Passing a firewall assessment is rarely about the hardware. It is about whether you can produce evidence, quickly, that the perimeter is governed — who changed what, when, and what it caught.
What assessors ask to see
PCI DSS, HIPAA, SOC 2 and cyber-insurance questionnaires phrase it differently, but the underlying questions are the same. They want documentation that the firewall is configured deliberately, kept current, and monitored.
- The rule base, exported. Not a screenshot — a list an assessor can read, with a reason and owner per rule.
- Log retention. Proof that traffic and admin logs are kept for the required period and can be produced on request.
- Patch and signature history. Evidence that firmware and UTM services are updated on a schedule, not ad hoc.
- A change record. Who changed the firewall, when, and why — the trail that turns “trust us” into evidence.
“The finding is almost never ‘you have no firewall’. It is ‘you cannot show how this one is run’.”
The evidence pack
Assemble these four artefacts once and keep them current, and most of an assessment answers itself. The work is in keeping them live between audits, not producing them the week before.
Make it exportable, not screenshotted
Auditors want artefacts they can file. A rule-base export, a log-retention policy and a change log in a shared folder beat a scramble through the console every time.
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