Things to keep in mind to successfully manage firewall migration
The security of the information is the key concern of today’s business. To deal with the security issues, organizations are now focusing on ensuring strong security for the access to corporate data, installation of critical security updates, and the security of connectivity to the data center from external users as well as internal users. This security issue gets more complicated and sensitive when you migrate your security policy to another platform.
Everything in the technology of cloud computing and distributed data center is going through abrupt changes. Therefore, it is very common that you may need to migrate the security policy to new platforms. Thus, it comes to the question of controlling and managing firewall migration. It is also important to understand how to manage firewall migration when solutions from multiple vendors are available to you with both physical and virtual appliances and you want to use them. Thus, depending on how you manage firewall migration, a firewall migration can be very simple or even a lot more complicated.
Managing Firewall Migration:
If you want to manage your firewall migration effectively, you need to take care of the following things-
- Creation of a powerful firewall and the development security visibility map:
Before starting the migration process, it is important to document all the aspects of your firewall. You also require to develop a plan to understand the present and future needs. To make a plan, first, you need to gather information. In order to include all information regarding technical connectivity, it is important to create a dynamic and visual map for the traffic and architecture of your firewall.
- Preparation for Policy Migration:
After the development of a security visibility map, it is important to understand and document all the security policies throughout your network. The firewall migration does not always involve one security appliance, instead, one may need to deal with multiple security vendors due to the dynamic nature of the data center of modern-day. Therefore, the preparation for the policy migration around the heterogeneous platforms is becoming a significant concern of policymakers. You need to understand the algorithms of each end-point of the network of the firewall and identify the necessary security policies.
- Analysis of the Business for the Creation of a Migration Path:
To prepare for the firewall migration, the most important thing is that you need to understand the impact of your business. Therefore, it is important to investigate how the applications of your business interact with the security policies. Depending on the business units, a business can experience various firewall traffics. Thus, several data centers can be assigned to the security policies. As firewall migration can impact your business in several ways, therefore, you need to focus to reduce the impact as much as possible. Effective interaction between the business model of an organization and the firewall and security technologies is very essential.
Finally, if you can make appropriate planning considering the business model of your organization, firewall migration can not be so difficult for you. You just have to have good visibility of security architecture and use the right tools to make a plan in order to minimize the migration complexity.
