60 percent of enterprise firewalls fail critical checks
New research from FireMon shows that 60 percent of enterprise firewalls fail high-severity compliance checks immediately upon evaluation, with another 34 percent falling short at critical levels.
Using data collected anonymously from AI-powered analytics platform FireMon Insights deployments across large enterprises and regulated industries, the study found misconfigurations, outdated rules, and bloated policies that bog down performance and leave security teams struggling to keep up.
“Firewall complexity isn’t just a configuration issue, it’s a threat to resilience and trust,” says Jody Brazil, CEO and founder at FireMon. “Security teams are buried under policies they can’t explain, map to business objectives, or manage at scale. FireMon Insights cuts through the noise. It benchmarks your performance, exposing what’s been missed, and helping you take action before it turns into disruption.”
Among other findings 95 percent of application objects and 82 percent of service objects show zero usage, creating unnecessary overhead and expanding the attack surface. In addition 30 percent of firewall rules are completely unused, and 62.6 percent lack any owner or documentation, introducing audit gaps and operational blind spots. More than 10 percent of rules are redundant or shadowed, reducing performance and masking dangerous misconfigurations.
FireMon Insights delivers visibility across multi-vendor, hybrid environments with no waiting for scans or reliance on outdated dashboards. It enables network security operations to measure progress against business-aligned goals, course correct where needed and build a sustainable plan that reduces risk while supporting the pace of the organization.
“Collectively, the cybersecurity industry has been driving organizations to a point of sophistication that actually distracts their cyber strategy from implementing required capabilities and measuring operational outcomes,” says Dan Rheault, director of product management at FireMon. “Teams are turning to FireMon for a smarter, more sustainable path forward.”
You can find out more on the FireMon site.
Image credit: .shock/ depositphotos