had issues with the console. For example, we couldn't update which devices to include in a security assessment. The initial suggestion from support was to just reboot it. It seems like there weren't many other options available such as to restart services before going to the extreme of a complete reboot.
I'm not sure we have the largest implementation of FireMon out there but we do have a few 1000 devices being probed by FireMon. Overall, the system's performance has been rock solid. The console refreshes quickly and reports are generated within an expected timeframe.
FireMon technical support is awesome! They respond quickly to our requests and they are well trained and very knowledgeable about the tool. Some issues have to be referred to the development team, but technical support largely provides solutions for any issues that we may have.
I has worked with AlgoSec and while they are very similar product, I find the FireMon is easier to understand and get rolling with. While both require some learning, FireMon is by far the easier one. Once you have an understanding of how things are arranged and labeled you can easily import firewalls and begin to work on them to improve them
Compared to Sysdig Falco (the free open-source IDS), Lacework helps security teams by providing actionable alerts and a user-friendly interface that gives you an overview of all workloads being monitored, and detailed insights into these workloads if needed. Falco requires you to build your own integration and interface around it, including a mechanism to whitelist certain alerts. This made it harder for the security team to focus their time on potential intrusions.
Firemon Is easily scalable and maintainable with any size team. Although it requires some tech debt, it is well worth the time to invest to ensure compliance is visible and reports are accurate. Although our environment is very large we do not fully utilize the scalability of the Firemon product.
Being a FinTech company, financial institutions who partner with us want to know that we are appropriately maintaining a Security, Risk and Compliance program that maintains a level of comfort for their vendor management. Lacework gives us the ability to monitor and maintain a level of security for our infrastructure that puts our partners at ease, reduces the revenue cycle for new partners and opens doors to the future.
