Virtual Firewall Support with MSPs in Mind

More MSPs are now relying on hosted, multi-tenant environments to deliver business services. Virtual firewalls are being deployed to deliver privacy and security without overwhelming IT with unnecessary hardware.

Virtual firewalls provide a similar mutual exclusivity and security as their physical counterparts, but with the added benefit of hosting multiple firewalls from one physical device. ManageEngine’s Firewall Analyzer is designed to capitalize on efficiencies with monitoring software to oversee physical and virtual firewalls.

Looking to attract the attention of MSPs, it now supports logs from virtual firewalls in market-leading Cisco Systems, Check Point and Fortinet devices, with no special configuration required. The benefit to MSPs, says ManageEngine, is the ability to cost-effectively monitor, analyze and report on physical firewalls as well as the firewalls in virtualized environments.

Firewall Analyzer automatically recognizes logs originating from the virtual firewalls. The new virtual firewall support is best suited for enterprises and MSPs that run multi-vendor, multi-tenant environments and need to offer virtual firewall service for each of the vendors exclusively, says the company.

To assure privacy requirements in a multi-tenant environment, the software supports user-based client views, which empower MSPs with client-specific firewall reports and alerts for individual customers.

That’s something that attracted IT infrastructure service provider Computacenter, said Scott Fenna, a senior consultant. Firewall Analyzer is now suited to monitor traffic, manage configuration changes, detect network anomalies, track bandwidth usage, archive firewall logs and generate security compliance audit reports for the three vendors’ virtual firewalls.

“Our customers are facing an increasing need for managing vendor-agnostic virtualized environments,” said Pravin Kumar, product manager for ManageEngine Firewall Analyzer. “To best support those requirements, we have extended the capability of Firewall Analyzer to monitor, analyze and report not only on physical firewalls but also for firewalls in virtualized environments.”

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