Palo Alto Networks K2-Series Reviews

I'm a telecom operator, so all of my IT and network management stuff is behind this firewall. 

Palo Alto K2-Series firewalls could use some technical improvements, like main and standby, as well as FTU and STU support. In addition, they should upgrade the CPU, and there are so many other things that I cannot think of off the top of my head. 

I've been using Palo Alto firewalls for two years.

Product-wise, it's stable, but it takes too long to switch between main and standby — maybe 10 to 12 seconds — and sometimes my traffic cuts out, yes. Also, the CPU processing power is not so good.

Palo Alto firewalls are scalable enough. We have about 110 employees in our company, and we are about to expand to 130.

Most firewall companies offer similar products, like Fortinet, etc., but Palo Alto support is not as good as its competitors. Palo Alto is almost zero. If we have issues, they take anywhere from two days to a week to respond. I even wrote to their CEO because there was no response. When it comes to support, this is the worst company.

We have no idea how complicated the setup is. An agent from Palo Alto did all that and then conducted some training. And if we need something, we have to call the agent.

The price is high, but we've already purchased these two boxes, so we have to continue using them for some time. Unfortunately, the salesperson we worked with isn't a Diamond-level agent, so he couldn't give us good discounts. But maybe a lower price is possible.

I rate Palo Alto K2-Series Firewall six out of 10.

We primarily use the solution as a next-generation firewall.

This company is a leader in the space.

The company is inventive and always adds a lot of great features.

The support on the solution is excellent.

The initial setup is pretty easy.

The company needs to align better with the customer. At the price point they offer, they need to be as good or better than the competition. They're losing market because they aren't there yet in that regard.

When it comes to renewing the solution, they tend to try to jack up the pricing.

We've been using the solution for almost five years now.

From a hardware point of view, we don't face any issues whatsoever. It's not glitchy or buggy. It doesn't crash. it's reliable.

The technical support has been excellent. We've very satisfied with the level of service they provide. It's one of the main selling features of the product.

Compared to the competition, support is excellent across the board.

We don't find the solution to be overly complex in terms of the initial setup. They make their implementation process pretty clear.

The deployment can happen in one week. It doesn't take too long. Sometimes, if you are new to the product, it might take a month or so.

We tend to use consultants when we implement the solution.

The licensing costs are too high. They need to become more competitive in that regard. We constantly need to bargain to get better pricing.

They tend to take advantage once the product has been sold to us. From a renewal point of view, the price is very high. They are demanding. That itself is creating a bad mark on them.

From a cost perspective, I'd rate the solution two out of ten.

I am trying to avoid Palo Alto, even though they have a very good solution, specifically due to the cost. 

We're just a customer.

From a technical support perspective, I'd easily rate them nine out of ten. If they didn't try to price gouge on renewals, I'd likely rate them higher.

Due to their pricing strategy, especially around renewals, I would not recommend them. We have 20+ firewalls, and we feel the heat when it comes time to renew the solution.

Generally, the solution is used as a perimeter-based firewall with a secondary firewall covering the servers.

Benefit wise with the speed of deep packet inspection, we've found it will assist with a quicker resolution to a potential false-positive alert. You're able to drill down. It's a third to probably 75% faster than a lot of the other premier firewalls on inspections. Therefore, your root cause analysis will then come to a resolution quicker. It's all about speed.

The deep inspection functionality is great.

The solution scales well.

As long as the solution is kept updated, it's pretty stable. 

The solution provides a lot of value to the client.

The licensing cost is a typical complaint with many clients. The solution is expensive.

In terms of automation, they could get better with it, especially with third-party integration. There are not too many products that will integrate with ease to the Palo Alto product set. They keep things locked down quite hard, which technically is also a benefit. That said, third-party integration definitely would be a benefit to us, as most of our implementations are two or even three different firewalls. Having third-party tools that integrate with all three or all two other products would be a benefit.

I've used the solution since it came out, about seven years ago.

The stability of the product has to be put into a relative context. If people keep it upgraded and maintained, there are generally no issues. If they let it fall behind and we have to do a catch-up or leapfrog versions then there could be other complexities.

The solution is scalable. If a company puts in at the right requirements and they double it by 50%, which you should always do, then there is lots of headroom until the next refresh cycle.

Any type of company can leverage the solution, from smaller organizations to very large enterprises. The main difference is if there's a higher security environment, the solution requires more attention. However, it has the capability to handle any size of setup.

I've never directly spoken with technical support and therefore cannot speak to how helpful or responsive they are. 

The solution is complex due to the fact that the salespeople from Palo Alto, or even from my firm will say, oh, we can just use this import wizard. However, that works to about a 60% level, and it does not do a complete import of Fortinet to Palo Alto or Cisco to a Palo Alto or Check Point to a Palo Alto.

That's where the complexity comes in. The customer thinks it's going to be easy. The salespeople said it's going to be easy. However, it really is not.

The time it takes to implement the solution is a hundred percent dependent upon the requirements of the solution. I've had firewalls taking six months to implement in a large retail environment and I've had also firewalls where you walk in and they give you just outbound requirements, and boom, it's up and out in two hours. That's why it really depends upon the complexity of the requirements.

The cost of the product is quite high.

I deal in list price. I don't get into discounting due to the fact that I do everything on a solution based on the list price. I have seen super heavy discounts from Palo Alto, however.

The licensing for Palo Alto is very straightforward. They include a lot in their base license. However, there may be features in there that are included and are buried in the base licensing cost that the customer will never use.

We're partners with Palo Alto. 

I'm dealing with all different versions of the solution and not necessarily just the most recent version. While most of what we work with is on-prem, many people are now moving to the cloud.

I would advise those considering the solution to ensure that they have a knowledgeable installer. That is critical. Most of ours that we take over are watched installs.

I rate the product at a nine out of ten. From a security/cost-benefit perspective, it's one of the best.

I use this to provide better content to my students as an instructor.

Palo Alto's App-ID is what differentiates it from other competitors. 

Palo Alto has many other products. It would be nice for these products to be centralized under one tool rather than having to jump from tool to tool.

I have been using this product for four years.

This product is designed for large companies. The price would not be suitable for a small or medium-size company.

Your budget should be your main concern when considering K2-Series as a solution to ensure you will be able to take advantage of each feature or if you would be better off choosing a different solution.

Overall, I give this tool an eight out of ten.

We are a system integrator and this Palo Alto K2-Series is one of the firewall products that we implement for our customers.

This firewall is very good for our customers because they don't have to write their own rules for adding an application.

The WildFire feature is very good.

Using Panorama and the web interface makes it easy to manage.

The reporting functionality in GlobalProtect needs to be improved. Other products, such as Check Point, have better reporting features that give more reports.

The price of the K2-Series should be lowered.

The dashboard could be improved by adding more GUI components.

We have about three years of experience with the Palo Alto K2-Series in my company, although I have only been working with this solution for about one year.

Palo Alto is very stable. In my previous job, I had not faced any stability issues.

All of the higher-level Palo Alto products are scalable.

We are the first level of support for our customers. If the problem is very complicated and we cannot solve it then we open a case through the distributor, which is the second level. After that, if they cannot solve it, the case is escalated directly to the Palo Alto technical team. Generally, if we cannot solve it then the distributor cannot either.

We also have experience with Check Point firewalls, as well as with solutions from Fortinet. I think that Palo Alto is better than Check Point in terms of threat prevention, and both of these are better than Fortinet. Palo Alto, however, is very expensive compared to Fortinet.

Check Point has better reporting and a better dashboard but is more difficult to install. Price-wise, they are similar.

The initial setup is very easy compared to Check Point. It is not hard for me to install and configure features such as High Availability.

We implement and deploy this solution for our customers. We also provide maintenance and support.

Palo Alto firewalls are very expensive.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

Until recently, most of my time was spent implementing this product and our company still does that. As a security solutions architect, I'm now more focused on the architecture and that side of things. We're partners with Palo Alto. 

It's a very good product, simple to use. The visibility is very, very important, and that's good with Palo Alto. The solution has simple integrations with the domain controllers and other inventories, which the endpoint traps by cloud which is very important. It's an easy firewall, very easy to configure, to monitor, and to use. It's easier than Forte, for example. 

The solution could be improved with more dedicated reporting about the user's context. For example, if I need to have a summarized report that includes uses as well as consolidating the user's activities, threads and applications on the endpoint machine, Palo Alto does not have the visibility for the endpoint in their firewalls. If I want to have a report from the firewall that summarizes user application from the user side, rather than the server side, Palo Alto software does not have that information.

Other vendors, such as Cisco, have that in their profile. You can generate a report from Cisco firewall and it will tell you that you're using the internet, and using Firefox or Google Chrome. Palo Alto doesn't have that extended visibility to the end point. 

It would be the same for additional features - I need to have the visibility of the endpoint application, endpoint context. It's an innate feature in Cisco firewalls. I don't like the style of Forte, for example. It has email spam over the firewall. I don't like this feature, and I don't like to have features that are not really good for out of the box. What Forte does have that is good is an explicit proxy capability and Palo Alto could include that.

I've been using this solution for more than 10 years. 

Palo Alto is stable. They used to have some issues but now they're good. All software has a vulnerability, but stability here is fine.

It never used to be scalable but they've recently added a cluster mechanism so you can scale as much as you need. I've spoken to them and they're going to make an announcement about it later in the month if they haven't already. 

Palo Alto support is good, I contact them all the time. They have two kinds of support: Premium, which allows you to contact the vendor directly, they open the case, and you communicate with Palo Alto and they'll help you on the spot. There is also Partner support. I would not recommend that to anyone. 

Palo Alto is the easiest solution in this field to implement. 

Implementation depends on the use case. For example, if you implement on the edge, or you implement on-prem, or you implement on the internet, it's different from implementing to the data center. It's generally a quick process. It might take around two weeks, depending on the number of applications in the data center. If you're using solutions like Forte or Cisco, they will take longer. 

The number of people required to implement also varies depending on how you plan to implement - whether over the internet or if you deploy through the application theme. It requires communication between all parties. 

It's a good product. I would suggest people think about the design, the architecture, what they have and the applications. If they have a different kind of firewall, if they have an internet firewall, they can use the Palo Alto tool. Or they can use something else depending on what they have on their network.

I recommend Palo Alto because it's a platform as well as a firewall and it has a lot of features. I would suggest testing the features and trying to get all the benefits of all the functions in the box. 

I would rate this solution a seven out of 10. 

We use the firewalls to defend our perimeter and data center.

For me personally, the support, in general, is the feature I have found most valuable.

Palo Alto boasts a lot of great features that cover all markets from small businesses to large enterprises.

It's very easy to see everything on the dashboards. 

It would be nice if it could easily be integrated with Elasticsearch or Nagios for monitoring and reporting.

They should lower their prices for small businesses. They should offer subscriptions or box-sets because a lot of companies want to buy it, but they just can't afford it. 

It's not that expensive necessarily; the market is just doing poorly at the moment.

Everything I could possibly want has already been implanted into the new version, including the Internet of Things, machine learning, and SD-WAN; every feature I wanted has already been integrated.

I have been using this solution for roughly eight years.

Palo Alto Networks K2-Series is very stable. I've never had a problem with Palo Alto. The only problem we experienced with it was when the fan broke down — even then, it still kept on working without the fan. No harm was done and Palo Alto replaced it very quickly.

This solution is very scalable.

The initial setup was very straightforward. It only took us a few hours. On the other hand, deployment times vary. Sometimes it takes just a few hours, and other times, due to testing, it can take months. It's not complicated, but when you have to replace something, you have to consider the amount of testing before you put it into production.

We are the integrators.

I would recommend Palo Alto. With Cisco, when you engage Firepower, the performance decreases. Next generation functions with Palo Alto are much, much better. 

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Palo Alto Networks K2-Series a rating of ten.

You should always choose the best version of a solution. As your company grows, you will want to work with more power and better features. 

I am a network security engineer and this is one of the products that make up our security solution. We implement this product for our clients.

The most valuable feature is security.

The technical support, and how they provide it to the client, needs to be improved. They take too long to provide answers.

I would like to have a statistical report that shows the number of times that each rule is used.

I have been working with the Palo Alto K2 series for about three years.

This is a very reliable firewall and we have never had problems with it.

This firewall is scalable. Our clients vary in size. They are small and medium-sized businesses, as well as enterprises.

I deal with a number of different firewalls including solutions by Cisco, Check Point, and Palo Alto.

This is an easy firewall to set up, although the length of time required to deploy depends on a number of variables. For example, a complex environment will be more complex and take longer to configure. This type of setup could take a week but a simpler one could take a day or two.

We have an in-house team for deployment. I can do it by myself, or I can ask my colleagues because several of them can do it as well.

Overall, this is a very good firewall and I would recommend it. With respect to security, it is a perfect solution.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.