Editor’s Note: As of January 2022, iland is now 11:11 Systems, a managed infrastructure solutions provider at the forefront of cloud, connectivity, and security. As a legacy iland.com blog post, this article likely contains information that is no longer relevant. For the most up-to-date product information and resources, or if you have further questions, please refer to the 11:11 Systems Success Center or contact us directly.
At 11:11 Systems, we get the opportunity to help customers deploy our solutions in ways that are specific to their business needs. Often, this involves helping them adapt cloud services to their compliance requirements. We’d like to share one example that shows how the 11:11 Cloud Console provides the features customers need to ensure firewall security.
Recently, we had a customer open a ticket to request that syslog be enabled on their vShield Edge firewall. They said that the request was compliance-driven; they needed to be able to track certain activities that were performed on their cloud firewall for internal and external auditing purposes. Syslog is a message logging protocol that nearly all firewalls support to provide notification of a wide variety of events. However, you need to have a syslog collector and message parser setup to make use of any device’s syslog output. This customer did not have either of those things already setup.
As an alternative, we walked the customer through the functionality that is provided through the 11:11 Cloud Console. The customer was previously only familiar with the generic vCloud Director web interface and hadn’t explored all the offerings of the 11:11 Cloud Console. The features the customer was most interested in are outlined below:
• ECS Event History – This report provides a list of state changes that have occurred, the time and type of the change, the username of the individual who created the change, and the result. This includes changes made to the vShield Edge firewall.
• ECS Login Event History – This reports provides logs of authentication events. The report captures the date, time, username, login event type (login/logout/login errors), and IP Address of anyone accessing your 11:11 Cloud environment.
• Firewall/NAT Restore Points – Anytime a firewall or NAT rule is changed, a restore point is automatically generated. These restore points allow you to quickly revert back to your previous configuration should you encounter problems. The 11:11 Cloud Console also allows you to view the contents of the restore point before restoring it.
• Firewall/NAT Export Configuration – Using this option, you can download an export of your firewall/NAT configuration. This allows you to save a backup of your firewall/NAT configuration locally. This is also useful for external IT audits that require you to submit a copy of your firewall configuration for review.
• Firewall/NAT Import Configuration – Using this option, you can restore a firewall/NAT configuration that you previously exported.
After demonstrating these features to the customer, they no longer had any desire to setup syslog. They said that the 11:11 Cloud Console provided everything they needed to satisfy their firewall security and compliance requirements. This is just one of many ways the 11:11 Cloud goes the extra mile to provide customers with everything they need to stay compliant and so much more. It should also be noted that these features are not available through the generic vCloud Director web interface and are unique to the 11:11 Cloud Console.
This customer interaction was very rewarding as it shows that the innovation and new features we continue to develop in the 11:11 Cloud Console have direct benefit to customers, helping them to use cloud services in new ways and make their day-to-day working lives easier.
