Security Policy Rule Management & Cleanup

Identify and Remove Unnecessary Items

Streamline network management and improve firewall performance by regularly identifying and removing duplicate, expired, unused, or shadowed rules and objects in your firewall rule bases, ensuring policy optimization, strengthening security controls, and maintaining a zero trust environment for endpoints with real-time adjustments to existing rules.

• Remove duplicate objects, for example, a service or network host that is defined twice with different names. The Best Practices Report can identify these. 

• Delete expired and unused rules and objects. All of these are detected by the Rule and Object Usage and the Expired Rules reports. 

• Delete old and unused policies. Check Point and some other vendors allow you to keep multiple rule bases. This is another test in the Best Practices report. 

• Remove unused connections – specific source/destination/service routes that are not in use. You can detect those using the Automatic Policy Generator to analyze traffic patterns. 

• Delete fully shadowed rules that are effectively useless. If you have SecureTrack+, these are detected by the Rule and Object Usage report. 

Document and Standardize

Properly document rules, objects, and policy revisions, along with enforcing consistent naming conventions, to ensure clarity, accountability, and ease of future management and audits. 

• Document rules, objects, and policy revisions and enforce a standard for rule documentation with the Rule Comments Format test in the Best Practices report. 

• Enforce object naming conventions that make the rule base easy to understand. For example, use a consistent format such as host_name_IP for hosts. 

• Break up long rule sections into readable chunks. This too can be checked with the Best Practices report.