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Athena's Change Advisor now allows a large group of application developers and firewall engineers to work together more effectively

Available as an add-on tool to Athena FirePAC or as a standalone product

Wednesday, November 2, 2011 — Chicago — Optimizing a firewall change process is difficult because of the many stakeholders involved. Athena's newest release, Change Advisor, addresses a serious operational dilemma by relieving firewall engineers from nonessential change requests.

The Change Advisor presents a web form to help desk and application engineers using the same parameters of a typical change request. Host names, instead of IP addresses alone, prevent common errors in specifying source and destination addresses. The web form initiates a simulated network packet test, based on configuration data that is not directly accessible to the requester. The simulated network test analyzes how packets would traverse the network, based on connectivity, routing and the firewall devices involved in the change request. Change Advisor then tells the requester if the change is already covered by existing policies, and if not, that it is ready to be submitted to the firewall engineer for review.

For firewall engineers with authorized access, rich configuration analytics pinpoint the firewalls and rules to modify.

"Firewall engineers are highly technically skilled and therefore an expensive and important resource to spare from unnecessary change requests. Process improvements alone cannot reduce the number of requests that firewall engineers have to deal with, says David Hurst, CTO of Athena Security. "If we can automatically filter out the requests that are already in production, firewall engineers can save several hours per week."

Athena's Change Advisor takes advantage of Athena's breakthrough packet tracing technology for understanding how packets would traverse the network and ensures a change process that is compliant, efficient and completely aligned for all of the different stakeholders who are involved. Key advantages of the system are:

• Changes are prescreened before they reach the firewall engineer
• Packet tracing technology is scalable to hundreds and even thousands of devices
• Operational data is exposed only to authorized firewall engineers involved in the change process
• Firewall engineers are shown exactly where changes are to be made if the service needs to be added

The Change Advisor is immediately available as an add-on component to a standard FirePAC installation or as a standalone product. Pricing starts at $6,000 and a free 60-day trial for an unlimited number of devices is available from www.athenasecurity.net.

About Athena Security

In a world where controlling technology costs are paramount, Athena is the only solution provider to offer enterprise firewall analytics and remediation in a collection of focused tools. Customers configure Athena FirePAC towards requirements that are specifically operations, security or complianceoriented and pay only for what is needed. With a global customer base of several hundred Banking, Insurance, Retail, Healthcare, Energy, Utilities and US Federal Sector enterprises and thousands of users across a suite of products, Athena is constantly innovating the range of solutions it offers to drive more intelligent firewall and network management. From data center migration to policy optimization, Athena aims to be the most affordable and flexible choice for network and security engineers. For more information see agurnani@athenasecurity.net

Dan Chmielewski
Madison Alexander PR for Athena Security
Phone: 714-832-8716
dchm@madisonalexanderpr.com