A firewall bought five years ago and never reviewed is not protecting much. Northern Star provides firewall management services for UK businesses, covering monitoring, rule governance, patching and tuning.
We have supported growing organisations for more than sixteen years. You keep ownership of the policy and the decisions. We do the work and tell you what we found.
Almost nobody has a broken firewall. What they have is a rule set that has grown for six years, temporary allow rules nobody removed, and firmware two versions behind.
That drift is where breaches start. We stop it, and where the wider architecture needs rethinking, our IT consulting team can take that on separately.
We start by reading what is actually configured, not what the documentation claims. Redundant rules, shadowed rules, any to any entries and open management interfaces get flagged. You get a baseline document and a prioritised list of fixes.
Every change request is assessed for security impact before it goes in, then logged with who asked, why, and when it should be reviewed. Temporary rules get an expiry date rather than becoming permanent by accident.
Engineers watch for blocked attack traffic, failed logins, tunnel drops, throughput anomalies and device health around the clock. Device failover and high availability pairs are checked too, since a standby that has never been tested is not really a standby. Genuine issues reach you with context and a recommended action. Noise does not.
Vendor advisories are tracked and patches applied in agreed maintenance windows, with a rollback position ready before anything is touched. Subscription renewals for threat feeds and filtering are tracked too, because an expired licence silently disables inspection.
Deep inspection costs throughput. We tune policies so security and speed are balanced, and we test the changes rather than assuming. Where a rule set needs independent validation, we can pair the service with penetration testing.
Monthly reports show blocked threats, rule changes made, patches applied and outstanding risks, written so a board can read them. The same evidence satisfies Cyber Essentials, ISO 27001 and PCI DSS firewall requirements.
We work with Fortinet, Palo Alto, Sophos, SonicWall, WatchGuard, Cisco and Check Point. If you already own hardware, we manage it rather than insisting on a replacement.
Cloud and hybrid estates are covered too, including Microsoft Azure firewalls and security groups, so on premises and cloud policy are consistent rather than diverging.
Our client satisfaction score sits at 95.4 across recent reviews, from sixty five responses in ninety days.
Clients stay because change requests are actioned quickly rather than queued for a week, engineers know the estate, and fixed monthly pricing means you are not billed per rule change.
We support organisations from five to two hundred and fifty users, including multi site and international estates.
Assessment first, usually one to two weeks. Then stabilisation, where we clean the rule set, close obvious gaps and bring firmware current, typically two to four weeks.
Ongoing management follows, with quarterly reviews. Where deeper visibility is needed, the firewall feeds into our managed SOC so perimeter events sit alongside endpoint and identity data.
Pricing is normally per firewall per month, so it scales with the number of devices rather than the number of problems you have.
Most UK small and mid sized businesses budget between one hundred and fifty and five hundred pounds per device per month for fully managed cover. What you pay depends on the vendor, whether the device is a small branch appliance or a clustered pair, how many change requests you generate, and whether you need out of hours support.
Hardware and vendor subscriptions are quoted separately, since those are licence costs rather than service costs.
Northern Star reviews your existing estate and renewals before quoting, because consolidating those often funds part of the service.
Yes. We are vendor agnostic and will manage what you already have, including Fortinet, Palo Alto, Sophos, SonicWall, WatchGuard, Cisco and Check Point.
Replacing working hardware for a provider’s convenience is rarely justified, and it usually means writing off subscription terms you have already paid for.
We start with an assessment, take over administrative access under a documented handover, and confirm licensing, support entitlement and end of life dates before anything else.
Where a device genuinely is past its useful life, undersized for your throughput or no longer receiving vendor updates, we will say so and show you the evidence. Replacement is then planned around your maintenance windows rather than rushed.
A full rule set audit every six months is the sensible baseline, with a lighter review each quarter.
The reason is drift. Rules accumulate faster than anyone removes them, and a rule added for a supplier who left three years ago is still an open path if nobody checks.
Certain events should trigger an unscheduled review regardless of the calendar. Those include an office move, a cloud migration, a merger or acquisition, a change of internet provider, and any staff departure with administrative access.
Cyber Essentials and ISO 27001 both expect documented review, so audits produce evidence as well as security benefit. We build the schedule in rather than leaving it to be remembered.
No, and it is worth being clear about the boundaries.
A firewall controls traffic at the boundary. It is excellent at blocking unwanted inbound connections and enforcing what is allowed out, but it sees very little once an attacker is operating inside using legitimate credentials.
Endpoint detection covers what happens on the device. A managed SOC covers correlation and investigation across endpoints, identity, cloud and the firewall together.
Most breaches now begin with a phishing email and a valid login rather than an attack through the firewall, so perimeter management is necessary but not sufficient. Northern Star can run these together or separately, and we will tell you which gap matters most.
Firewalls appear explicitly in both frameworks, so the work produces compliance evidence as a by product.
Cyber Essentials requires that boundary firewalls are securely configured, default administrative passwords are changed, the management interface is not exposed to the internet, and every inbound rule is documented and business justified. Those are exactly the items an audit surfaces.
ISO 27001 goes further and expects documented change control, review records and proof that controls operate over time rather than at a single point.
Our reporting is written with both in mind, so when an assessor asks for firewall evidence it already exists rather than needing reconstruction.
Urgent changes are handled by an engineer, not a queue.
Most requests fall into two categories. Routine changes, such as opening access for a new application or a new site, are assessed and scheduled within agreed service levels. Urgent changes, such as blocking an active threat, revoking access for a departing employee or restoring a broken VPN tunnel, are actioned immediately.
Every change still goes through the same governance, even the urgent ones. The security impact is assessed, the change is logged, and a rollback is available.
Emergency changes are then reviewed afterwards rather than left in place indefinitely, which is how temporary rules quietly become permanent problems.
Tell us when your rule set was last audited. If the answer is a shrug, that is usually reason enough. Book a call with an experienced engineer, not a sales script.
Tell us what is slowing your organisation down. An experienced specialist will help you understand the most practical next step.
6 global locations. One local point of contact. London-based support.
Dependable IT support and cyber security for ambitious organisations in London and around the world.
The Leadenhall Building
122 Leadenhall Street
London EC3V 4AB
Schuman Roundabout 2–4
1040 Brussels
14 Wall Street, 20th floor
New York, NY 10005
33 Rue La Fayette
75009 Paris
75 Broadway, Suite 202
San Francisco, CA
Marina Bay Financial Centre
10 Marina Boulevard
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