How Companies Can Learn From Firewall Logs to Boost Their Business

Categories: Culture, Science, Business

Published on: 11 May 2021

As companies test and deepen their digital capabilities, business leaders naturally expect that useful business insights must be stored in those systems that capture and process vast amounts of data.

Firewall Insights and Log Analytics: Your Network’s Health and Future

Planning for the future and understanding your network’s health – based on log analytics enabled by firewall insights. And the logs themselves aren’t stray bits of data hoovered up for security’s sake. They contain powerful business intel that can influence capacity planning, improve security posture and inform wiser business decisions.

Let’s take a closer look on how you could transform your firewall logs into business intelligence. We will be covering log aggregation, dashboards, trend alerts and how to get awesome and super-useful insights.

1. Log Aggregation

The first thing, obviously, is to collect all your firewall logs in one place. You could have a number of firewalls or various log producing devices. This data can also become scattered and difficult to analyze.

Picture log aggregation as the action of picking up all the pieces of a puzzle from across your desk before beginning to form the picture.

And here’s why log aggregation is essential:

• Centralized data: You’ve got all your firewall logs in one place so that they can be analyzed in one place.
• Consistency: Logs could be in multiple structures. They can be normalized by aggregation tools.
• Better discoverability: Don’t switch between systems, search the entire dataset in one go.

When you collect and aggregate your logs, you’re building a sturdy platform for gaining insight. Without this, capacity planning is a crapshoot, and security vulnerabilities are overlooked.

2. Dashboarding

When your logs are all together in one location, you need a way to get meaning out of them fast. And that’s where dashboards are useful.

Imagine a dashboard as the cockpit of an aircraft. It provides at-a-glance real-time info that will let you navigate your business with confidence.

What does your firewall log dashboard look like?

• Historical traffic volume: Allows you to identify peak usage times.
• Blocked vs allowed connections: See what your firewall is blocking and what it is letting through.
• Top IP’s and Geo locations: Discover where most of your traffic or threats originate from.
• Threat types: Malware, phishing, IDS alerts and more.

Dashboards are, indeed, interactive. You can zoom in on specific time periods or types of traffic. This is what makes capacity planning so much easier. You will know when your firewall or network devices are about ready for some upgrades before they become overwhelmed.

And it also lets you see security events visually, so that you can trace your security posture. You’ll be less reactive and more proactive.

3. Trend Alerts

You have all that data logging to your firewall constantly. Nobody can watch all of it live. Which is why trend alerts are a godsend.

You can create alarms about unusual patterns or thresholds. For example:

• Sudden increase of restricted connections381@protocol) / % (adj_sBLOCK381@protocol) – Suddenly Increasing Blocked Connections
• Traffic from a particular country that you do not usually get; it’s either play or not bot’s clicks!
• Multiple access attempts to a limited port

Notifications can be emailed to your team or security product. That way you get the notification as soon as something shady goes down.

Advantages of trend alerts are:

• Premeditation on attacks
• Awareness of usage patterns that impact capacity
• It is less work if you make use of automation and do not have to keep an eye on it manually

You can react swiftly with good alerting. It also serves up your business intelligence by revealing where the money is being kited and where risk balloons.

4. Actionable Insights

Now, however, the most important question: What do you do with all this data?

Here are a few ways firewall insights can provide business intel you can act on:

• Capacity planning:
  • Identify hours of peak traffic and plan upgrades for this time.
  • Know what services are hard users of your bandwidth
  • Predict device overloads to prevent expensive downtime
• Stronger security posture:
  • Locate repeated attacks and build a defense in those parts
  • Know attacker’s behaviour for better firewall rules
  • Customize Training for your Team On Common Threats
• Resource allocation:
  • Redirect already-on IT people towards “when in time” or otherwise high-risk systems
  • Invest more smartly in the technology behind cybersecurity
• Business growth support:
  • Identify developing usage patterns which may indicate new opportunities
  • Identify the effect of marketing campaigns by tracking traffic changes

Regularly update stakeholders on these insights using the reports you create from your dashboards and alerts. This links your IT security works directly to the business results.

Wrapping It Up

Leveraging firewall logs in log analytics isn’t simply about filling in security gaps. It’s an exercise in unlocking a treasure trove of firewall intelligence to help make better decisions and produce more potent business intelligence.

By focusing on:

• Log Aggregation to consolidate all your data,
• Quick visualization by dashboarding,
• Trend alerts to monitor significant shifts,
• And Drawing actionable insights for planning and security,

you are able to do, raw firewall data transformed into a potent business tool.

Begin by examining the logging you operate now. What can you collect more effectively? How are you visualizing data? Can you automate alerts?

The more you use this data, the clearer the picture of your network capacity and security posture will become. And that means less time reacting to surprises, and more confidence in your business decisions.

The point is, log analysis goes a long way toward smart security insights (that is, insights into what your firewall is actually doing on your network) as well as industry-specific intels from your firewall logs that give you an edge – both in securing your network and in growing your business.

Try it out today and feel the difference.