FireMon has released new findings from its AI-powered analytics platform, FireMon Insights: 60% of enterprise firewalls fail high-severity compliance checks immediately upon evaluation, with another 34% falling short at critical levels. These aren’t just technical oversights; they’re signs of deeper governance issues that can lead to audit failures, operational downtime, and increased exposure to threats.
Across on-prem, cloud and hybrid environments, FireMon found misconfigurations, outdated rules, and bloated policies that bog down performance and leave security teams struggling to keep up. FireMon Insights was built to change that. It gives organizations a clear picture of their firewall risk, compares them to industry peers, and shows exactly where and how to fix what’s broken. It’s about helping teams see the problem, understand the impact, and move faster with fewer surprises.
These findings were collected anonymously from FireMon Insights deployments across new customers in large enterprises and regulated industries. And the data is striking:
- 60% of firewalls fail high-severity compliance checks; 34% fail at critical severity
- 95% of application objects and 82% of service objects show zero usage, creating unnecessary overhead and expanding the attack surface
- 30% of firewall rules are completely unused; 6% lack any owner or documentation, introducing audit gaps and operational blind spots
- More than 10% of rules are redundant or shadowed, reducing performance and masking dangerous misconfigurations
“Firewall complexity isn’t just a configuration issue, it’s a threat to resilience and trust,” said Jody Brazil, CEO and founder at FireMon. “Security teams are buried under policies they can’t explain, map to business objectives, or manage at scale. FireMon Insights cuts through the noise. It benchmarks your performance, exposing what’s been missed, and helping you take action before it turns into disruption.”
