Updated: Sep 01, 2025
Your firewall ruleset is supposed to protect you. Yet in many Indian enterprises, it has turned into a liability. Rules pile up. Owners change. Exceptions creep in. When an attack slips through, it is often because policy drift was left unchecked. The good news: these failures are preventable, and the fixes are practical.
Take a Gurgaon-based IT services firm with four data centres and cloud workloads in AWS and Azure. In five years, its firewall grew from 200 rules to over 3,000. Many rules had no clear owner. Some had broad any-any permissions. When auditors asked for evidence of review, the team scrambled for weeks. Sound familiar?
Failed firewall rules are not harmless clutter. They increase your attack surface, weaken audit posture, and slow down change windows. CERT-In’s six-hour breach reporting mandate means you cannot afford messy rulebases when investigators ask for logs and rationale.
Add to this the cost of outages when misrules block legitimate traffic, the delays in provisioning new services because teams fear breaking existing flows, and the rising scrutiny from insurers who now demand proof of firewall hygiene before underwriting cyber cover. What looks like policy clutter quickly becomes an operational and financial risk.
Many firms start with in-house clean-ups, only to find the sprawl returns. Managed firewall services, such as Proactive’s Cisco Powered Service, provide continuous rule hygiene. Our run teams baseline, tag, and review rules every week. You keep control of intent. We provide the discipline, tooling, and audit evidence.
A precision engineering company in Peenya Industrial Area faced repeated production downtime due to misconfigured firewall rules that blocked SCADA data. Production lines halted more than once a month, forcing engineers to work overtime and pushing delivery schedules back. The issue was not a lack of investment in hardware, but unmanaged and outdated rules that nobody wanted to touch for fear of making things worse.
With managed firewall, the ruleset was cleaned, owners assigned, and application-aware policies applied. Each rule was mapped to a business purpose, and shadow rules were retired. The company saw fewer incidents, faster changes, and compliance evidence available in hours instead of weeks. For the first time, the board received a weekly dashboard on firewall hygiene tied directly to uptime and audit readiness.
A firewall ruleset that is lean, owned, and evidence-ready. No firefights at midnight. No stale exceptions. Just a live policy aligned to your business goals and regulatory obligations. It gives you the confidence to pass audits, the speed to approve changes without fear, and the visibility to prove outcomes to your board and customers alike.
Book a consultation with Proactive. We will assess your current firewall ruleset, identify the top risks, and share a clean-up plan. You get clarity, control, and confidence, without adding headcount.
