The Vendor is required to provide a firewall monitoring solution.
- The firewall monitoring solution will provide the branch a means with which to monitor firewalls.
- The Branch envisions a Firewall Monitoring Solution contributing meaningfully to its Cybersecurity Maturity Program in the following ways:
• Detecting unusual or unauthorized network traffic and helps identify potential breaches, policy violations, or attack patterns in real time.
• Protecting environments by monitoring to ensure firewalls are functioning properly and tracking access control effectiveness while preventing misconfigurations that could expose the network.
• Providing logs and alerts that support incident response workflows.
• Facilitating rapid containment of threats and supports forensic analysis during investigations.
• Providing valuable insights to refine security policies and firewall rules over time while supporting governance and risk management efforts.
- Multi-Vendor and Multi-Environment Support - Manage firewalls from multiple vendors and across on-prem, cloud, and hybrid environments, including Cisco, AWS, Azure, Oracle, and GCP firewall services. Proponents are expected to share the current list of firewalls supported, along with their roadmap for extending the coverage.
- Firewall Configuration Auditing - Ensure the firewall rules are correctly configured and compliant with security policies to detect misconfigurations, outdated rules, and violations of best practices. Identify unnecessary open ports or overly permissive rules.
- Compliance Reporting - Ensure that the firewall configuration complies with relevant regulatory standards, including GDPR, HIPAA, PCI-DSS, and SOC 2 and aligns with compliance/regulatory requirements.
- Risk Assessment - Identify vulnerabilities in the firewall setup that could expose the network to attacks by highlighting potential issues such as overly permissive rules, missing patches, or unlogged traffic.
- Rule Cleanup and Optimization - Optimize the firewall rules to improve performance and security by identifying redundant or obsolete firewall rules that could be cleaned up to improve performance and reduce the attack surface.
- Network Traffic Flow Visualization - Gain insights into network traffic flow across the firewall by mapping out traffic flows, etc., to help identify bottlenecks, potential security gaps, or misconfigurations.
- Alerting and Notifications - Get real-time alerts on firewall-related events, such as unauthorized access attempts or configuration changes.
- Automated Security Policy Enforcement - Ensure that firewall rules are consistently applied and conform to security policies by flagging deviations from defined rules and configurations, reducing human error in managing firewalls.
- Integration with SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) - Improve overall security posture by integrating firewall data with SIEM systems.
- Change Management and Historical Analysis - Track changes made to firewall configurations and analyze historical traffic data.
- Contract Period/Term: 3 years
- Individual Proponent Conferences Date: January 9, 2026
- Questions/Inquires Deadline: January 12, 2026
