Say you have 25 firewalls. Right now, to make a rule change, you have to log into 25 devices and issue commands.

Playbook acquires your firewall rules directly and puts them in a web console. To make a rule change that affects every firewall in your enterprise, there’s a single place to write and track the change. All your changes are tracked. When it’s time to deploy the change, you click a button, and Playbook handles the drama.

Say you get 15 requests to change rules from your internal customers every week. We’re sorry. Right now, you have to keep track of what firewalls manage which rules for which hosts, which you may or may not have inventoried.

Playbook gives your internal customers a simple ticket system to request changes. You pick up tickets and work on firewall rules. We’ve figured out what your rules mean, so you can search by hosts and ports and protocols, including inside of CIDR netmasks. You make a change. It’s tracked. Your team can review the change diff. When you commit the change —- get this —- the rule change is tracked with the ticket request, so you have an audit record. Wave that in front of your SOX auditors like a voodoo doll.

Last updated on September 17, 2009 by Thomas Ptacek