Research Summary: The Value of Using Security Policy Orchestration and Automation to Improve Change Management and SecOps

This is a summary of the EMA research report, "Data-Driven Security Tools: The Value of Network Security Policy Management Tools", sponsored by Firemon.

This report queried companies that use Network Security Policy Management (NSPM) tools and companies that do not in order to compare and contrast their security change management process, timeliness and efficacy. The evaluation considered whether there were any differences in their inherent risk profiles and if or how NSPM created improvements in security performance.

In fact, organizations leveraging NSPM demonstrated significant advantages in both IT operations (ITOps) and security operations (SecOps). Advantages included more consistent security policies, which led to fewer attack surfaces, shorter change approval and implementation processes, fewer change-related outages, more successful business continuity and disaster recovery testing, and more.

Participants coming from environments where NSPM was not used felt they had strong IT and security visibility, but had more significant issues with poorly implemented security policies, non-standardized policies, and failed cloud migrations for critical business applications. The NSPM group had a more realistic outlook.