Streamlined Change Management procedures
October 19, 2017

Streamlined Change Management procedures

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Modules Used

  • Security Manager
  • Policy Planner

Overall Satisfaction with FireMon

We adopted the PP module as an alternative to very resource intensive, manual legacy procedures we used to check for rule compliance in the past. Even though implementation is being championed by our NetSec department, we have integrated it with an End-to-End overarching process which allows us to reconcile and match information from rules, their 'owners' or requestors, and their intended use. Primarily, it eases and streamlines our change management procedures while giving us instant visibility into 'who' requested 'what' and 'why' it has been configured that way.
  • Streamlined change management procedures.
  • Great automation capabilities.
  • Built-in reporting capabilities.
  • Extensibility (customizations).
  • Perhaps the ability to add and customize dashboards (e.g. by power users) would be desirable.
  • The workflows are still somewhat not that 'intuitive'.
  • No hard dollar figures yet in my case (that will come later on as we collect more info), but it certainly has a positive impact in terms of 'productivity loss' (man-hours released, now dedicated to higher value initiatives).
  • Additionally, it has become a key factor in terms of overall visibility into our infrastructure, which allows us to take better, informed decisions with potentially high impact.
  • Also proves to be very useful if your organization is undertaking major 'house keeping' efforts in order to consolidate and rationalize network infrastructure
  • A negative impact is the fact that today we are not able to automate the deployment of rules in our specific infrastructure, so analysts are in a way 'duplicating' efforts by entering the changes in PP first, yet having to resort to other tool so as to input the actual commands (e.g. CLI, proprietary tools, etc.)

PP is a great tool to keep Change Management procedures 'under control' in large network infrastructures and/or in scenarios where modifications to infrastructure are deemed critical. It is also very useful as an auditing tool.

On the other hand, it might not be that necessary for SMB type of infrastructures.