FireMon Debuts Agentic AI for Firewall Policy; Dell Expands Cyber Resilience

FireMon’s offering, called FireMon Agentic AI, is aimed at a workload that grows with each firewall vendor and cloud environment an enterprise runs, SiliconANGLE reported. One business access request can span several devices and policies, often with more than one technically valid way to grant it. Engineers have traditionally worked through those decisions by hand; FireMon argues the manual coordination ties up expertise while the business pushes for faster decisions.

In the new setup, agents handle investigation and planning steps inside limits the customer sets on which devices and tools each one can touch. The data behind that work is the same policy record FireMon’s human users already query. Choices that need organizational judgment go back to practitioners.

FireMon supplies three agents and lets customers customize them or build new ones in the platform. The FireMon Intelligent Agent answers plain-language questions about policy, such as which rules allow access to a given service, and generates the underlying queries itself. The Network Designer Agent recommends firewall rules for a specific access requirement. The Policy Change Designer Agent carries an access request from discovery to staged Policy Plan changes, fills required fields such as rule names automatically, and pauses when a practitioner must choose between valid alternatives. Nothing is saved until someone reviews and accepts the proposal; acceptance only stores the work in FireMon’s workflow, with no automatic deployment to firewalls.

Outside agents can reach FireMon through a new Model Context Protocol server, which could let an incident investigation workflow pull FireMon policy evidence alongside alert data. Authorized workflows can turn selected recommendations into staged Policy Plan changes. Roles and credentials govern what each external application can access.

AI enablement is optional and off by default. Customers can choose from supported large language models, including one hosted in their own approved environment, and scope each agent’s permissions to particular device groups. Activity is logged to an audit trail. FireMon said both Agentic AI and the MCP Server are due in November and that it is not charging extra for the initial release.

“Network security has never been more complex, and the answer isn’t more infrastructure,” said FireMon founder and Chief Executive Jody Brazil. He said the aim is to put the policy context the company has accumulated to work while practitioners keep “the calls that need human judgment.” Brazil started FireMon in 2004; the Lenexa, Kan.-based company reports more than 1,800 enterprise customers in upward of 70 countries.

Dell’s announcement covered three fronts. PowerProtect software can restore a compromised identity platform to a clean, trusted state after an attack, supporting Microsoft Corp.’s Active Directory and Entra ID as well as Okta Inc. Access controls come back with the platform, so administrators are not stuck rebuilding them by hand after an incident. Dell Managed Detection and Response for Identity, a new service, monitors around the clock for suspicious authentication activity, compromised accounts and misuse of privileges. If it picks up a defined attack pattern, Dell analysts can launch automated responses to contain the threat.

On the AI side, Security Hardening for Dell AI Factory sends Dell experts into a customer’s AI Factory deployment to check the physical, virtual and application layers for configuration risks; customers receive prioritized recommendations for reducing exposure. Resilience Operations for AI begins by working out which AI capabilities a business can least afford to lose, then Dell writes recovery policies and procedures for those applications and gives the customer a plan for bringing them back after a disruption. Dell first put an AI assistant into PowerProtect Data Manager in March. The updated version’s chat interface can be used for restores, reporting and other tasks, and the assistant sends a daily brief on risks it expects could escalate. Any action it proposes goes to a person for approval first.

On storage, PowerProtect now runs retention-locked local snapshots on Dell PowerScale systems automatically, including scheduling, so customers have a recent copy for fast recovery. With PowerScale SmartSync, a second copy of those snapshots can go to Dell ObjectScale and be kept long term. PowerStore’s quantum-safe encryption, part of its latest software release, applies to traffic over Fibre Channel connections. When the arrays are paired with supported Dell PowerEdge servers, the encryption protects data against harvest-now, decrypt-later attacks, according to Dell. Dell also offers a Post-Quantum Readiness Assessment that looks for exposed cryptography across an organization’s infrastructure and devices; the resulting inventory ranks risks by criticality to guide migration priorities.

“Many organizations still defend AI environments and identity systems with tools and strategies designed for yesterday’s threats,” said Simon Jelley, vice president of cyber resilience at Dell. He said attacks are moving faster than they were even a few months ago. Dell did not say when the new services and capabilities will be available or what they will cost. The lineup is being presented at the AI Cybersecurity and Resilience Summit, which is broadcasting on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio.