McAfee teams with Tufin to streamline firewall management

Tufin is teaming with McAfee to integrate their security products to reduce the time and cost of running firewalls and make it easier to draw on data needed to meet regulatory audits.

With the agreement, Tufin Security Suite (TSS) will be integrated with McAfee Firewall Enterprise and the McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator (ePO), bringing management, optimization, change automation and auditing tools to McAfee's products, the companies say.

The alternative would be to do the same functions manually, which is slower and more prone to error. These features include Tufin's recently available Automatic Policy Generation (APG), a feature that analyzes firewall logs, determines what seems to be normal, acceptable traffic and creates an efficient set of rules to allow critical traffic. Customers can use the APG rules as a base and modify them as they want.

The feature can be used to refine existing rules to tighten up those that are unnecessarily permissive, thereby improving security. TSS includes change-management features for handling change requests, designing rule changes and analyzing the risk the changes represent. It guards against new rules that might unintentionally disrupt business and provides data about whether rules meet compliance criteria.

For its part McAfee recently overhauled its ePO to more efficiently manage security tasks like policy updates for devices running McAfee security agent software.

The alliance between Tufin and McAfee is a part of McAfee's partner program called Security Innovation Alliance.