Tufin moves beyond firewall management

Over the last year I have been following two companies in what I called the firewall management space. Secure Passage, whose CEO appeared on the podcast and Tufin Technologies, which I have been getting to know through Liz Safran of Looking Glass PR.  I actually met with the Tufin team at the Gartner Security Summit this past summer up in DC. I was impressed with both companies and think both companies bring a needed solution to market.  Today’s enterprises and MSPs have to be able to manage multiple firewalls from multiple vendors and it has to go beyond just inserting a rule across the board.  One question I had was how each of them would broaden the amount of different firewall solutions they could manage.  Having a product in this category that only did Checkpoint and Juniper, might be OK for a sub-section of the market, but would ultimately limit the opportunity for either of them.

Both companies told me they planned to expand coverage.  Tufin was attempting to do so in a scalable manner by building out a platform that would then make it easier to “plug in” new devices in a rapid manner.  Today they announced that using this Tufin Open Platform (TOP), they have plug ins available for 12 new devices and manufacturers equipment. That in and of itself is cool, good to see them expand.  But what I thought was worthy of writing about was the fact that they are moving beyond firewalls and are  providing security management for switches from most of the leading vendors as well.  This moves them into a whole new market.  The Tufin system has great change management and logging and auditing of what they call security life cycle mangement.  I think the expansion beyond firewalls really positions them to make a move in the market with a great network convergence story.  With so little new in security it seems, I am happy to see a company actually doing something.