Matasano’s Playbook: Available Now!

Max Caceres | July 2nd, 2008 | Filed Under: Matasano

We are very pleased to announce the availability of Matasano’s Playbook!

What is Playbook?
Playbook is a web-based command center for network firewalls. From a single console, Playbook allows firewalls teams to search firewall rulesets, design access rules with full change tracking, and push them out to one, ten or one hundred devices with a single click.

Playbook helps organizations with multiple network firewalls to better manage their policies by providing a centralized and version controlled repository of rulesets, which can be easily browsed or searched via the web. Network operators can review all recent rule changes affecting the London branch, document a recently provisioned firewall at corporate offices, and rollback to the last known version of rules for the North-East group after an update gone wrong with only a couple of clicks and without having to log into 50 different devices. 

Playbook takes advantage of an expressive wiki engine to help you document rulesets, protocols, and your network infrastructure, so that you not only have a complete audit trail of all your changes, but you also know why those changes are there in the first place.

There is more information at the product’s official website. We’ll keep you posted as Playbook continues to evolve.

If you currently manage multiple firewalls and are are interested in learning more about Playbook we’d love to talk with you. Shoot us an e-mail or give us a call at 1-888-677-0666 x7529 (PLAY).

20 Comments so far

  • Dino Dai Zovi

    July 2nd, 2008 5:10 pm

    It lives! Congratulations, it looks great.

  • Liquidmatrix Security Digest » Matasano Has The Playbook

    July 2nd, 2008 5:13 pm

    […] Article Link Tag It: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. […]

  • Kevin

    July 2nd, 2008 5:17 pm

    I liked the original name, but since I’ve already sold my boss on the project, I’m just glad to see this go live.

  • Dennis Cox

    July 2nd, 2008 5:19 pm

    Looks nice - I wish I could see it better, perhaps you could make the images clickable (and with that full screen versions) so that I can see what’s on the actual screenshots?

  • Max Caceres

    July 2nd, 2008 5:23 pm

    @Dennis: will do, we are putting together a set of bigger screenshots, we are just excited to announce :-)

  • Ted J

    July 2nd, 2008 5:50 pm

    Congrats guys!!!

  • Zero Day mobile edition

    July 2nd, 2008 6:51 pm

    […] Max Caceres explains: Playbook helps organizations with multiple network firewalls to better manage their policies by […]

  • Tom Watson

    July 2nd, 2008 7:58 pm

    Congratulations! I did like the original name a bit better, but I’m just happy to see the design go live!

  • AMZN

    July 2nd, 2008 10:29 pm

    Looks like the Amazon logo upside down.

  • David Mortman

    July 3rd, 2008 9:16 am

    Congrats! It’s awesome to see this finally available…

  • Anonymous Coward

    July 3rd, 2008 11:52 am

    Is this Solsoft all over again? One UI to control many different firewalls? Were they sold for like, $5m?

    Please explain - I am really curious?

  • Hernan

    July 3rd, 2008 2:56 pm

    Congratulations!, specially to Max but just because I know him better! :).

  • Thomas Ptacek

    July 3rd, 2008 3:11 pm

    This is much, much simpler than Solsoft. We’re not even slightly interested in giving you a graphical map of your firewall rules and routing tables. I’m not even totally sold on the idea that you need “rule optimization”. The companies we’ve worked with? They have 10’s of thousands of rules. They have a week-long review process for changing one of them. We’re not yet crazy enough to suggest they run their rules through a compiler.

    There are just a couple key problems we’re starting out trying to solve:

    1. Too many companies have no “track changes” functionality for their rules. When they do, it’s a different regime for each firewall vendor they work with. Most of those regimes suck.

    2. If you have 500 firewalls, it’s not reasonable to eat 41 hours at 5 minutes per device to make simple changes to all your rules.

    3. No system we’ve seen has reasonable support for documenting rules.

    Our answer:

    1. A web console that backends all content to Subversion, and still supports command-line svn editing with your favorite editor.

    2. A job management system that will push rules to firewalls.

    3. A content system built on a solid Wiki engine, which can be integrated into firewall rules, and which also backends in to Subversion.

    We didn’t take $15MM in VC money. We don’t care about our “position” in the “firewall ecology”. We don’t care about how “defensible” our ideas are. We just want to solve the core operational problems that make firewall management suck, and *then* move on to designing the Rube Goldberg features that nobody uses. I know that sounds backwards. Welcome to the upside-down topsy-turvey world of Matasano!

  • Nate

    July 3rd, 2008 3:38 pm

    Congrats to all on shipping your first product! Looks like it’s very useful.

  • Anton Chuvakin

    July 3rd, 2008 4:00 pm

    Wow, this is cool …

    >We just want to solve the core operational problems

    Is this, like, the only way to go, which actually passes the common sense test? :-) Is this why this way is so unpopular?

    Along the same line, there is got to be some GRC angle with it, isn’t there? :-)

  • Thomas Ptacek

    July 3rd, 2008 4:07 pm

    All I know is, as a result of not taking VC and therefore not having been ousted from the board of directors, I can speak in my role as a company director when I say: if you call us a GRC solution, I will punch you in the nose.

  • PaulM

    July 4th, 2008 10:29 pm

    Congratulations on launching Playbook. I noticed on the site that it doesn’t list (at least not that I can find) the supported firewall platforms.

  • Max Caceres

    July 7th, 2008 11:18 am

    @PaulM: We will be updating the site with more information very soon, stay tuned!

  • JR

    July 10th, 2008 8:48 am

    Congratulations on shipping!

    This blog has some of the best (i.e. clear, insightful, grammatically correct, and concise) writing on security issues; please don’t let your product focus slow down the blogging. Best wishes for continued success and keep up the great work.

  • </p><img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/blueflavor/~4/329080859″ height=”1″ width=”1″/>Kenny MeyersMon, 07 Jul 2008 16:41:54 -0000http://blueflavor.com/blog/2008/jul/07/css3-jquery-and-attribute-selecto

    July 11th, 2008 11:48 pm

    […] wanted to let you all know that one of our clients, Matasano Security, has launched their new web product, Playbook […]

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