Tufin-ough To Manage Complex Firewalls

Company: Software

Headquarters: Ramat Gan, Israel

Technology Sector: Security

Key Product: Tufin SecureTrack

Year Founded: 2003

Number of Channel Partners: 110 worldwide

Ideal Channel Partner: Enterprise-focused solution providers

Why You Should Care: Tufin Software addresses a huge problem for enterprise perimeter security: managing and securing complex and multivendor firewall configurations.

The Lowdown: With the copious number of enterprise-class firewall products on the market, IT administrators have wondered how to manage and control the multitude of complex and multivendor firewall systems on their networks.

That's where Tufin Software Technologies comes in. Launched in 2003, the company got its start when a group of engineers from Check Point Software Technologies branched off from the firewall vendor after seeing enterprise businesses struggling to manage firewalls.

"Large firewall customers have a need for better management solutions, especially if they're

managing firewalls with complex configurations and multivendor firewalls. A lot of them do," said Ruvi Kitov, CEO of Tufin. "For whatever reason, these organizations evolved in this way. It's very difficult to manage many firewalls without a tool like SecureTrack."

The company's flagship product, Tufin SecureTrack, is a firewall operations manager that offers an easily deployable way to oversee and control corporate firewalls, ensure business continuity and determine and remediate security risks created by misconfiguration.

Targeted at enterprise customers, SecureTrack allows administrators to optimize firewall efficiency, manage firewall policy change, enforce corporate security policies, analyze firewall rules and comply with regulatory security mandates, such as PCI and HIPAA. The product also creates customized reports and sends real-time alerts to IT administrators monitoring the system for potential security threats.

The company counts security players such as Check Point, Cisco Systems, Fortinet and Juniper Networks among its technology partners.

Kitov said that sales have tripled for the past four years, including 2008. And despite the down economy, he anticipates that sales will grow about 30 percent in 2009, in part, because Tufin partners can easily demonstrate that the SecureTrack saves customers time and money by making firewall operations more efficient, "turning something that takes hours into a matter of minutes."