CASE STUDYLarge U.S. Utilities Company Cuts Network
Change Time, Automates Compliance Tracking,and Reduces Downtime

A network outage at a major US utility company can mean a power outage for millions ofcustomers. Massive power outages put people’s lives in danger — think hospitals, traffic lights,emergency communications. Therefore, the mission of this network security team comes withthe burden of maintaining public safety.
In order to secure this utility company’s complex and fragmented network, the team must
adeptly deploy and manage firewall rules across 2500+ devices, controlling access tocritical assets in the company’s infrastructure. Manual processes and lack of visibility resulted
in months-long SLAs and an ineffective use of highly skilled resources. Tufin SecureChangeand SecureTrack have vastly improved their SLAs and the company’s overall security posture.

Challenge I: Accelerating Network Access Changes
Managing network changes in a large, highly regulated environment is a complex undertaking,especially when relying on manual processes to implement changes across 2,500 firewalls
and thousands of routers and switches. Previously, nearly 40 people managed changerequests. There was a two-month lead time and a tremendous backlog. This is because eachchange requires an impact analysis to check any proposed changes against security policy,
vulnerability management tools, DNS servers and more. “Security was seen as a bottleneck
and blocker instead of a business enabler,” explains the Cybersecurity Manager.

Challenge II: Automating and Streamlining Compliance Tasks
With an obligation to comply with many federal and regional regulations, such as NERC
CIP, this company’s network security team must track every change across all infrastructure
assets and validate that firewall rules are current and accurate. Identifying and eliminating
all shadowed rules was impossible, because they had no way to automatically track all rules
across their hybrid architecture. An inability to keep with up network permissions acrossfirewalls greatly increases an organization’s cyber risk exposure.

Challenge III: Faster root cause identification to handle network
outages
When outages or other service interruptions occurred, the network security team had tomanually research and review past changes because they lacked a solution to providecomprehensive path analysis to find the blockage.

Why Tufin

BUSINESS IMPACTy Rule change SLAs are < 1 week –down from 2+ months
y 50% reduction in time to resolve
outages
y 80% reduction in time to identify andremediate shadowed rules.
y Reduced number of people focused onchange requests from 40 to 5
y Reduced time to prepare forcompliance audits from weeks to2 hours“The more efficiently wemanage the thousands offirewalls and other criticaldevices in our environment, thebetter we enable the business tomove quickly in service of ourcustomers. Tufin helps us deliveron that mission.”— Cybersecurity Manager,
Large U.S. Utilities Company

www.tufin.com

1© Copyright 2022 Tufin. All rights reserved.

“The cybersecurity team evaluated options for best managing its firewall environment.
Flexible automation, scalability and breadth of integrations were top of mind. They needed theability to check the company’s security policy against every rule exception request. Moreover, theywanted a solution that could implement and track changes in a single location for all the firewalls,routers, switches, and F5 and NSX devices in their environment. “Tufin checked all the boxes,”
commented the Senior Cybersecurity IT Solutions Engineer.

The value becomesapparent when a workloadthat took 40 people, now
takes about 5 people.”— Senior Cybersecurity IT Solutions
Engineer, Large U.S. Utilities Company

The Results
Network Changes in Days, Not Months
With Tufin network security solutions in place, the network security team has dramatically reduced the time and effort required
to manage firewall rules and change requests. “The value becomes apparent,” commented the Solutions Engineer, “when aworkload that took 40 people, now takes about 5 people.”

Automated, Streamlined Compliance Efforts“We save countless hours on rule cleanup and compliance reporting, and we can give management visibility without pulling
one of our valuable team members from critical tasks,” explained the Cybersecurity Manager.
Tufin SecureTrack automatically identifies shadowed rules. Plus, it automatically reviews and tests every access change against
the company’s security policy. The company is also planning to leverage its ability to check against security intelligence fromthird-party solutions, such as the company’s vulnerability management tool and its SIEM.
With immediate visibility into partial and fully shadowed rules, the team has reduced its time to identify and remediate theseissues by 80%.

Ensuring Uninterrupted BusinessWith such a large deployment of firewalls in regulated and internal domains, being able to determine the cause for outages that
may be the result of firewall policies or rules is essential to the network security team providing rapid resolution. During outages,
Tufin’s path analysis tool streamlined the process of identifying where the blockage is, reducing time to resolution by 50%.

“We save countless hours on rule cleanup and compliance reporting, and we can give management
visibility without pulling one of our valuable team members from critical tasks.”

Future Plans— Cybersecurity Manager, Large U.S. Utilities Company

Going forward, the network security team plans to take greater advantage of Tufin’s market leading workflow automation, such as
automatically permitting firewall rule changes that meet standard policies. “We want to continually reduce our SLAs, explained theManager.
In addition, the team is piloting SecureCloud, Tufin’s SaaS solution, which allows the team to integrate NetSec and DevOps processes
and apply a security policy in the provisioning of cloud resources. They are also test driving various Tufin marketplace apps, to better
leverage intelligence from their vulnerability management platform and to get more advanced in automated rule lifecycle management.

www.tufin.com
Copyright © All rights reserved. Tufin, Unified Security Policy, Tufin Orchestration Suite and Tufin logo are trademarks of Tufin. All otherproduct names mentioned herein are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners. You may not copy, reproduce,
photograph, translate, transmit ,make available to the public, make derivative works, perform in public, rent , broadcast or make any
commercial use of the publication in full and / or in part without prior written approval.

DP20220716