Fiber provider retires seven unsupported firewalls by proving every rule dead before deleting it
A regional fiber-optic internet service provider. Outcome verified
The problem
A regional fiber-optic internet service provider's data-center segmentation platform depended on seven virtual firewalls the vendor no longer supported. Hundreds of accumulated rules left nobody confident about what could be removed, and the platform could not be upgraded until the firewalls were gone. The two data centers also needed a clean primary/secondary design with no unplanned downtime.
Why it mattered
Unsupported firewalls sat in the path of production traffic between two data centers, and every month on old software widened the security and uptime exposure.
What we did
Vizius treated the job as evidence-driven decommissioning rather than a forklift replacement. Each rule had to fail three independent checks (no endpoints attached, no traffic hits, manual review) before removal. Surviving internal rules were rebuilt as native fabric policy, external inspection moved to a high-availability firewall pair, and each tenant got its own routing exit, migrated one tenant per maintenance window.
What changed
The as-built design delivered in October 2025 shows the new firewall pair in production with per-tenant dynamic routing into the fabric. The legacy appliances were replaced and routing migrated, clearing the way for the platform upgrade.
- Telecom and isp
- Midsize company