With Halloween next week, it’s a good time to ask yourself: is my network haunted? No, we’re not talking about whether or not you believe in the supernatural. Rather, let’s focus on an aspect of network security management that is often neglected – old, obsolete and duplicate firewall rules and policies which generate clutter and bloat. Clearly security policy bloat is a complex burden for network security managers and it potentially introduces significant security risks as well as performance problems. But safely removing rules is not always easy and there’s always the risk that you may cause an application outage by doing so. So what steps can you take to safely exorcise these ghost rules lurking in your firewalls? Here’s a five step process for reducing security policy bloat.

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