Azure Firewall vs Palo Alto Networks VM-Series comparison

Fortinet FortiGate is an innovative line of firewalls that aim to protect organizations from all types of web-based network threats. They come in a wide variety of product types. Fortinet FortiGate’s solutions are available in a large range of sizes and form factors and are key components of the Fortinet Security Fabric, which enables immediate, intelligent defense against known and new threats throughout the entire network.

Fortinet FortiGate provides users with next-generation firewall solutions that provide proven protection with unmatched performance across the network, from internal segments to data centers to cloud environments. You can protect every part of your network without exception. Additionally, your protections can be managed from a single central location. This ensures that the task of protecting your network is infinitely easier to accomplish.

Benefits of Fortinet FortiGate

Some of the benefits of using Fortinet FortiGate include:

• The ability to manage your firewalls from a centralized automated control console. Fortinet FortiGate’s FortiManager enables administrators to exercise control of their firewalls in a streamlined manner. Administrators have full visibility and control over their system from a single location. It utilizes automation that collects information in real time, which greatly simplifies and reduces the cost of running various types of workflows. Administrators can free up resources by automating the most basic tasks.
• The ability to produce uniform, appropriate, and coordinated responses to threats across networks. Fortinet FortiGate’s FortiGuard feature generates system protections in near real time. This allows administrators to address threats to the system with custom-made solutions that can be uniformly enforced.
• The ability to scale up your security to fit your changing security needs. Fortinet FortiGate’s design allows users to accelerate the transfer of data between users and escalate the number of users that are covered without compromising security of performance. This means that users can grow their networks and continue to collaborate without worrying about the system slowing down or coming under attack.

Reviews from Real Users

Fortinet FortiGate’s firewall solutions are cutting edge. They stand out from competitors for a number of reasons. Two major ones are the robustness and power of their firewalls. Fortinet FortiGate’s firewall provides users with many valuable features that allow them to maximize what they can do with the solution. These firewalls enable users to use a single piece of software to accomplish tasks that often require the use of multiple pieces of software.

PeerSpot user Eric S., a Solutions Engineer and Consultant at a tech-services company, notes the robustness of this solution when he writes, "One of the nice things about FortiGate is that it can be deployed on the cloud or on-premises. You can actually do both. That's the biggest reason why I stick with this solution as opposed to something like Cisco Meraki. Another nice thing is that I can log directly into a FortiGate or get to it through their FortiCloud access products. They're pretty reliable and consistent. One of the reasons why I started using the product was their single pane of management. I can deploy their line of firewalls in conjunction with their switching and access points, and I can manage the entire network from one interface.”

PeerSpot user Jim M., a network admin at Penobscot Valley Hospital, notes the power of Fortinet FortiGate’s security software when he writes, "It does a lot for you for intrusion protection and as an antivirus. The threat management bundle is worth the money. You don't need another company to monitor your web traffic for you. You can do everything yourself on the firewall. You restrict your own black list for people on the firewall.”

Azure Firewall is a user-friendly, intuitive, cloud-native firewall security solution that provides top-of-the-industry threat protection for all your Azure Virtual Network resources. Azure Firewall is constantly and thoroughly analyzing all traffic and data packets, making it a very valuable and secure fully stateful firewall as a service with built-in high availability and unrestricted cloud scalability. Azure Firewall allows users to create virtual IP addresses and provides for secure DDoS protection for the virtual machines on your network. It also provides fast and efficient east-west and north-south traffic security.

Azure Firewall is a managed, cloud-based network security service built to protect your Azure Virtual Network resources. It is a fully stateful firewall as a service with built-in high availability and unrestricted cloud scalability.

Azure Firewall has two significant offerings, Standard and Premium.

Azure Firewall Standard works directly with Microsoft Cyber Security and supplies excellent L3-L7 filtering and threat awareness. The proactive real-time threat awareness will quickly alert you and immediately deny all traffic to and from any known problematic or suspicious domains or IP addresses. Microsoft Cyber Security is updated continually to protect against all new and known potential threats at all times. To learn more about Azure Firewall Standard, click here.

Azure Firewall Premium provides everything the standard version does, and additionally adds extra levels of data encryption, network intrusion detection, extended URL filtering, and Web category filters. To learn more about the added features of Azure Firewall Premium, click here.

Key Benefits and Features of Azure Firewall:

• High availability - You do not need load balancers with Azure Firewall; it's already built in and ready to go.
• Self-scalability - Azure Firewall is intuitive and will auto-scale as needed based on traffic flow to be ready for peak traffic times.
• Threat awareness - Using Microsoft Cyber Security to filter traffic, Azure Firewall will deny any known problematic threats to keep your network safe.
• Additional IP addresses - You can securely add up to 250 public IP addresses with Azure Firewall
• Improved web category filtering - You can set up specific protocols to allow or deny categories within websites that are deemed inappropriate for use within your network. You have the ability to organize categories based on a defined set of descriptions.

What our real users have to say:

Many PeerSpot users found Azure Firewall to be very user-friendly and easy to use. They liked that it offers seamless integration to the cloud and were especially pleased with the threat filtering options.

Regarding integration and threat intelligence, our users wrote:

“The most valuable feature is the integration into the overall cloud platform.”

“The most valuable feature is threat intelligence. It is based on filtering and can identify multiple threats.”

“I think that one of the best features is definitely the premium version, along with the IDPs in terms of the intrusion detection and prevention system.”

Palo Alto Networks VM-Series is a highly effective advanced threat protection (ATP) solution and firewall that can be hosted on cloud computing technologies designed by many different companies. It decreases the amount of time that it will take administrators to respond to threats. Users that deploy VM-series have 70% less downtime than those who use similar firewalls. Neither protection nor efficiency are concerns when this next-generation firewall is in play.

VM-Series is being deployed to protect both public and private cloud environments. This level of flexibility empowers organizations to run the environment or environments that best meet their needs without worrying that they are going to be exposed to digital threats due to the environment that they choose.

In the public cloud, users of Palo Alto Networks VM-Series can automate their deployment and dynamically scale up their environment while experiencing a consistent level of protection. This dynamic scalability means that they also integrate their security into their DevOps workflows so that their security can keep up with their activities and requirements. Users of private cloud environments can set up security policies that can be automated to be provisioned as the need arises. Organizations don’t need to slow down when they deploy VM-Series because it makes the task of defending them so simple that they can set their defenses and forget that they are even there.

Users gain a deep level of visibility when they deploy Palo Alto Networks VM-Series. App-ID technology enables organizations to see their network traffic on the application level and spot threats that might be trying to sneak in through vulnerable points in their defenses. It also leverages Palo Alto Networks WildFire and advanced threat protection to block the threats before they can escalate.

Palo Alto Networks VM-Series Features:

• Central management system - It has a central management system that enables users to set up and control their security operations from one location. Users don’t need to search for the tools that they need. This system allows for security consistency and complete control without requiring businesses to spend large periods of time to do so.
• Blacklisting and whitelisting - Organizations can utilize blacklisting and whitelisting tools to ensure that their network traffic only contains the type of traffic that they want to be present. These tools make it possible for them to set specific web traffic sources as being either undesirable and thus blocked from entering their network or desirable and thus allowed to enter. 
• Automation feature - The product’s automation feature can automate many critical functions that users would otherwise have to handle manually. Security policy updates are an example of a function that users can automate.

Reviews from Real Users:

Palo Alto Networks VM-Series is a solution that stands out when compared to other similar solutions. Two major advantages that it offers are its ability to protect users without degrading the efficiency with which their networks perform and its centralized management system. 

Jason H., the director of information technology at Tavoca Inc, writes, “There is no noticeable trade-off between security and network performance. In fact, so far, we've not seen any negative network performance with it. We're very impressed in that regard.”

An information technology manager at a tech services company says, “We use Palo Alto’s Panorama centralized management system. We have an on-prem firewall where Panorama is very good for pulling logs in from the cloud so we can see what is going on. It gives us visibility into that as well as shows us what attacks are coming in. Palo Alto’s Panorama centralized management system simplifies our security posture based on our requirements. Instead of manually pulling logs, then generating them into readable formats, it gives us the console in a readable format to view.”