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In a survey conducted by SkyBox Security during the recent RSA security conference, the company uncovered surprising information about the prevalence of next-generation
firewalls, and the huge percentage of large organizations that do manual firewall management.
In a press release by SkyBox presented on Marketwire, the company reports 42 percent of respondents had more than 100 firewalls to manage, and 67 percent admitted that they have firewalls from multiple vendors. Of the fifty attendees surveyed, 54 percent said their firm employs more than 5 full-time people in day-to-day firewall management and security but only 21 percent of the firms use any automated firewall management products at all.
“The time required to define next-gen firewall rules at the user and application level is a big issue for more than 20% of survey-takers. Another common theme is the time and effort it takes to do basic firewall analysis: 25% of respondents raised this as a major concern. The prevalence of multiple types of firewalls from multiple vendors only exacerbates the problem, as was expressed by 18% of respondents.
‘The biggest challenge I’m facing today is having to do more with the same tools around administration, maintenance, and logging, and then finding the time to do the checks,’ said a senior manager of network and delivery services at a financial institution.”
