Yesterday I participated in a webinar discussing the must-do’s of network security and configuration management with SolarWinds‘ Head Geek Josh Stephens.  We discussed some best practices for managing configurations and some guidelines for firewall configs themselves.  The meat of the webinar was a demonstration of Orion NCM and the integration with Athena FirePAC.  The combined products make a dynamite solution for firewall configuration management.  You can watch the webinar online (registration required) and the slides are available here.  Check it out!

Thanks to Josh Stephens, Head Geek at SolarWinds, for mentioning Athena FirePAC on his blog.

“FirePAC is cool because it evaluates the ACLs on your Cisco PIX and ASA, Juniper NetScreen, and Checkpoint firewalls and tells you where you’ve left holes or where you’ve duplicated functionality…. Definitely something you should check out.”

SolarWinds offers highly affordable network management products that can be downloaded over the web and installed and running in minutes. Their Orion NCM tool is a great complement to Athena FirePAC, simplifying the process of acquiring firewall configurations for analysis.