Executive Management

Management is highly supportive of effective firewall protection.
Management supports extensive protection of firewalls and recognized the criticality of protection in these systems.
Management recognizes that even with a perfect firewall, internal systems are not completely safe and has taken measures to secure internal systems in addition to the efforts to secure firewalls.
Firewall operation is controlled by top-level management at an executive level and there are no more than 3 managers between the technical staff working on the firewall and the executive management of the organization.
People working on the firewall do not report to the people whose access they control.
Management is properly educated to make management decisions about firewalls.
Firewall management crosses the boundaries of the organizations that directly or indirectly use the firewall.

Systems Administration

The systems administration interface makes managing the firewall straight forward.
The management interface tends to reduce unnecessary complexity while allowing flexible drill-down for detailed understanding and verification of proper operation.
Error detection and response is highly automated, however, systems administrators are fully aware of the details of all incidents and the meaning of all indicative messages.
The management interface provides information in a manner and fashion that clarifies without hiding information.
The management interface provides statistical information and a method for viewing and analyzing data with an external analysis program such as a standard database or spreadsheet.
The management interface provides analytical capabilities that allow attacks, defenses, configurations, and user behavior to be readily analyzed.
The management interface provides a useful report generation capability.
Remote administration is facilitated by the firewall technology and there is a secure method for remote as well as local administration.
There is a safe method for making and testing changes to the firewall configuration.
The change mechanism includes a comprehensive automated configuration management system with a usable interface.
There is a method for easily and quickly backing out of changes.
There is an independent method of comparing two configurations for their differences and verifying those differences against change control information.
With maximum value of