Protected, Productive and Proactive – the Three P’s of Firewall Management & Reporting
As corporate networks grow in size, so do their needs for cybersecurity. Today’s threats are more sophisticated than ever and network security administrators feel they have targets on both sides of their shirts. They spend their days defending against outsider security breaches as well as guarding against unauthorized insider violations. Add to that the need to meet compliance regulations, and administrators find themselves unable to manage firewall security policies manually without engendering an unacceptably high risk and cost. A major retail chain would have thousands of firewalls protecting a single internal network. How would a system administrator productively and proactively protect the security needs of a house with so many doors?
To solve this problem, administrators have turned to firewall management and reporting applications to manage the complexity of their firewalls and report on the thousands of security violations that occur daily. Only true Global Management Systems allow this easy and effective management, and Dell SonicWALL’s Global Management System is an industry-leading example of such an application. It enables administrators to be productive and proactive by ensuring the protection a firewall provides against threats from within and without. To better visualize these areas, let’s dive into each with helpful graphics.
PROTECTED
In near-realtime, the Global Management System (GMS) provides visualizations and statistical analysis of the historical threats detected and blocked by Dell SonicWALL next-generation firewalls. Intrusions, viruses, spyware, attacks, phishing, denial-of-service, zero-day exploits, SQL-injections, cross-site scripting vulnerabilities, trojans, keyloggers, and all types of cybersecurity events are logged by our firewalls. The firewalls employ Dell SonicWALL’s threat database as their defense using 15+ million threat signatures. The Dell SonicWALL GRID Network updates this database continuously by collecting threats 24x7 from our 1+ million firewalls and in turn, updates the firewalls continually with new signatures, so that every one of our customers is protected within hours after each new threat is discovered.
 |
GMS can render every on-screen visualization of threat data as a softcopy report. Administrators can customize reports to filter and sort on any combination of firewalls, timeframes, threats, users, IP addresses, geographies or other parameter that is logged by the firewall. This flexibility allows virtually any variety of report at any level of detail desired by the administrator. These reports prove the efficacy of protection, allowing administrators to determine the nature of a threat, track the activities of a user, or prove the security compliance of the network. Administrators also use the data in these reports to refine the firewall security policies to strike the perfect balance between security and access. Finally, administrators can schedule these custom reports to run and to be emailed automatically to interested parties.
PRODUCTIVE
Dell’s Global Management System enables administrators to configure, deploy and monitor security policies for multiple firewalls from a single login window. For networks with tens, hundreds, or thousands of firewalls, GMS enables ten/hundred/thousand-fold increases in productivity by reducing the number of repetitive administrative actions required by the customer. This could save hours of work in updating and maintaining an environment to keep it secure, allowing the company to spend its resources on innovative, revenue-driving efforts.
 |
GMS also assures productivity and protection by tracking the internal usage of disallowed web applications, time-wasting websites, and unauthorized data transfers. GMS has a reporting facility that calculates the data usage costs for Internet access, allowing the administrator to optimally manage and save on the bandwidth usage on a website-by-website, application-by-application basis.
PROACTIVE
GMS enables administrators to efficiently manage the performance of their firewalls through its rich on-screen dashboards and powerful policy management features. Administrators can “see” proof of the protection that the firewalls are providing while assuring themselves that internal users are maximizing their productivity and not wasting bandwidth. And GMS boosts the administrator’s policy management productivity for thousands of firewalls at a time, providing them with the same easy-to-use interface they use when managing a single firewall.
 |
So now could you imagine yourself as a system administrator of thousands of firewalls? Perhaps you can now that you’re armed with the three fundamental factors required for firewall management in today’s complex environments, only possible with an application like the Dell Global Management System. To find out more visit us at http://www.sonicwall.com/us/en/products/GMS-Application.html or contact us at http://www.sonicwall.com/us/en/how-to-buy.html