Most organizations that are required to undergo PCI audits struggle to meet three
main challenges: initial assessment, gathering compliance data, and maintaining
a continuous compliance posture. FireMon is a full-featured solution that
addresses each of these by providing the following:
Initial Assessment
FireMon assesses firewall configurations for non-compliant access based on 15 PCI
DSS 1.2 requirements, specifically requirements 1 and 2. At a high level, these
requirements mandate that organizations "Build and maintain a secure network." At
a more detailed level, the requirements describe the access that should or should
not be permitted between networks.
FireMon PCI Assessment analyzes firewall configurations for those rules that control
traffic between network zones. Using your organization’s unique access requirements,
you can customize the assessment with the services that should be explicitly allowed.
Based on your settings, FireMon determines if the configuration fails or passes
each standard, provides details of access violations, and offers suggestions
on how to remediate the violation or how to maintain compliance.
Meaningful and Actionable Compliance Data
Data
One critical aspect of compliance is an organization’s documentation or justification
of the firewall rule base. FireMon’s Rule Documentation feature is both an interface and repository for
ongoing justification that enables you to provide documentation with less effort
in less time.
Instead of vendor-supplied comment fields that are too small, or spreadsheets that
grow unmanageable, you can justify the rule within the visual context of the rule
base. Define the critical meta data about rule, including business justification,
business owner, and expiration date. This meta data is immediately, automatically
and permanently associated with the rule, so even if the rule changes, the relationship
with its justification remains intact. And you can display and disseminaterule documentation
as stand-alone reports or as supporting detail in other reports.
Continuous PCI Compliance Posture
Even after the initial PCI assessment and documentation, firewall access will continue
to change. With automated PCI assessments and documentation of change, you can ensure
that access changes don’t render the firewall non-compliant.
A regularly recurring PCI assessment tests firewall configurations at scheduled
intervals. As with other reports, FireMon can email the report in HTML or PDF format.
As changes are implemented, FireMon creates a running list of modifications called
Audit Log. The Audit Log is also an interface and repository for meta data that
explains, justifies and helps you track a change. You can enter meta data about
the change, including requestor, approver, or change control number. This list of
modifications and supporting documentation create the history of a rule, which you
can view any time by running a Rule History Report.