How Configuration Management Complements The Vulnerabilities Of A Firewall
If you think that your organization does not need configuration management, think twice. You might have underestimated the numerous benefits that configuration management technology can bring you. With an organized configuration management in place within your organization, you will not only prevent or reduce system disasters. Configuration management can even help you enhance your organization's security features by complementing the vulnerabilities and weaknesses of your firewall protected network. Here are some reasons why you would need configuration management: Firewalls have numerous vulnerabilities. You might have firewalls installed to protect your network from malicious and unauthorized entries but a firewall can be quite wanting in features and are more likely to be problematic. Some firewalls with high level of security, for example, are too complex to configure. Worse problems may even occur when a firewall is inappropriately configured because the outcome is reportedly more risky and dangerous than not installing any firewall at all. Moreover, while the objective of firewalls is to protect your system from intrusive and malicious entries, a typical firewall only protects a system from threats that originate in a public network. This will pose a problem for reason that you are not secure from internal threats. Internal threats can come from those who have access to your system but can make damaging changes in the system's configuration. Configuration management should therefore be in place within your network to help you avoid the damages that can be incurred by the vulnerabilities of a firewall set up.
Configuration management is the answer to the vulnerabilities of a firewall. Configuration management does not only complement the weaknesses of the firewall but also enhances the security features of your system. In order to avoid damages that can be incurred by manual errors in configuring firewalls, a configuration management tool is needed. Configuration management tools can easily detect configuration errors in your system because it logs all versions of configuration changes that took place making it much easier to track errors. The system can even easily go back to a previous configuration set-up when new versions result in errors. This makes it easier and less risky to configure complex but highly secure firewalls. Configuration management secures your network from external and internal intruders. With configuration management in place, your system is not only safe from external intruders but from internal intruders as well. How? Your network administrator can easily keep track of all operations that take place in any of your network's device. This includes what particular device has been configured at a particular time and what was the configuration impact. This helps in preventing unauthorized configuration changes that can originate either internally or externally. If you have been complaining on the limitations of the firewall set-up in your organization, it is best to have in place an efficient configuration management system. Configuration management complements the vulnerabilities of firewalls and secures your network from both external and internal intruders. |
