Best Practices in Firewall Management

- Sabu Thaliyath

Introduction to Firewall

• In the front of perimeter-level defence

• Works mostly on ports and IP addresses

Be Specific

•Default policy must be Deny All

•Be specific in firewall rules i.e • Open only the port you need open

• Allow only the IPs that you need to give access to

Access Control

• Keep the responsibility/authority to change firewall with only 1 or 2 admins

Have a change request policy

• How the requests would be received ?

• Approvals required

Add description

• Every rule must have a description

Expiry date

• Keep an expiry date for user requested rules

• Remind the user when expiry date is nearing

Backup

• Take periodic backups of your firewall

Periodic Review

• Clean up expired rules

• Remove redundant or duplicate rules

Manage from central location

• Cloud based management would help

Compliment firewall

• Compliment the firewall with other security products – Intrusion Prevention System, Endpoint Security

Thank You

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