At its core, a firewall is a shield that protects your network from malicious traffic. Sounds simple, but those who work with firewalls every day know the reality: An average firewall has thousands of rules governing how traffic should be handled, many of which may be outdated, redundant, or contradictory. In fact, a Cybersecurity Insiders report revealed that 58% of organizations have more than 1,000 firewall rules, but we know of customers with highly complex environments where their firewall rules number in the millions. Not only is this a complexity issue, but a security risk. Gartner asserted that misconfigurations would cause 99% of all firewall breaches through 2023.
It’s no surprise, then, that when we spoke to our customers, there were a few challenges we heard over and over: (1) Checking configuration details is hard, (2) Troubleshooting is hard, (3) Optimizing the ruleset is hard. So, when we got to work on our AI Assistant for Firewall, those were the three use cases we focused on: assist (policy identification and reporting), augment (troubleshooting) and automate (policy lifecycle management).
Built inside Cisco’s cloud-delivered Firewall Management Center (cdFMC) and leveraging the latest large language models (LLMs), we created a generative tool designed to simplify firewall management for both seasoned admins and novice users. Utilizing advanced natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML), it provides answers in seconds rather than forcing an administrator to spend their time sorting dependencies, network maps, and documentation. A change ticket that might have taken two hours to close in the past, can be resolved in a fraction of the time — we’re talking minutes — thanks to the context-based AI. NOUN PERSONS NAME COUNTRY NOUN ADJECTIVE COLOR
