Our company is Reece Group.
We have a number of different
organizations that fall underneath that as well.
Our primary focus in terms of sales
and what we try to achieve for our customers.
Our customers are plumbers
but also everyday people like yourselves as well.
So the AlgoSec solutions that we have implemented alone,
we've got AFA,
which is AlgoSec Firewall Analyzer
which I find to be the baseline product
that you must have and have it configured well.
And the other big one for us is FireFlow.
So our change management process
and making sure
whatever rules we're putting in adhere to particular risks,
our compliance
and also it gives us the ability
to give the power to our developers in our network
rather than having them to come to us every single time
they want to log a change.
But just making sure that alignment to what our risks
and our compliances is I guess met by the standards.
The other thing that we use also is AlgoBot.
So that ties in with both the FireFlow as well.
Being able to use AlgoBot and give it
to our developers to work with.
So they work heavily within Slack,
giving them the power to be able to
make those queries themselves rather than having to come up
to come up to us to work out whether a participate application doesn’t work
because the firewall is getting the way or
because they misconfigured something.
Also from there, they will be able to log changes
immediately if it is something within the firewalls
instead of having them come up to us one by one
or having to wait when there is someone that's free
within the networking spaces
and check whether there is actually issues
with the firewalls that's preventing it from going through.
We were moving from one firewall generation to the next.
That was managed offsite by another company.
We send the request off to them.
What we found is that that lacked the business kind of
alignment, and we found that there was
a lot of rules that we didn't need
moving forward.
So we went from around about 3,000 rules
to 450 rules
between the perimeter in DMZ with the systems of AlgoSec.
One of the biggest challenges with doing that
is trying to digest and having an understanding about
what those rules did,
what services they apply to,
and also the biggest piece was
how can we make sure that we are updating these
and changing these to make sure
that we are not actually going to cause an outage for the business.
The reason why I chose AlgoSec is because
we saw the benefit in terms of what it will give us
for the business, what we were doing with the firewalls
in place
from where we were coming from in terms of,
I guess, not as good posture from the security standpoint,
but saying what it will be able to give us value
for in the short term but also the long term
with general processing
and that kind of stuff,
and also having as I said that support
on hand
like a meeting away for them to come in.
One of the big benefits obviously right off the bat
when we moved across from different vendors
of the firewall and having that such a large ruleset
that was a big short term benefit.
I think long-term what really seem with AlgoSec
is the time that we're saving.
I guess the people that are administering the firewalls
taking the time away from them having to go
every single day to check what rules are being used
and all that kinda stuff
and having that in automated fashion
means that the benefit is they have the time back
in order to focus on
other projects that we're working on
but letting I guess the trust
and the ability of AlgoSec to do
all the work that would take a lot more time.
So another big benefit also was
we were able to reduce our firewall ruleset
by a huge amount, by about 90%.
That's a number that we can look at
and we can actually benefit with AlgoSec,
but also the time that takes for us to make
a change or for people to request a change
has dropped significantly.
We don't wanna be one of those, I guess, internal parties
that takes a wall or blocks applications
are being developed internally.
So what we strive for is less than two hours
for a firewall change within the network.
Obviously, we had to go through our risk assessment
and that sort of thing,
but that's aided and helped a lot by AlgoSec
and within the business as well.
So another big thing is
understanding our risks and compliance.
So we have the following compliance
structure as well as understanding our risk
within the business because this is something
that we really want to flesh out,
and then that will in turn help the automation piece
with FireFlow and Analyzer as well
so that whenever we make changes,
we know that we are adhering to
both what we understand our risks should
be at what level or risk,
and also the compliance that we're required to have within the business as well.