FireMon says that their increased cloud capabilities differentiate them enough in the NSPM market to justify them calling their platform the first agile one in the industry.
Network security policy management vendor FireMon has announced an update of their core network security policy management [NSPM] platform. NSPM has not been cloud-centric in the past, but these changes, extend fuller platform functionality into the cloud for the first time. As a result, FireMon says that they are significant enough to make this the industry’s first agile NSPM platform.
FireMon began life in 2005 as firewall configuration and workflow solution, but has expanded into a much broader NSPM platform play involving network security automation, compliance and risk mitigation.
“The nature of large enterprise environments is that there is a ton of heterogeneity,” said Tim Woods, FireMon’s VP of Technology Alliances. “They want to see what metrics they need to apply controls to, and today they want to see that across the entire hybrid real estate. So there is a need for both cloud and on-prem data control.”
Woods emphasized that FireMon’s expansion of its cloud presence with this release is a differentiating factor in the industry.
“We are moving into the cloud at an aggressive rate which was not part of NSPM in the past,” he said. “That’s what makes our platform more agile today, that we are combining it with further dynamics across the cloud around hybrid infrastructure. A lot of enterprises are struggling with tools that don’t translate into cloud, and the average large enterprise has 70-80 tech platforms. We give them a lens – a common pane of glass – that gives visibility across the full threat landscape, which enhances our value proposition.”
Woods said that this accelerates advantages that FireMon has always enjoyed in the NSPM market.
“There are a lot of real time discovery tools, but they don’t capture the context of the policies themselves in the way that we do, because we are actually inside, as a repository for the security policy,” he stated. “We don’t need 50 different correlation or analytics engines – just one – to provide all that rich metadata.”
FireMon already has an extensive roster of strategic vendor partners with which their headless orchestration API integrates, including ITSM platforms like ServiceNow, SOAR tools like Splunk Phantom and Palo Alto Cortex, and DevOps platforms like Red Hat Ansible and HashiCorp Terraform. However Woods – who in his role owns the relationship for these technology agreements – said that they are still not integrated with some major ones, and that the new cloud capabilities will help fix that.
“We had a large client come to us four weeks ago who was getting ready to engage with a large vendor who we don’t support – we are 1/16th their size – and they needed to know FireMon will engage this vendor on a tech alliance front so we can provide visibility into them,” Woods stated. “We have some untouched landscapes out there, so the potential for our growth is just huge.”
Woods emphasized the importance of the fact that in extending full platform functionality into the cloud, FireMon is now in the AWS cloud natively for the first time.”
“Our customers are from the Fortune 50 to the Fortune 2000, and this is how they want to consume our product,” he said. “Customers today don’t even want to download it. They want it to live in the cloud. So we are marching to that beat.”
Woods also said that from a channel perspective, the cloud expansion will bring FireMon partners back into the cloud space.
“The channel has felt cut out of many cloud activities, but we give them something they can bring to their customers here, and which gives then something they can really talk to their customers about. Our platform will empower the channel to take that message.”
