BlueFire's Managed Firewall Services provide an advanced, fully outsourced firewall that protects your key information assets across networks, hosts, applications and databases. Our highly trained security experts become an extension to your in-house IT staff, providing analysis, configuration, set-up, alerts and 24x7 management of the firewall.
This customised firewall service harnesses industry best practices to ensure a high level of network access and information availability, integrity and privacy. 24x7 firewall monitoring generates immediate alerts and response for service outages associated with critical Internet access points.
Firewalls can be linked together to provide sophisticated VPNs (Virtual Private Networks) or provide high-availability through load balancing and clustering. Each implementation of this service includes:
- full system administration
- system management
- security policy management
- software upgrades
- 24x7 monitoring and alarm management
- a service level agreement with guaranteed service levels
- And remember, subscribing to Managed Firewall Services does not require purchase of hardware or software, study of technical manuals or constant updating of your systems.
System administration and management
BlueFire can deliver the management and administration of the firewall without any on-site assistance from the customer. A key element of the service is the quality assurance and reliability we build in as standard. By using a rigorous process to test software patches and major releases, we ensure system integrity before rolling-out the whole system in the production environment.
Our aim is to keep the system up-to-date and implement the latest fixes and patches as they become available from the vendors. However, this is only done once we are sure that nothing else will be affected.
Security policy management
BlueFire security engineers will manage and maintain the firewall rule base to ensure a robust security policy is maintained and will make changes to the policy based on appropriate requests from customers.
Change requests
Designated contacts within an organisation are used for authorising all policy changes. This can be initiated from the website. Alternatively a fax plus authorised signature or encrypted e-mail procedure may be used.
Change control
All changes are managed through a change control procedure, and all changes are 'vetted' to ensure the overall security of the firewall is not compromised by an inappropriate request. Additionally, all changes are logged and recorded, with the option to quickly roll back the security policy if necessary. For extra peace of mind, all configuration files have a digital signature attached to them to protect against unauthorised tampering.
Management reports
Monthly management reports are included within the Managed Firewall Services. The firewall log files are either directly accessed by our reporting servers or in the case of more sophisticated firewall designs the log files are automatically stored and a management summary sent through an encrypted connection. Monthly reports are made avialable.