Firewall discipline. On tap.

Managed Firewall Services: Rules That Age, People Who Do Not

Managed Firewall Services from Proactive operate your Cisco Secure Firewall estate with discipline: rulebase hygiene, documented changes, tuned threat protection, and audit-ready evidence for DPDP, RBI and SEBI. NOC and SOC work from one ticket queue. Backed by a 30-minute response and 3-hour P1 restoration SLA. Delivered by a Cisco Penta-Preferred Partner under the Cisco 360 Partner Program. 

The Rule From 2019 

Someone added a rule in 2019. It let a supplier's contractor reach the design server for one project. The project ended. The contractor left. The supplier lost the account. The rule stayed. 

Six years later, nobody knows why it is there. Nobody knows whether removing it will break something. So it stays. Two hundred rules like it stay. On audit day, the firewall documentation is a spreadsheet somebody exported the night before the auditor arrived, with fields marked for internal review and legacy, do not touch. 

Security policy fails the moment it depends on human memory. 

Discipline, Not Heroics 

Managed Firewall Services replace human memory with documented discipline. Every rule has a stated purpose, an owner, a review date and a documented change history. Every proposed change is reviewed against the existing rulebase before it lands, and every landed change ships with a pre-approved rollback path. The rulebase does not accumulate. It is curated. 

This is not glamorous work. It is the work that decides whether the auditor closes the file in an hour or opens twenty findings. 

What Sits Under the Managed Firewall Contract 

Cisco Secure Firewall estates of any size, on-premises or virtual, running Firepower Threat Defense (FTD) or ASA legacy, managed through the Firewall Management Center (FMC) or the Firewall Device Manager. IPS policy, URL filtering, malware defence and application control tuned for your actual traffic pattern, not a lab default. VPN concentrators for remote access, integrated with Cisco Duo for MFA. Site-to-site tunnels for branch and partner connectivity. Change control, incident response, monthly rulebase reviews, quarterly policy audits. 

Everything with a rulebase, a policy engine or a tunnel is in scope. Everything else stays with you. 

Audit-Ready by Default 

DPDP Rule 6 requires access controls, audit logs and evidence that unauthorised access can be detected and reconstructed. RBI's cybersecurity framework requires periodic VAPT and rapid incident reporting. SEBI's CSCRF requires ISO 27001-grade rigour for Market Infrastructure Institutions and Qualified REs. IRDAI requires annual VAPT and third-party risk management. 

The common thread is documentation the enterprise can produce on demand. Managed Firewall Services produce it by default: a live rulebase register, dated change logs with reviewer sign-off, IPS event history with retention that outlasts the regulator's clock, VPN access records tied to named identities, and quarterly compliance reports formatted for the internal audit team. Your compliance posture holds between reviews, not just during them. 

Threat Protection, Tuned for Real Traffic 

A stock IPS policy generates noise. A tuned IPS policy generates signal. We start with your actual traffic pattern (application mix, protocol distribution, business-hour rhythm) and tune signature groups against it. False positives are suppressed by rule, not by turning off signatures. Threat intelligence from Cisco Talos flows into the policy weekly. Zero-day advisories trigger a review inside the day, not the week. 

One Queue: NOC and SOC 

Most managed services partners run NOC and SOC as two teams with a ticket handoff form between them. When a network event is a security event, the handoff loses hours. 

Proactive runs both from one queue. The engineer looking at the network alert is one message away from the analyst tuning the IPS. The customer sees one owner per incident, not two. This is a small architectural choice that shows up in almost every P1 debrief. 

How the Commercial Works 

Three models, chosen against your existing estate and refresh cycle. Full choice guide sits in our CapEx vs OPEX decision guide. 

INR-priced illustrations sit in the Managed Services Buyer's Kit. 

What SLA Backs It 

4x7 coverage for enterprise tiers. Change windows scheduled in low-traffic slots. Emergency changes take the P1 clock. 

Why the Cisco Preferred Services Designation Matters Here 

Cisco Preferred status across all five portfolios (Security, Networking, Collaboration, Cloud & AI and Services) is genuinely uncommon in India. For a Managed Firewall customer, three specific advantages come from it. Priority TAC escalation on Cisco Secure Firewall P1 tickets, ahead of the general partner queue. Direct access to Cisco Talos advisories that Preferred Security partners receive early. And single-contract accountability when a firewall incident touches Duo, Umbrella, XDR or the underlying Meraki fabric. 

Start With a Rulebase Audit 

Two hours with your CISO or head of network security. We take a snapshot of your current firewall configuration, run it through our audit template, and hand you a written finding by end of week: how many undocumented rules, how many redundant rules, how many stale rules with objects that no longer exist, and where the compliance evidence gaps sit. No charge. No obligation. 

If the finding tells you the estate is well-run, we say so. If it tells you the estate is one audit away from a finding, we tell you that too, and we quote the fix. 

Write to [email protected]. 

Disclaimer: Service levels, coverage, tuning outcomes and commercial terms described here are indicative and subject to the final signed contract. Compliance mapping is operational guidance based on published regulator obligations and is not a substitute for legal advice from a qualified Indian lawyer.