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An Integrated Firewall Management Platform

Security concerns in computer networks resulted in a remarkable proliferation of network firewalls. However, the mere presence of more firewalls in the network is not a guarantee of more secure networks. The average expertise of today’s firewall administrator is probably lower than it was a few years ago, resulting in an increased possibility of faulty installations, poor configuration and ineffective monitoring. This scenario calls for safer and more cost-efficient procedures for firewall deployment and maintenance. This paper presents a framework we have developed for integrated management of firewall appliances. The advantages of such a framework are manifold: it reduces installation and maintenance costs (several firewalls become remotely installable and manageable from a single remote location); it simplifies firewall configuration (firewall policies are definable using an easyto-use graphical interface, rather than the error-prone mechanisms required by most firewall implementations); it simplifies the resolution of hardware failures (since firewall configuration if kept in a remote database, it is sufficient to replace the faulty hardware and automatically upload the saved configuration into the new hardware); it enables the administration of geographically distributed firewall environments; and it provides an integrated monitoring facility that concentrates logs and health reports from several firewalls in a single database.