Network Security Policy Management (NSPM) software refers to tools and platforms used to create, manage, and enforce network security policies across an organization’s IT infrastructure. These policies define the rules and protocols that govern how data is accessed, used, and protected within a network.
NSPM software is crucial for ensuring that network security policies are consistently applied and enforced, helping to reduce the risk of cyberattacks and data breaches.
One key importance of NSPM software is its ability to centralize and automate the management of network security policies, which can be complex and time-consuming when done manually. By providing a single interface for policy management, NSPM software enables network security and cybersecurity professionals to more effectively monitor and control access to their network, identify and respond to security threats in real-time, and ensure compliance with regulatory requirements.
Additionally, NSPM software can help organizations improve their overall security posture by providing visibility into their network environment, allowing them to identify and mitigate potential vulnerabilities. Overall, NSPM software plays a crucial role in helping network security and cybersecurity professionals effectively manage and secure their organization’s network infrastructure.
In the past, Network Security Policy Management (NSPM) software primarily focused on providing basic functionalities such as firewall rule management, access control, and policy configuration. These early NSPM tools were often limited in scope and functionality, requiring manual intervention for many tasks and lacking the ability to scale effectively with growing network complexities.
However, as network security challenges have become more sophisticated and diverse, NSPM software has evolved significantly. Modern NSPM solutions now offer a comprehensive suite of features, including automated policy deployment and enforcement, real-time monitoring and reporting, and integration with other security tools and platforms.
This evolution has been driven by the increasing complexity of IT environments, the rise of cloud computing and virtualization, and the growing importance of compliance and regulatory requirements.
Today, NSPM software is an essential component of any organization’s cybersecurity strategy, helping to streamline policy management, improve security posture, and reduce the risk of data breaches and cyberattacks.
The continued evolution of NSPM software is likely to focus on enhancing automation, integration, and analytics capabilities to keep pace with the ever-changing threat landscape and the increasing demands of modern IT environments.
Best Network Security Policy Management (NSPM) Software: What To Look For
When choosing the best Network Security Policy Management (NSPM) software for their organization, there are several factors, features, and capabilities that organizations should consider:
- Policy Creation and Management: The software should provide a user-friendly interface for creating and managing network security policies. It should allow for the creation of granular policies based on specific criteria such as user roles, device types, and application requirements.
- Automation: Look for NSPM software that offers automation capabilities to streamline policy deployment and enforcement. Automation can help reduce manual errors and ensure policies are consistently applied across the network.
- Scalability: The software should be able to scale with your organization’s network infrastructure. It should be capable of managing policies for a growing number of devices, users, and applications without sacrificing performance.
- Integration: Choose NSPM software that integrates seamlessly with your existing security tools and platforms. This can help improve visibility and coordination across your security infrastructure.
- Real-time Monitoring and Reporting: The software should provide real-time monitoring and reporting capabilities to help you identify and respond to security threats quickly. Look for features such as alerts, dashboards, and customizable reports.
- Compliance Management: Ensure the NSPM software helps you meet regulatory compliance requirements by providing tools for auditing, reporting, and enforcing compliance policies.
- Policy Analysis and Optimization: Look for software that provides tools for analyzing and optimizing your network security policies. This can help you identify and eliminate redundant or conflicting policies, improving overall efficiency and security.
- User Access Controls: The software should offer robust user access controls to ensure that only authorized users have the ability to create, modify, or delete network security policies.
- Cloud Support: If your organization uses cloud services, ensure that the NSPM software supports cloud-based deployments and can manage policies for both on-premises and cloud-based resources.
- Vendor Reputation and Support: Finally, consider the reputation and support offerings of the NSPM software vendor. Choose a vendor with a track record of providing reliable, responsive support and regular software updates.
Best Network Security Policy Management (NSPM) Software Used By Security Professionals
1. AlgoSec
Policies govern all network security aspects, from access control, authentication, and encryption, to network segmentation, patch management, incident response, monitoring, and compliance. Sitting at the heart of the security network, AlgoSec supports these policies by integrating with the leading DevOps solutions and leading cloud, network security, and application-dependency vendors, to ensure sweeping visibility, automate and secure policy changes, and provide complete network security policy management across hybrid environments. With almost two decades of leadership in Network Security Policy Management, over 1,800 of the world’s most complex organizations trust AlgoSec to help secure their most critical workloads across public cloud, private cloud, containers, and on-premises networks.
STATS & SPECIFICATIONS:
- Continuous visibility: AlgoSec cloud provides holistic visibility for all your cloud accounts, assets, and security controls. Get a unified view of the entire multi-cloud estate from a single console.
- Risk management: Manage similar controls in a single policy to save time and prevent misconfigurations. Identify risky rules so you can confidently remove them and avoid data breaches.
- Policy cleanup: Easily identify unused rules and remove them with confidence and avoid bloated rulesets.
IDEAL FOR:
- Enterprise
- Mid-market
PRODUCT WEBSITE: NSPM Solutions | AlgoSec Cloud
2. Palo Alto Networks Panorama
Manage all your firewalls and security tools. Most firewall breaches are caused by firewall misconfigurations. Panorama monitors, configures and automates security management.
STATS & SPECIFICATIONS:
- Keep firewall rules consistent across your network: Panorama manages network security with a single security rule base for firewalls, threat prevention, URL filtering, application awareness, user identification, sandboxing, file blocking, access control and data filtering. Dynamic updates simplify administration and improve your security posture.
- Gain visibility into traffic and actionable insights: Panorama provides an interactive, graphical view of applications, URLs, threats, data files and patterns traversing your Palo Alto Networks firewalls. Now you can easily visualize network activity, threat activity, and blocked activity, and create customized views of current and historical data.
- Identify infected hosts and spot malicious behavior: The automated correlation engine in Panorama reduces data clutter so you can identify compromised hosts and surface malicious behavior more quickly, reducing the dwell time of critical threats in your network.
- Optimize firewall configuration and reduce errors: Panorama helps you organize firewall management with hierarchical device groups, dynamic address and user groups, role-based access control and policy tags. Preconfigured templates shorten the time needed to create new rules sets.
IDEAL FOR:
- Enterprise
- Mid-market
PRODUCT WEBSITE: Palo Alto Networks Panorama
3. Tufin NSPM
Do you have 10,000+ devices and 200M+ routes to manage? No problem. Eliminate manual firewall management tasks. Centralize on-prem and cloud enforcement point management. Automate network access changes Centralize segmentation planning, deploying and monitoring. Achieve continuous compliance automation.
STATS & SPECIFICATIONS:
- Automate security policy management: Tufin reduces the complexity of managing network enforcement points on your internal networks and in the cloud, letting your network security team move faster and safer to deliver network access, perform troubleshooting, and respond to audits. Centralize and automate firewall management across both your on-premises and cloud firewalls with automated rule cleanup, permissiveness reduction, decommissioning, and recertification of firewall rules. Even better, Tufin allows you to automate network access changes from on-prem to cloud and with the cloud. Our workflow automation is what sets Tufin apart from the competition, delivering improved business agility.
- Eliminate manual firewall management tasks: Saves thousands of hours a year by centralizing and automating the management of your on-premises and third-party cloud firewalls. Tufin visualizes your segmentation policies within a central dashboard, from which, you can refine or create new. It automates rule clean up risky rules, permissiveness reduction and access changes, while keeping you always audit ready.
- Manage network access across cloud environments: Tufin’s Orchestration Suite allows network and security teams to support DevOps processes by automatically integrating early detection, rapid remediation, and continuous compliance into the business application lifecycle. Tufin solutions support both on-premise and hybrid cloud networks where apps and resources are shared between the data center and public cloud platforms.
- Automate continuous compliance from on premises to cloud: Tufin’s security solutions support continuous compliance by ensuring network security policy management is aligned with regulations and internal policies consistently, even across hybrid cloud and multivendor networks. In addition, Tufin helps you maintain audit readiness through on-demand reporting and documentation of network security policy changes, approvals, exceptions, compliance changes, and other events.
IDEAL FOR:
- Enterprise
- Mid-market
PRODUCT WEBSITE: Tufin NSPM
4. Trellix ePolicy Orchestrator
Centralized security management platform to orchestrate and manage all your endpoints.
STATS & SPECIFICATIONS:
- Simplified management: Unify defense strategy, bring together different endpoints with native controls and reduce security operations dependency on multiple tools.
- Extensible platform: Comprehensive platform, helps security operations teams to plan and scale their operations model all while benefiting from true API integrations.
- Un-rivaled threat-intel: Threat Intelligence Exchange (TIE) and Intelligent Virtual Execution (IVX) integrations helps in effective sandboxing and thus identifying and stopping cyber attacks beforehand.
- Embrace native controls: Reduce complexity with common policy management of endpoint security while using native Windows system capabilities.
IDEAL FOR:
- Enterprise
- Mid-market
PRODUCT WEBSITE: Trellix ePolicy Orchestrator
5. FortiManager
FortiManager enables centralized management with automation-driven network configuration, visibility, and security policy management.
STATS & SPECIFICATIONS:
- Secure SD-WAN overlay orchestration: Enables secure SD-WAN provisioning and management across all branch offices and campuses.
- Centralized management: Provides central management of 100,000+ devices such as firewalls, switches and access points.
- Security operation: Reduces complexity and cost leveraging automation enabled via REST API, scripts, connectors, and automation stitches.
IDEAL FOR:
- Mid-market
- Small business
PRODUCT WEBSITE: FortiManager
6. FireMon
From rule creation to decertification, from network discovery to firewall cleanup, and from the data center to the cloud, FireMon enables security teams to streamline operations and automate workflows. FireMon delivers complete visibility and control across the entire IT environment to automate policy changes, compliance, and minimize policy-related risk.
STATS & SPECIFICATIONS:
- Achieve continuous compliance: Avoid audit headaches and fines stemming from compliance violations with FireMon’s consolidated compliance reporting, real-time violation detection, and automate rule recertification workflows.
- Change policies, not your security posture: Minimize the opportunity for error and outages while dramatically increasing policy deployment speed with end-to-end policy orchestration for rule creation and updates.
- Manage risk with real-time visibility and control: Identify, communicate, and mitigate risks before they’re exploited through custom business and best practice reviews, third-party scanner integrations, and modeling of risk and attack simulations.
IDEAL FOR:
- Enterprise
- Mid-market
PRODUCT WEBSITE: FireMon
7. Cisco Catalyst Center
Smarter, simpler network management. Optimize resources, reduce spending, and enhance your organization’s digital agility with a powerful management system that uses AI to connect, secure, and automate network operations.
STATS & SPECIFICATIONS:
- Scale at the speed of your business: Deploy networks faster with provisioning and configuration automation. Proactively scale your network using deep insights into capacity and performance. Improve time to resolution with AI diagnostics and remediation.
- Deliver optimal user experiences: Optimize Wi-Fi coverage and deliver services where they’re needed with 3D visualization. Gain visibility into the user experience and improve hybrid work experience with application insights.
- Secure the digital enterprise: Simplify zero-trust security for the workplace. Minimize exposure to security threats with an integrated security suite. Improve security posture and help to ensure compliance by using automated software and configuration management.
- Centrally manage the campus: Manage your entire network—campus and branch, wired and wireless, IT and OT—from a single console. Deploy the network management system anywhere to suit your needs, on-premises or in a public cloud, with a dedicated physical appliance or a virtual appliance.
IDEAL FOR:
- Enterprise
- Mid-market
PRODUCT WEBSITE: Cisco Catalyst Center
8. Junos Security Director
Security Director enables you to secure your architecture with consistent security policies across any environment and expands zero trust to all parts of the network from the edge into the data center. You’ll have unbroken visibility, policy configuration, administration, and collective threat intelligence all in one place.
STATS & SPECIFICATIONS:
- Centralized management: Configure and manage application security, firewalls, and security intelligence, along with VPN, IPS, and NAT security policies, all through a single interface, available both on-premises and in the cloud.
- Scalable security policy: Extend security policies across tens of thousands of SRX Series firewalls and site locations while granularly managing several logical system instances for each individual SRX Series device.
- Security assurance: Automate security policies across the network, including firewalls, routers, and switches, for accurate enforcement, consistent security, and compliance.
- Actionable attack insights: Automatically correlate detection events across your security stack, track each stage of an attack, and prioritize security incidents based on risk and severity.
IDEAL FOR:
- Mid-market
- Small business
PRODUCT WEBSITE: Junos Security Director
9. Opinnate NSPM
Eliminate boundaries in network security policy management. Analyze, optimize, automate & audit your security policies easily.
STATS & SPECIFICATIONS:
- Firewall rule optimization: Rule optimization stands as a vital aspect in the maintenance and management of firewalls.
- Policy change automation: Policy change automation becomes necessary when multiple firewalls, each from different vendors, are in place and there is a high volume of policy change requests.
- Firewall policy management: In multi-vendor topologies the firewall policies may not be centrally managed since each vendor has its own management system.
- User-aware policy management: User-aware firewall policy management is an effective way for organizations to improve their security posture and gain greater control over user access to network resources and applications.
IDEAL FOR:
- Enterprises
- Mid-market
PRODUCT WEBSITE: Opinnate NSPM
10. Ditno Network Governance
ditno provides a single unified management portal to create customized governance models that map to your business requirements and risk appetite. This IT security platform also creates micro-segmentation across the business. It detects non-compliant controls across on premise, cloud and hybrid hosting environments. It also delivers an easy-to-understand view of all network governance risks.
STATS & SPECIFICATIONS:
- Gain real-time visibility and identification of risk events.
- Configure compliance rules using compliance categories and tags.
- Easily analyse and identify non-compliant network security configuration.
- Drill into categories to find non-compliant tag pairs, then see the rules permitting non-compliant flows.
- Evaluate each network security rule in real-time to ensure it adheres to your compliance requirements.
- Achieve continuous security and governance across hosting environments including cloud and on-premise.
IDEAL FOR:
- Enterprises
- Mid-market
PRODUCT WEBSITE: Ditno Network Governance
11. SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager
Reduce cost, save work hours, and remain compliant using a comprehensive network management system.
STATS & SPECIFICATIONS:
- Stop worrying whether inventory spreadsheets and lists are accurate, up-to-date, and reliable. With SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager (NCM), you can quickly build an accurate inventory of your network devices by using network scanning and discovery to obtain up-to-date information on all network devices.
- Automation of network configuration management simplifies processes like scheduling regular backups, highlighting configuration errors, executing scripts, and maintaining organized configuration archives, so you can easily locate a backup file when you need it. Network Configuration Manager (NCM) takes the effort out of managing numerous device configurations in a heterogeneous network and minimizes network downtime.
- With Network Configuration Manager (NCM), you can ensure your network device files are backed up to protect against disaster scenarios. You can also work with templates to create “gold-standard” configs to roll out to new gear and obtain real-time change detection of config files.
IDEAL FOR:
- Enterprises
- Mid-market
PRODUCT WEBSITE: SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager
In Conclusion…
Choosing the best Network Security Policy Management (NSPM) software is a critical decision for organizations looking to enhance their cybersecurity posture. By considering factors such as policy creation and management, automation, scalability, integration, real-time monitoring and reporting, compliance management, policy analysis and optimization, user access controls, cloud support, and vendor reputation and support, organizations can select an NSPM solution that meets their specific needs and requirements.
The right NSPM software can help organizations streamline policy management, improve security effectiveness, and reduce the risk of data breaches and cyberattacks. It is essential for organizations to carefully evaluate their options and choose an NSPM solution that aligns with their security goals and infrastructure.