With March Madness kicking off this week, we wanted to get in on the fun and run a bracket of our own!

About a month ago, we posted a poll to our LinkedIn community asking, “What’s the worst consequence of a firewall misconfiguration?” With nearly 200 responders, you guys did not disappoint! Thank you for participating! The idea was to create a bracket similar to March Madness – and we are excited to share the results as the games begin!

The bracket started with twelve different consequences of a misconfigured firewall policy, three polls with four options per poll. Then the final poll had the top three results from the previous polls (the championship). Same question, different options for each poll in the first round. Here we go!

• Poll 1: Downtime, Data Loss, Stolen/ransomed IPs, Breach
• Poll 2: Failed Audit, Lawsuits, PR/Reputational Damage, Increased staffing/$ to fix
• Poll 3: Fines for noncompliance, Performance degradation, Insurance cost increase, Loss of prospects/revenue.

Poll 1: BREACH WINS BY A LANDSLIDE!

Poll 2: PR/Reputational Damage wins by almost 50%.

Poll 3: Loss of prospects/revenue wins by 60%!

Championship poll! Among the top three winners (Breach, PR/reputational damage, and Loss of prospects/revenue), what is THE WORST that could happen because of a misconfigured firewall?

Drumroll please…
Experiencing a breach was the overwhelming winner!

Sean Hatfield, who works in Business Development at FireMon took a moment to explain why a breach really is the worst that could happen because of a misconfigured firewall: “A breach will cause downtime, result in data loss, and of course stolen or ransomed IPs. Policy misconfiguration is not worth risking when the best in the business is available in FireMon.“ Basically, a breach can very quickly lead to each of the other consequences!

Though we created this bracket for fun, there is a method to our madness! We recently launched our no cost, no risk, no reason not to try it Policy Analyzer. This is a quick and easy way to get an understanding of the potential misconfigurations in your network. Within minutes, Policy Analyzer shares a diagnostic report outlining the health of the policies on a single firewall in your environment, complete with key areas of interest and remediation recommendations.

Policy Analyzer leverages FireMon’s 20+ years of experience creating the industry’s leading security policy management solutions. You can be confident in the insights you’ll
get.

Try it yourself or learn more to better understand what’s happening in your environment!