Here is  quite a practical and straight-forward FAQ to PCI compliance.  A couple of interesting items from the FAQ -

• Cost of compliance:  for smaller companies it is about $10,000 to $25,000 and for larger companies it is about $3 million to $5 million.
• Frequent compliance related problems: inadequate policies and improper network segmentation.

Considering the capability of Athena FirePAC, it should help in bringing down this cost and effort quite significantly  (especially since policy analysis and comparison is such a core feature of FirePAC).

This article in wired.com refers to a survey that found Fox News - the most trusted news source other than the web. I haven’t seen Fox News for a long time, have they changed? Or is it yet another bad survey?

A tool to analyze firewall configuration and verify its conformance to industry best practices - Athena FirePAC. Sample reports are available here.

A common reason for firewall configurations being large are anomalies/duplicates. Athena FirePAC’s Anomaly Detection technique can help in handling this problem. The accuracy and detail of the Anomaly analysis should simplify life for many a system administrator.

I have heard (and also seen) that Firewall configuration changes are usually accompanied by undesirable side-effects. Now imagine a tool that provide for an elegant and concise presentation of added or dropped services resulting from a configuration change. Athena FirePAC does exactly that. Athena FirePAC provides this information even before deploying the changed configuration by performing an off-line firewall analysis.  The Network Operations department (who is usually complaining about people who change Firewall configurations) should find Athena FirePAC interesting!