NetCitadel Intros New Version of Firewall Builder

NetCitadel has released new version of Firewall Builder, saying that it simplifies firewall management by enabling users to manage their firewalls from a single application.

The release of Firewall Builder 5 will enable companies to manage their server and network firewalls from a single application with an easy-to-use GUI.

“Our customers are being pushed to manage a growing number of firewalls, including both traditional network firewalls as well as host-based server firewalls,” Vadim Kurland, co-founder of NetCitadel said, adding that the new features in Firewall Builder 5 will help these users scale to manage much higher numbers of devices.

Firewall Builder 5 comes with new features, including object tagging, smart groups and user folders. These features provide powerful ways to organize and manage the database that holds the objects used in firewall rules. Company officials said that this scalability is especially important to companies that have several devices to manage.

Moreover, for importing BSD PF configuration files, Firewall Builder 5 also adds support to create an easy migration path from manual management of PF devices to using the Firewall Builder GUI to generate configurations.

Eric Ogren, principal analyst at Ogren Group, noted that companies with the expertise to run Linux-based open source firewalls still have the problems of managing rule sets that are continuously growing in complexity.

Software tools to help keep firewalls consistent with network security policy is now a must have for most companies, Orgen said.

“NetCitadel's approach for managing firewall configurations and analyzing rule sets simplifies open source firewall management for network administration and security teams,” Orgen said.

Tim Nufire, vice president of engineering at Backblaze, an online backup provider, said that the number of servers the company has to manage in its data centers is growing rapidly.

“We rely on Firewall Builder to provide an easy way to visualize our firewall rules and the new features in Firewall Builder 5 will help us manage our server security configurations even more efficiently,” Nufire said.