Network Security Policy Management (NSPM) in 2025

The recent failure of Skybox has left many companies without a supported NSPM solution. As a result, many of these previous Skybox customers have taken this opportunity to reevaluate their business needs when considering a replacement solution. At the extreme, some are asking if NSPM is even necessary in 2025. This post explores the history of NSPM and the ongoing critical role it plays in securing the complex, hybrid enterprise networks of today.

Firewalls Enforce Security Policies

The origins of NSPM date back to the late 1990s when FireMon was created to address the growing challenge of managing firewall policies. Even in the “simple” networks of that time, firewall policy mistakes were the source of critical failures, either by allowing unwanted, malicious traffic or blocking necessary traffic causing business outages. These challenges highlight the fundamental need for NSPM: firewalls enforce the security policies applied to them, and poorly defined policies result in poorly enforced security.

In the decades since this innovation, the need for NSPM has grown exponentially as network complexity has increased. Simple firewall environments separating inside, outside, and DMZ segments have evolved to more granularly segment internal networks. “Outside” has expanded with public cloud adoption, application complexity has surged, threats have proliferated in quantity and sophistication, and firewall technology has become more capable and complex. Today, it is common for enterprises to manage thousands of firewalls, each with thousands of rules, tens of thousands of network objects, and complex rules and object groups that collectively represent tens of millions of unique access paths through the network.

All this complexity makes effective security impossible without effective policy management. For enterprises such as large banks that are complex, highly regulated, and frequent targets of attack, an NSPM solution is a foundational element of security management. Even small errors in policies can render modern firewall technology ineffective. For example, a small change to an object group may seem innocuous, but that object group may be used in hundreds of rules, resulting in unintended security implications. An NSPM solution can detect and even prevent these otherwise hidden errors from exposing an organization to attack.

As long as firewalls are necessary, effective policy management will remain essential. NSPM is more critical today than ever.

Compliance Is Not Optional

For many years, network security compliance requirements mandated the existence of a firewall. Organizations, particularly those in highly regulated industries such as financial services, healthcare, and retail, recognized the necessity for effective policy management for an effective security program and expanded those requirements to evaluate the effectiveness of the enforced policies. These requirements include change management controls to ensure new changes are evaluated prior to implementation, audit controls to ensure all changes are documented, and ongoing rule life-cycle management to periodically review the business need and risk acceptance for access.

These requirements are captured in basic security frameworks including NIST 800-53, NIST CSF, PCI DSS, GDPR, DORA, and more. The existence and deployment of a firewall is not sufficient for establishing and maintaining a secure and compliant enterprise. Effective policy management is required to ensure these firewalls are properly enforcing and monitoring network security best practices.

Maintaining and documenting compliance with these frameworks is a very time-consuming task without automated tools to continuously assess and report on these complex configurations.

Network Security Operational Costs Are High

As network and security complexity has increased, so has the cost to manage these complex environments. At the same time, business and IT velocity has increased with the adoption of technologies including virtualization, public cloud, and infrastructure as code. This increased velocity has put more pressure on security to move faster.

The solution to both challenges, operational cost and speed, can be addressed with automation. Automation of network security operations goes far beyond automating the device change (“push”). Effective automation of network security includes:

• Streamlining the change request process to reduce the number of change requests and improve the requirements gathering.
• Automating the design process to identify what changes are required to achieve the desired outcome.
• Automating the pre-change assessment phase to ensure only appropriate, secure, and compliant changes are permitted.
• Streamlining the approval process to rapidly approve or deny change requests.
• Automating the implementation of the change during defined change windows without error-prone data entry steps.
• Automating the on-going compliance reporting.
• Simplifying and automating the rule review process.
• Automating the decommissioning of rules that are no longer needed.

Summary

The challenges of network security management that led to the creation of NSPM have grown exponentially. NSPM is more critical today than at any point in history. Just as the need for network security has not diminished, the need for effective network security policy management has only grown.

*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from www.firemon.com authored by Jody Brazil. Read the original post at: https://www.firemon.com/blog/network-security-policy-management-nspm-in-2025/