Today we are rolling out a major new release of Athena FirePAC.  Version 5.0 includes several significant new capabilities that will make your job as a network or firewall engineer much simpler.  The Change Impact Monitor component runs in the background and automatically detects what changed in your firewall or router configurations since the last update.  This cool feature does more than just tell you that something changed though.  It uses our advanced change analytics to tell you the meaning of the change.  Now you know how a configuration change affected the rules and objects, the traffic flows, and the security posture of the device.

The Change Impact Monitor takes advantage of another new feature, which is the capability to schedule tasks.  You can schedule firewall configurations for update on a regular basis and never have to worry about synchronizing your inventory before running a query again.  You can schedule analysis jobs to run on a regular basis and let FirePAC generate the reports for you automatically.

Speaking of updating configurations, FirePAC can now connect to your devices directly to retrieve configurations and routing tables during the Import and Update operations.  This means that three different mechanisms are available for getting configurations into FirePAC: import from the local filesystem, import from an NCM repository such as Solarwinds Orion NCM, and now import directly from the device.

And last, but certainly not least, FirePAC now supports a distributed architecture with mulitple clients sharing access to a common database.  Now everyone in the team can see the same configurations with only one import.  Combined with scheduled updates, you need never worry about getting out of sync with your teammates.

That’s a lot of powerful new features from Athena Security.  Check it out!