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A firewall is only as strong as its configuration and the team managing it. Poorly configured firewalls with bloated rulesets, outdated firmware, and misconfigured VPN gateways are regularly exploited by attackers — often years after the original misconfiguration. Infraspine's firewall management service keeps your perimeter security properly configured, continuously monitored, and compliant with industry standards, with a <5-minute policy change SLA and zero-breach track record under management.
Firewall deployments typically receive significant attention at initial deployment and then comparatively little ongoing management. Rule sets grow as new applications and users are added but rarely get cleaned up. Firmware updates are delayed because of change management concerns and never quite make it onto the schedule. VPN configurations remain with default settings that vendor advisories have since flagged as insecure. Over time, what was a well-configured firewall becomes a poorly understood security liability.
NGFW technology raises both the ceiling and the floor. Modern NGFWs from Fortinet, Palo Alto, and Check Point can perform application-aware inspection, SSL decryption, user-identity-based policy enforcement, and integrated threat prevention — capabilities that traditional firewalls simply do not have. But they require expert configuration to deliver this value. A misconfigured NGFW with default application control policies and disabled SSL inspection is providing almost no additional security over a basic ACL.
Policy management is where ongoing value is created. Every change request — a new application, a new branch, a new remote access requirement — needs to be evaluated for security impact before being implemented, documented in the change log, and reviewed quarterly for continued necessity. This discipline, applied consistently, is what separates organisations that use their firewall as a genuine security control from those that use it as a network traffic director with aspirational security labels.
NGFW vs Traditional Firewall
From initial NGFW deployment through ongoing policy management, IPS tuning, VPN, and compliance reporting.
Next-Generation Firewalls are fundamentally different from traditional packet-filtering firewalls. Where traditional firewalls inspect IP addresses and port numbers, NGFWs perform deep packet inspection, identify applications regardless of port, enforce user-identity-based policies, decrypt and inspect encrypted traffic, and apply machine-learning-based threat prevention inline. Our team designs and deploys NGFW architectures for your environment — whether single-site, multi-site, data centre, or hybrid cloud — with high-availability configurations to eliminate single points of failure.
Firewall rule sets grow over time and almost never shrink. After three years of operation, a typical firewall ruleset contains a significant proportion of rules that are redundant, overly permissive, or shadowed by other rules above them — a phenomenon known as firewall rule creep. Our rule review service analyses your entire ruleset, identifies unused rules (rules that have never matched traffic), overly broad rules (any-to-any permissions that should be restricted), and rule ordering inefficiencies that create security gaps or performance overhead.
Intrusion Prevention Systems and Intrusion Detection Systems add a critical layer of threat detection beyond basic firewall policy. Our IPS/IDS management service handles signature subscription management (ensuring you are always running current threat signatures), tuning of detection sensitivity to reduce false positives while maintaining detection coverage, and alerting integration with our NOC so every IPS alert receives human review. We operate IPS in blocking mode by default where network architecture permits, providing active threat prevention rather than passive detection.
Remote access has become a permanent fixture for most organisations, and VPN security has never been more critical. Vulnerable VPN gateways are consistently among the top initial access vectors exploited by ransomware groups. We manage your VPN infrastructure from initial configuration through ongoing policy management, certificate lifecycle, user provisioning and deprovisioning, split-tunnel vs full-tunnel policy, and MFA enforcement. Site-to-site VPN tunnels connecting branch offices or cloud environments are managed with the same rigour as remote access deployments.
Controlling which websites and applications your users can access from the corporate network is both a security control and a productivity management function. Our web filtering management covers URL category-based filtering (blocking malware distribution sites, phishing pages, and inappropriate content categories), application control policies (restricting or logging specific application usage), and SSL inspection to ensure encrypted traffic does not bypass your content policies. Policy exceptions are managed through a formal request process with business justification and time-limited approval.
Firewall configurations and rule sets are frequently subject to compliance audit requirements. PCI-DSS Requirement 1 dedicates extensive controls to firewall management including quarterly rule reviews, justification documentation for all rules, and separation of duties. Our compliance reporting service provides the evidence auditors need: timestamped rule change logs, quarterly rule review documentation, firewall configuration baselines, and traffic analysis showing that network segmentation controls are functioning as designed.
Firewall Vendors We Manage
Common questions from organisations evaluating managed firewall services.
Stop leaving your perimeter security on autopilot. Get properly configured, continuously monitored, and compliance-ready firewall management.
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