It’s been a long summer and the development team has been hard at work adding a bunch of new features to Athena FirePAC. We finally released v3.1 at the beginning of September. I thought it’d be worthwhile to point out some of the really cool features available in the new release.

First, as was announced here, Athena Security is now a technology partner with SolarWinds and we have integrated FirePAC with Orion Network Configuration Manager. You can connect to Orion NCM from FirePAC, select the firewall you’re interested in from the device repository, and import their configurations directly into FirePAC. The import is fast, easy, and painless. No worries about logging into the firewall or which commands you need to issue to get the right data. And you can import multiple firewalls in one operation.

Related to the Orion NCM integration is the configuration update feature. Now, after you’ve imported a firewall into FirePAC, you can update the configuration automatically from the same location it was originally imported from. If you imported from the filesystem, the update will be taken from the same files. If you imported from Orion, the update will be taken from there. No need to specify the same source for the configuration files over and over again. Just select the firewall in the FirePAC Firewall Inventory and click the Update operation.

Another big new feature is our enhanced Query capability. There are now three types of queries that allow you to explore the firewall behavior and configurations. With the Data Flow query, you can ask questions like “which critical hosts are exposed to these risky services?” or “what sources are allowed to connect to this server?” or “why is this service not being allowed through the firewall”? It allows you to use Athena’s powerful data flow analysis of firewall behavior to identify specific risks to your network or to understand exactly what the firewall is doing.

With the Rule Search query, you can search for rules that match specific patterns of source, destination, and service parameters across your entire inventory of firewalls. You can even select rules based on matching network or service groups. With the Object Search query, you can find where specific network or service objects are defined and where those objects are used in other object groups. Taken together, Rule Search and Object Search give you a powerful capability to understand the structure of your rulesets and object definitions and their inter-relationships.

Wrapping up the Query facility is the new Saved Queries feature. Now you need only enter the parameters for a given query once. Then you can save it and issue the saved query again later. This can be useful when you have a long list of critical hosts that you need to check exposures to on a regular basis.

All these new features really extend FirePAC as an operational tool for managing firewalls.  You can download an evaluation free for 30 days from our web site.  Check it out!

Tags: Athena FirePAC, query, SolarWinds Orion NCM

This entry was posted on Friday, September 25th, 2009 at 4:34 pm and is filed under Company Announcements. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.