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It was raised as a risk by a recent audit that our infrastructure team should have documented standard operating procedures for managing firewalls, listing daily/weekly/monthly tasks that are required to effective manage a firewall. This isnt to say that they arent doing these tasks, but their is nothing formal to state what they should be doing - should a new engineer start. I have no experience in managing firewalls myself, but out of curiosity, what kinds of tasks would you expect to see in a firewall management list of tasks. Any specific pointers? Is standard operating procedure the correct term for such a document, or out of interest, what do you refer to them as (which may help for searches to look for other templates online).
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It was raised as a risk by a recent audit that our infrastructure team should have documented standard operating procedures for managing firewalls, listing daily/weekly/monthly tasks that are required to effective manage a firewall. This isnt to say that they arent doing these tasks, but their is nothing formal to state what they should be doing - should a new engineer start. I have no experience in managing firewalls myself, but out of curiosity, what kinds of tasks would you expect to see in a firewall management list of tasks. Any specific pointers? Is standard operating procedure the correct term for such a document, or out of interest, what do you refer to them as (which may help for searches to look for other templates online).

firewall management operations

Hardware-based firewalls provide more sophisticated protection for inbound and outbound traffic than the simple Windows software firewall or the basic NAT firewalls found in routers. These devices implement techniques such as stateful packet inspection, deep packet inspection, and content filtering; and may include built-in antivirus and anti-malware protection.

Hardware Firewalls

Software firewalls, also known as host-based firewalls, provide a layer of software on one host that controls network traffic in and out of that single machine. Most operating systems now include firewall software, but many available software firewalls include central distribution, antivirus systems and disaster recovery.

Software Firewalls

Network Management involves issues that are independent of specific hardware or software, including email policies, upgrade planning, backup scheduling and working with managed service providers for Desktop-As-A-Service (DaaS), Software-As-A-Service (SaaS) and the like through the use of tools, coupled with manufacturer standards, best practice guidelines, policies and procedures plus all other relevant documentation. Network management also includes monitoring, alerting and reporting, management reporting, planning for device or service updates, the backup of configurations, the setting of key performance indicators and measures (KPIs/KPMs), associated service level agreements and problem records as part of the IT Service Management (ITSM) framework.