Strategy Convergence is a systematic approach to transforming broad, coarse‑grained firewall and access policies into finely tuned, least‑privilege rules that precisely match real business traffic.
Managing firewall policies across multi‑vendor networks often leads to broad, redundant rules that heighten security risks, overload operations teams, and fail compliance. And that’s where Strategy Convergence comes in—it tackles these issues by automatically scoring and refining policies based on real traffic, deploying least‑privilege rules, and continuously retiring unused entries. The result is stronger defenses, streamlined maintenance, and audit‑ready compliance—all with minimal disruption to business services.
Pain Points
The prevalence of coarse-grained policies in enterprise firewalls gives rise to three major issues:
- Increased Security Risk
- Heavy O&M Burden
- Compliance Shortcomings
Core Features & Process
- Policy Scoring and Selection
- Traffic Collection and Analysis
- Policy Generation and Deployment
- Verification and Cleanup
Benefits of Strategy Convergence
Accurate Security Risk Control
- Reduced Attack Surface: Broad, coarse-grained policies are converged into least-privilege policies, minimizing the risk of unauthorized access.
- Threat Traceability: Policies are generated based on actual business traffic, ensuring each rule has a clear business context, making it easier to trace and respond to incidents.
Comprehensive Compliance
- Auditable Traceability: The full convergence process is recorded, including the policy change history and administrator confirmation logs, supporting regulatory audits.
Business Continuity Assurance
- Zero False Positives Guarantee: By modeling real traffic patterns, the risk of business disruption is kept below 0.1%.
Product Realization
Data Input and Task Definition
- Choose a broad strategy
- Traffic logs
- Convergence task parameters
Data Source
- Firewall configuration synchronization
- Syslog
- User-defined
Example
- Source and destination any policy
- Five source groups + timestamp
- Observation period: 7 days, convergence granularity: 24 bits
Core Modules and Workflow
The Strategy Convergence process is built around seven core modules, each representing a distinct stage in the end-to-end workflow:
Task Management
Initialization of a convergence task and selection of target devices.Device Configuration
Automatic verification of logging readiness—if the firewall isn’t already forwarding traffic logs via a proxy, the system deploys and enables the global traffic-logging proxy.Strategy Scoring & Selection
Once devices are ready, available convergence strategies are scored by permissiveness. Administrators choose the desired strategy, defining granularity and analysis time window.Task Configuration
Final task setup—assigning a descriptive name, selecting convergence granularity, and configuring the traffic-capture period.Traffic Collection & Triggering
The system begins passive logging of real traffic and analysis tasks against existing (broad) policies.Policy Analysis & Distribution
Collected logs feed into an automated engine that analyzes access paths, generates fine-grained rules, and distributes them by inserting high-priority policy entries.Verification & Cleanup
Continuous monitoring of hits on legacy rules ensures that once new policies prove effective—and no business disruptions occur—the old, redundant rules are safely retired.
How to Set Up Strategy Convergence in iNet
1. Create a convergence ticket.
2. Select the corresponding device and determine whether to enable syslog logging and set up a proxy server.
3. Sort the strategies by score and select the strategies that need to be converged.
4. Generate new detailed strategies based on traffic logs.
Refined policy recommendations: Two specific rules (TCP port 22 traffic between 172.21.1.36/32 and 172.21.1.83/32) identified for modification to reduce permissiveness score to 1.
Original broad policy analysis: A single highly permissive rule (0.0.0.0/0 to 0.0.0.0/0) allowing all traffic identified with a permissiveness score of 100, requiring refinement for enhanced control.
Comparing iNet to Traditional & Competitor Solutions
1. Strategy Identification
- Traditional: Conducted via manual audits → high risk of missed detections
- Competitor: Uses static rule‑based matching
- iNet: Utilizes a dynamic algorithm‑based scoring system
2. Convergence Basis
- Traditional: Based on experience and speculation → prone to misjudgment and business impact
- Competitor: Relies on preset policy templates
- iNet: Driven by real‑time traffic analysis
3. Effect Verification
- Traditional: Verification through manual testing after each change
- Competitor: Generates strategies that must be manually processed
- iNet: Fully automatic delivery with continuous monitoring of business traffic
4. Operation & Maintenance Costs
- Traditional: Requires employee oversight for every strategy step
- Competitor: Necessitates ongoing maintenance of a policy‑template library
- iNet: Offers a fully automatic closed‑loop system
Takeaways
As organizations grapple with sprawling firewall rulebases and mounting compliance pressures, Strategy Convergence emerges as the game-changer that network security teams have been waiting for. By transforming coarse-grained, legacy access policies into precision-tuned, least-privilege rules—based squarely on real business traffic—this methodology not only shrinks your attack surface but also slashes operational complexity.
In practice, Strategy Convergence delivers a four-step cycle of continuous improvement: automated traffic-log collection, permissiveness scoring, fine-grained rule generation and deployment, and real-time verification with safe retirement of outdated entries. The result? A resilient, auditable policy framework that adapts as your business does, guaranteeing zero-point-one-percent false positives while keeping compliance audits effortlessly within reach.
And maybe iNet might help you implement this solution better than the rest.
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