New data derived from FireMon customer onboarding revealed that 60 percent of enterprise firewalls fail high-severity compliance checks immediately upon evaluation, with another 34 percent falling short at critical levels.
The global firewall policy management company identified where firewall configurations fall short—providing benchmarks and context that business, IT, and app teams can use to guide operational decisions and minimize risks to business disruption.
Across on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments, FireMon identified misconfigurations, outdated rules, and bloated policies that can hinder performance and leave security teams struggling to keep up.
The findings were collected anonymously from deployments across new customers in large enterprises and regulated industries. The data showed:
- 95 percent of application objects and 82 percent of service objects show zero usage, creating unnecessary overhead and expanding the attack surface.
- 30 percent of firewall rules are completely unused; 6 percent lack any owner or documentation, introducing audit gaps and operational blind spots.
- More than 10 percent of rules are redundant or shadowed, reducing performance and masking dangerous misconfigurations.
These aren’t just technical oversights; they’re signs of deeper governance issues that can lead to audit failures, operational downtime, and increased exposure to threats, the firm warned.
“Organizations have been trying to untangle firewall complexity for years, but too often the tools fall short, either offering static snapshots or failing to provide the operational context that teams actually need,” said Mark Miller, CRO at EncoreCyber.
Network security teams are expected to move fast—but speed without direction leads to missed priorities and unmanaged risk, the company added.
“Collectively, the cybersecurity industry has been driving organizations to a point of sophistication that actually distracts their cyber strategy from implementing required capabilities and measuring operational outcomes,” said Dan Rheault, director of Product Management at Firemon.