Following Skybox Security’s abrupt closure and acquisition by Tufin, many organizations are scrambling to find a replacement for the now-defunct firewall management solution.  

Instead of maintaining the status quo, IT and security leaders are seizing this opportunity to move away from traditional, siloed firewall management by replacing Skybox with a more streamlined and scalable approach. They’re aiming to: 

• Fully automate firewall policy creation, management, and validation. 
• Ensure continuous compliance for leading security frameworks like DORA, NIST, and NIS2. 
• Eliminate tech debt by integrating their cloud, network, and security systems into a single source of truth. 

In other words, this sudden transition is an opportunity to look beyond Tufin for faster workflows, deeper network insights, and more seamless integrations. 

What Does a Next-Gen Firewall Policy Management Solution Look Like? 

It’s no secret that traditional firewall policy management tools struggle to provide the visibility necessary for securing today’s dynamic networks. Outdated solutions focus on rule administration, but fail to assess changes in the context of the evolving network and security environment. This leaves security and network teams to wrestle with fragmented visibility and time-consuming manual workflows, which can cause delays, misconfigurations, and vulnerabilities that bad actors are all too happy to exploit.   

Manual firewall policy rule provisioning process.

Meanwhile, a next-gen firewall policy management solution would address these challenges by providing an end-to-end view of cloud, network, and security environments. With access to highly contextualized insights, teams have the flexibility to automatically create and implement changes—without the risks of unintended consequences. 

This is exactly where IP Fabric and Network to Code (NTC) step in: to make this next-gen solution a reality. 

IP Fabric and Network to Code: The Smarter Skybox Alternative 

At Cisco Live EMEA 2025, IP Fabric and NTC unveiled our fully automated, closed-loop solution for next-gen firewall policy management.   

At a glance, IP Fabric brings:

• End-to-end visibility across network infrastructure, including detailed path lookups between IP endpoints.  
• Granular insights to validate configurations both before and after changes are made.  
• Over 160 intent checks to proactively identify configuration and compliance issues before they arise.  

IP Fabric combined forces with NTC to build a go-to solution for automated rule creation and management. As a leading network source of truth and automation platform, NTC offers: 

• Automatically generated configurations based on incoming change requests.  
• Standardized policy rules across vendors and platforms via Nautobot’s robust Application Dictionary. 
• Universal policy rule application to ensure consistency across diverse network environments. 

Next-gen firewall policy management with IP Fabric and Network to Code.

Between IP Fabric’s automated network discovery and NTC’s simplified policy management, our combined solution helps organizations to build a more resilient network one policy rule at a time. 

What Does Automated Firewall Policy Management Look Like?

Here’s a glimpse of how the IP Fabric and NTC integration automates firewall policy rule creation, management, and validation:  

• Step 1: Centralize app policy rules before translating them into vendor-neutral policies. 
• Step 2: Evaluate network paths to identify impacted firewalls, pinpoint interdependencies, and ensure that rules are correctly configured and up to date.   
• Step 3: Generate change requests outlining necessary configuration updates, according to highly contextualized network insights.  
• Step 4: Push updated firewall configurations to relevant devices.  
• Step 5: Validate all changes while updating requests with comprehensive documentation.  

This is just a sneak peek into how this integration builds consistency, compliance, and security into every step of the firewall policy management process. Our goal? To give your team the confidence you need to make quick, reliable changes without sacrificing your security. 

Migration Made Easy: IP Fabric and Network to Code’s Unified Approach  

IP Fabric and NTC’s Nautobot were both purpose-built to create a centralized view of rules, policies, and network paths. Users can rely on frictionless API connections to: 

• Automatically pull data from IP Fabric, Tufin, and other systems into Nautobot’s Single Source of Truth (SSoT) app. 
• Push data from Nautobot to other systems to ensure that new policy rules are consistent across platforms.  

This unified view ensures that new policy rules integrate smoothly into your existing setup for a seamless network management experience during every stage of the migration process.   

TL;DR: It’s Time to Go Beyond Traditional Policy Management 

It’s clear that in today’s increasingly complicated networks, traditional firewall policy management tools can only do so much. Sure, they enforce rules, but they fail to provide the network visibility and context needed to avoid critical security and compliance gaps.  

However, next-gen tools like the IP Fabric and Network to Code integration give organizations the visibility and control they need to secure their evolving networks with confidence.  

Ready to take the next step? Contact our team to learn how you can start automating your firewall policy management today.