"Its Snort 3 IPS has better flexibility as far as being able to write rules. This gives me better granularity."
"Firepower has been used for quite a few enterprise clients. Most of our clients are Fortune 500 and Firepower is used to improve their end to end firewall functionality."
"The content filtering is good."
"Feature-wise, we mostly use IPS because it is a security requirement to protect against attacks from outside and inside. This is where IPS helps us out a bunch."
"The most valuable feature is stability."
"I have access to the web version of Cisco Talos to see the reputation of IP addresses. I find this very helpful. It provides important information for my company to obtain the reputation of IP addresses. The information in Talos is quite complete."
"The integration of network and workload micro-segmentation helps a lot to provide unified segmentation policies across east-west and north-south traffic. One concrete example is with Cisco ACI for the data center. Not only are we doing what is called a service graph on the ACI to make sure that we can filter traffic east-west between two endpoints in the same network, but when we go north-south or east-west, we can then leverage what we have on the network with SGTs on Cisco ISE. Once you build your matrix, it is very easy to filter in and out on east-west or north-south traffic."
"The solution offers very easy configurations."
"Palo Alto Networks VM-Series is very easy to use."
"What I like about the VM-Series is that you can launch them in a very short time."
"It has excellent scalability."
"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."
"The most valuable feature is that you can control your traffic flowing out and coming it, allowing you to apply malware and threat protection, as well as vulnerability checks."
"Using Palo Alto Networks Panorama, we were able to deploy a single point of management and visualization of the firewall infrastructure in cloud, on-premise and integrated with Azure to automate scale up. Its security features, i.e. anti-malware, threat prevention, URL Filtering, VPN, and antivirus are the most valuable. The ID-User integrated with AD and 2FA features are also very useful to provide secure access to servers and some users in the company. "
"In Palo Alto the most important feature is the App-ID."
"The most valuable feature is the Posture Assessment."
"I like it for its simplicity. It is very simple to configure and implement. It is a very good product for medium-sized organizations."
"The interface is user-friendly and the product is easy to configure."
"The solution comes with a common bundle which comprises all the feature."
"We find it easy to use. Its internal configuration is very easy. It is not complicated in terms of use and configuration. It has been fairly stable, and it is also scalable."
"Orchestration of the firewall is the most valuable feature. It is a fast and agile solution. It is good with protection. It is also very easy to deploy and manage, and its user interface is easy to use."
"Overall the solution works well."
"Sophos XG deployment is easy and rapid."
"Sophos is a stable solution, and we haven't had any bugs or limitations."
"This product is managed using the Firepower Management Center (FMC), but it would be better if it also supported the command-line interface (CLI)."
"An area of improvement for this solution is the console visualization."
"The solution could offer better control that would allow the ability to restrictions certain features from a website."
"There is limited data storage on the appliance itself. So, you need to ship it out elsewhere in order for you to store it. The only point of consideration is around that area, basically limited storage on the machine and appliance. Consider logging it elsewhere or pushing it out to a SIEM to get better controls and manipulation over the data to generate additional metrics and visibility."
"The initial setup could be simplified, as it can be complex for new users."
"It's mainly the UI and the management parts that need improvement. The most impactful feature when you're using it is the user interface and the user experience."
"The change-deployment time can always be improved. Even at 50 seconds, it's longer than some of its competitors. I would challenge Cisco to continue to improve in that area."
"The intelligence has room for improvement. There are some hackers that we haven't seen before and its ability to detect those types of attacks needs to be improved."
"The product needs improvement in their Secure Access Service Edge."
"The disadvantage with Palo Alto is that they don't have a cloud-based solution that includes a secure web gateway."
"The user interface could use some improvement."
"The one issue that I didn't like is that the SNMP integration with interfaces didn't record the interface counters."
"It'll help if Palo Alto Networks provided better documentation."
"At the beginning of the implementation, we had some difficulties with the scripts, but Palo Alto Networks support together with a local partner finally fixed it."
"They made only a halfhearted attempt to put in DLP (Data Loss Prevention)."
"It would be good if the common features work consistently in physical and virtual environments. There was an integration issue in the virtual deployment where it didn't report the interface counters, and we had to upgrade to the latest version, whereas the same thing has been working in the physical deployment for ages now. It seems that it was because of Azure. We were using VMware before, and we didn't have any such issues. We do see such small issues where we expect things to work, but they don't because of some incompatibilities. There also seems to be a limitation on how to do high availability in a virtualized environment. All features should be consistently available in physical and virtual environments. It is not always easy to integrate Palo Alto in the network management system. We would like to be able to compare two network management systems. They can maybe allow monitoring an interface through the GUI to create a reference or do a baseline check about whether your network monitoring system is actually giving you the correct traffic figures. You need traffic figures to be able to recognize the trends and plan the capacity."
"Lacks improved throughput performance in a box."
"The UI needs improvement because it can be a little weird at times."
"In the next release, I would like to see improvements to simplify the interface and more policy deployments."
"The main problem with Sophos XG today is that it doesn't have a feature where you actually know the quality of an international link, which would allow us to we know if the link is operational or not. We need more information. It's losing packets on the network. It's high latency. So, we need more information to know if the link is really bad or really good, and today, we will only know if it's working and this just isn't enough."
"In the Firewall, the Intrusion Prevention System can be improved."
"They should include fiber ports on smaller product models and the tools should be improved for scalability."
"Support could be improved."
"We are facing some problems on this firmware version, version 18, that require improvement. We want to improve the email security because it doesn't give proper security with the data protection. Also, our clients are facing some problems where most of the sites which they're accessing are getting blocked. I want to improve those sites, that email security, and the data protection on the Firmware version 18."
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Palo Alto Networks VM-Series is ranked 10th in Firewalls with 14 reviews while Sophos XG is ranked 5th in Firewalls with 146 reviews. Palo Alto Networks VM-Series is rated 8.4, while Sophos XG is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Palo Alto Networks VM-Series writes "An excellent solution for the right situations and businesses". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Sophos XG writes "Light and stable with excellent real-time control ". Palo Alto Networks VM-Series is most compared with Azure Firewall, Fortinet FortiGate, Cisco ASA Firewall, Juniper SRX and Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls, whereas Sophos XG is most compared with Fortinet FortiGate, pfSense, OPNsense, Meraki MX and Azure Firewall. See our Palo Alto Networks VM-Series vs. Sophos XG report.
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