“58% of firewalls fail high severity compliance checks” reports FireMon

The new operational analysis from the FireMon Insights platform comprises 9.2 million policy checks and examines policy behaviour across complex hybrid networks at scale. It reveals a structural security operations problem: manual policy management is “woefully inefficient” and allows risk across the attack surface to continue to expand rapidly. This is primarily due to creating an environment in which high severity policy failures persist over extended periods of time, exacerbated by unused and redundant rules.

The FireMon Insights 2.0 release addresses this discrepancy by moving beyond static dashboards and point-in-time reporting to deliver continuous operational intelligence for enterprise policy environments, all powered by AI. More than simply layering AI on to reporting, the new version imbues AI with the operational context behind policy data. 

Instead of simply reporting policy status, the AI-powered platform helps security teams identify where operational risk is accumulating, which issues persist over time and where automation can reduce policy complexity and improve control across hybrid networks.

Security controls are only as effective as the policy that governs them. Any lack of a policy control plane allows these issues to persist and compound.

The anonymised data from FireMon Insights deployments reveals the following:

*58% of firewalls fail high-severity checks. 48% fail at critical severity. 69% of firewall rules are unused and 45% lack an owner or documentation, introducing audit gaps and operational blind spots

*17% of rules are redundant or shadowed, increasing operational complexity and masking potential misconfigurations

*automated policy workflows highlight a 67% lower change-related risk delta compared with manual changes

Control problem

“Firewall complexity is no longer just an operational problem,” explained Jody Brazil, CEO of FireMon. “It’s a control problem. Security teams have massive investments in firewalls, cloud and segmentation platforms, but without control of policy those environments become difficult to manage securely. The problem is no longer lack of tools. It’s about a lack of operational control.”

By combining policy data with operational context, FireMon Insights 2.0 helps teams to identify risk faster, prioritise remediation intelligently and automate repetitive tasks that slow secure policy changes and increase operational risk.

In the first six months of operation, customers using FireMon Policy Manager significantly reduced control failures by up to 31%.

The new and enhanced capabilities underpinning these gains include: 

*policy change intelligence: built-in policy change analysis eliminates manual export and spreadsheet work, while also identifying rework, operational churn and opportunities to reduce policy risk through automation

*workflow intelligence: visibility into how change requests move through the policy workflow, highlighting rejected requests, redesign loops, approval bottlenecks and opportunities to safely increase automation

*automation effectiveness: analytics that identify repetitive manual work and pinpoint where automation can reduce cost, improve consistency and lower policy change risk

*control failure analysis: deeper visibility into which controls fail most often and where failures recur, helping teams to prioritise the highest-risk issues across the environment

*policy posture trends: understand where policy is breaking down, what’s driving exposure and what to fix first through scoring and trend analysis over time

*control-level visibility: Domain-based, control-level pass/fail visibility helps teams to quickly identify where policy and compliance issues exist across managed devices

Vulnerability of connected systems 

“Technologies like Mythos are shining a bright light on a reality security teams can no longer ignore: any connected system is vulnerable,” observed Brazil. “As AI accelerates the speed and scale of attacks, firewalls, segmentation and policy governance become more important than ever. Our Insights data shows most organisations still lack the operational control needed to consistently manage policy across hybrid environments. That’s why network segmentation, microsegmentation and continuous policy governance are becoming foundational for reducing the attack surface and limiting blast radius.”

With Insights 2.0, FireMon is strengthening its role as the network security control plane for enterprises operating across firewalls, cloud, segmentation and hybrid infrastructure.

*FireMon Insights 2.0 is available now for all FireMon customers. Customers can also register for the Insights 2.0 webinar online