How the Albarius Solution Was Born and Why It’s Critical for Large Organizations
Denis Malinovtsev, Information Security and Network Architecture Expert
Managing rules in firewall systems is one of the greatest challenges facing information security teams in large organizations. In an era where the volume of logs and network traffic in corporate environments continues to grow exponentially, the need for tuning existing rules, building new rules, and implementing changes becomes a task requiring enormous resources, significant time, and sometimes the patience of steel.
But what if this entire process could be transformed to become precise, fast, and automatic?
How It All Started: From Client Story to Revolutionary Solution
It all began with a project we executed for a large financial organization. As part of our activity as an integration company, I managed a professional team that dealt with building firewall rules. The team entered the organization, examined the existing situation, and carried out a comprehensive project that included review, tuning, and rebuilding of the firewall ruleset – sometimes dealing with systems containing 7,000 rules and more.
One of our team members, a first-rate expert, spent nearly two years(!) on a project that included segmentation, building new rules, manual log analysis, script writing – complex, precise, but never-ending work.
When we tried to recruit him for another project – similar in scope but double in size – he refused. “I’ll resign if you send me to manage rules manually again,” he said. That was the moment I realized: there has to be another solution. This is how Albarius was born.
So What Does Albarius Actually Do?
Albarius is an intelligent system that performs automatic analysis of network traffic and organizational logs, and generates smart, precise, and implementation-ready recommendations for the desired firewall ruleset.
While manually a team member might be able to analyze one week or month of logs (and even that with difficulty), the system analyzes months backwards, millions of events, and provides insights based on algorithms, not guesswork. It doesn’t just analyze – it builds the new rules automatically, including all required zones, segmentation, and contexts – all in less time, at lower cost, and without the human errors that accompany manual processes.
Real Example: Wasting Hundreds of Hours on Four Rules
In another case, a financial organization took our services for rule tuning. One of our team members sat at the client site two days a week for eight months, dealing with tuning just four rules. When we understood the scope of work and timeframe, we saw that such a project could drag on for years, at a manual work pace.
With Albarius, the same analysis would be performed within minutes, and the new ruleset would be ready for automatic implementation, including the deployment phase in the firewall itself.
Benefits for Organizations
The Albarius system brings enormous value to large organizations:
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Saving hundreds of hours of human work
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Reducing human errors in a sensitive and complex process
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Optimizing management of existing rules and implementing new rules
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Significant improvement in security quality – rules are precise, practical, and data-based
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Shortened response times – requests that are handled today in several days or hours are shortened to mere minutes
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Freeing information security personnel to engage in additional tasks in the organization
Who Is This Suitable For?
The Albarius solution is particularly relevant for large organizations – those managing:
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Tens or hundreds of servers
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Multiple environments (DMZ, suppliers, data centers)
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Massive traffic and tight regulation
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Rulesets containing hundreds or even thousands of rules
