Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls Reviews

I am a customer of Palo Alto Networks. If any issue arises, I raise a ticket with Palo Alto.

We are currently using Palo Alto in our national data center, which is a large Tier Three data center. As all communication is now going through APIs, it would be beneficial to improve Palo Alto by adding an API scanner in the future.

The most valuable feature of the solution is the network protection.

We decided to use Palo Alto because they are the leader in the market.

Palo Alto does provide a unified platform that natively integrates all security capabilities.

These days, DDoS attacks are becoming more frequent, especially in external data centers. Therefore, we need to enhance the DDoS attack block list and update patches in our national data center.

The API scanner could be improved.

The support could be improved. 

Palo Alto does not have a support team located in Bangladesh, and their support team operates from another location. Therefore, when we raise a ticket, it takes some time for them to respond, which can be problematic for us.

I have been working with Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls for seven years.

Since we have definitely used Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls, it's not possible to compare them with any other product.

The stability of Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls is good.

The current solution is satisfactory, but we require more scalability from Palo Alto.

Technical support is good.

I would rate the technical support a nine out of ten.

Positive

Previously, we did not use another solution.

The initial setup was straightforward, as we prioritize quality over price for our federal work. Our main concern is protection, as we need to safeguard national assets.

I am the consultant.

We have observed a positive return on investment because if a DDoS attack were to occur, it would result in a loss of business and other adverse effects.

By using Palo Alto to protect our data, we can prevent such attacks and ensure that our business runs smoothly.

We always aim to reduce the pricing, as it is currently a bit high and needs to be lowered.

Before my organization purchases any product, they must obtain my permission and also conduct an evaluation.

From the very beginning, we have been using Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls, I cannot make a comparison with other firewall solutions.

Palo Alto is the market leader in firewall technology, and we also use their firewall. However, we have been experiencing DDoS attacks and are using Palo Alto to protect against them. 

In some cases, we may need to increase the DDoS block list and update patches through Palo Alto.

As someone who works in the national data center, we always strive to use the very best, not the cheapest.

I would rate Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls a nine out of ten.

We use Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls with Prisma and cloud environments.

As a firewall, it effectively protects our environment from threats.

In general, I appreciate the regular firewall function of the Palo Alto Networks NG Firewall.

Overall, it is a good networking device product.

From my perspective, having machine learning integrated into the core of the Palo Alto NG Firewalls is very important for enabling real-time attack prevention.

As far as I know, the use of Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls has resulted in reduced downtime, but I am not directly involved with that department.

One main issue I've encountered is customer service. Occasionally, when I open a request, it gets closed automatically, without any explanation, leaving me unsure of what happened to it. However, overall, the product itself works well. As for Prisma Cloud, it could benefit from some additional functionality, but the main issue is the lack of communication regarding closed requests.

There is room for improvement in the area of customer service.

I have had experience working with Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls for three or more years.

The stability of Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls is good.

Technical support is lacking. I would rate the technical support a seven out of ten.

Neutral

Previously, we worked with Cisco Secure Firewall.

We switched to Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls because it was a good deal for the company.

I was not involved in the deployment.

Another team was responsible for running the proof of concept.

I don't have any knowledge or experience regarding the unified platform and native integration of all security capabilities provided by Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls.

Based on my experience, evaluating the security solution for all workplaces from the smallest office to the largest data centers cannot be assessed by a single path. However, in general, the solution is performing its intended job well.

I would rate Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls an eight out of ten.

Attending the RSA conference provided me with an enormous amount of knowledge on various topics such as new technologies, and threats in different environments, including cloud and on-premises. Which impacts my purchase throughout the year afterward.

One of our objectives is to search for new solutions, whether to replace current ones with more modern options or to explore new sandboxes, technologies, and vulnerabilities.

We have implemented our own private cloud where we host different services for a number of internal companies that are part of a group. We have financial companies, hospitality, and construction companies; a large variety. We use Palo Alto to provide security protection for all these companies.

Previously, with our old firewalls, we did not have any visibility. The application layer was zero. We didn't have any visibility there. And we also didn't have any reports. Now, we have good visibility and we are able to get reports and we can monitor the network much better. That's a big change for us and a big help.

There are a lot of helpful features

• monitoring
• reporting
• WiFi.

You can easily integrate it with Active Directory, and you can use the GlobalProtect VPN for internal and external purposes. The URL Filtering is also clear and the application filtering is a plus. The application filtering is much better when you compare it to FortiGate or other firewall vendors.

Also, the fact that Next-Gen Firewalls from Palo Alto embed machine learning in the core of the firewall to provide inline and real-time attack prevention is very important. Nowadays, all the modern attacks, hackers, and bad people are becoming more intelligent and automating attacks. Embedding AI is a good idea.

We have complete visibility through the logs and the alerting. It depends on how you configure the firewall. You can configure it to get alerts whenever there's an attack or whenever something is happening. That's how we can assess if the firewall is doing the job correctly or not. We are happy with the way the firewall does its job.

There has been a recent change in the graphical interface. For the monitoring part, they could have a better UI.

We have been using Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls since 2012.

The big firewalls, like the PA-300 and the PA-3020, are very good, stable, and performant. They are very reliable. The smaller models are reliable, but the performance on their management plane is a bit slow. Even the management plane of the PA-850 is a bit slow when you compare it to some of the bigger models.

Scaling is easy. We currently have about 1,000 endpoints.

We haven't worked with their technical support.

We replaced a Cisco ASA Firewall with Palo Alto, and then we started replacing all our other firewalls with Palo Alto. Cisco ASA was not a next-generation firewall at that time. And no firewall could beat the traffic monitoring and the visibility that we had on Palo Alto.

We did a PoC before going to Palo Alto. We placed the Palo Alto in virtual wire mode, meaning a transparent mode. Without changing our existing network infrastructure, we were able to plug the Palo Alto into our network where we could see all the incoming and all the outgoing traffic. Without creating any policies or any blocking, we were able to see all the traffic and we were impressed with that part and we decided to switch to Palo Alto.

The first deployment was very complex. I was not the one who implemented it, it was an integrator, but it was a headache due to some difficulties. After that, things became easy. We have implemented six or seven Palo Altos, and things are easy because of our familiarity with the whole deployment process. The first time we were using this firewall we were not at ease with the product. After that, we got used to it and it became easier.

Because of the issues with the first one, it took one week for the deployment, for the complete transition from Cisco ASA to Palo Alto. Since then, all the deployments have been done in one day.

We have seen ROI as a result of the visibility and reporting. These are two things we didn't have, and now that we have the visibility, we can ensure  that our network is secure.

If you compare Palo Alto with other firewalls, it's a bit expensive.

At that time, Palo Alto was the leader and I think it was the only next-gen firewall.

We have looked into other firewalls since then. In 2017 or 2018, we decided to replace one Palo Alto with a Forcepoint Next-Gen Firewall. We placed that in the network but, after six months, we replaced it with Palo Alto.

If someone is looking for the cheapest and fastest firewall, I would say the fastest is good, but not cheapest. Palo Alto Firewalls are not cheap.

We use it as an Internet-facing parameter firewall. In my environment, it has security and routing. It is on a critical path in terms of routing, where it does a deep inspection, etc.

There have been a lot of improvements from security to service.

It is critical that Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls embeds machine learning in the core of the firewall to provide inline, real-time attack prevention. In my environments, we have an integration with a third-party vendor. As soon as there is new information about new threats and the destination that they are trying to reach on any of our network devices, that traffic will be stopped.

Setting up a VPN is quite easy. 

It gives you a lot of information when you are monitoring traffic. 

In terms of user experience, Palo Alto has very good user administration.

Machine learning is important. Although we have not exhausted the full capabilities of the firewall using machine learning, the few things that we are able to do are already very good because we have an integration with a third-party. We are leveraging that third-party to get threat intelligence for some destinations that are dangerous, as an example. Any traffic that tries to go to those destinations is blocked automatically. There is a script that was written, then embedded, that we worked on with the third-party. So, machine learning is actually critical for our business.

There is a bit of limitation with its next-generation capabilities. They could be better. In terms of logs, I feel like I am a bit limited as an administrator. While I see a lot of logs, and that is good, it could be better.

I wanted Palo Alto Networks engineering to look at the traffic log, because I see traffic being dropped that happens to be legitimate. It would be interesting for me to just right click on the traffic, select that traffic, and then create a rule to allow it. For example, you sometimes see there is legitimate traffic being dropped, which is critical for a service. That's when actually you have to write it down, copy, a rule, etc. Why not just right click on it and select that link since that log will have the source destination report number? I would like to just right click, then have it pop up with a page where I can type the name of the rule to allow the traffic.

I started using Palo Alto in 2015.

It is very stable. We had two outages this year that were not good. They were related to OSPF bugs. Those bugs affected our service availability. 

It is quite scalable. I have been able to create a lot of zones to subinterfaces for a number of environments. I don't really have any issues regarding scalability. It meets my expectations.

Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls technical support is very poor. Three or four months ago, I had a bug where the database of the firewall was locked. You cannot do anything with it. We looked for documentation, giving us a procedure to follow, but the procedure didn't work. We logged a complaint with Palo Alto Networks, and they gave us an engineer. The engineer relied on documentation that doesn't work, and we had already tested. In the end, the engineer gave us an excuse, "No, we need this account to be able to unlock it." This happened twice. The way out of it was just to restart the firewall. You can restart the firewall and everything goes back to normal. Therefore, I think the support that we got was very poor.

Neutral

I have used Check Point and Cisco ASA.

Initially, when I started with Palo Alto, we had Cisco ASA, but Palo Alto Networks beat ASA hands down.

We have a multi-vendor environment with different providers. Our standard is that we can't have the same firewall for each parameter, so there is some kind of diversity. 

We had ASA looking at one side of the network and Palo Alto Networks looking at the other side of the network. We also had Juniper looking at another side of the network. At the end of the day, ASA was very good, I don't dispute that. However, in terms of functionality and user experience, Palo Alto Networks was better. 

Palo Alto Networks beat ASA because it was a next-generation firewall (NGFW), while ASA was not.

When we bought Palo Alto, we had Juniper devices in our environment. We were told that it was a bit like Juniper, so we were happy. However, some people were a bit skeptical and scared of Juniper firewalls. Because of that, it took us a very long time to put them on the network. However, as soon as we did the implementation, we realized that we were just thinking too much. It was not that difficult. 

We deployed Palo Alto Networks as part of a project for data center implementation. The implementation of the firewall didn't take long.

We buy through a third-party. Our account is managed by IBM.

We have seen ROI. There is more visibility in the environment in terms of security. There was a time when we suspected a security breach, and this firewall was able to give us all the logs that we expected. 

Palo Alto is like Mercedes-Benz. It is quite expensive, but the price is definitely justified.

One thing is system administration. In our opinion, Palo Alto administration is easier compared to other vendors. I know other vendors who have Check Point. You have to manage Check Point, and it is a bit cumbersome. It is a very nice, powerful firewall, but you need more knowledge to be able to manage Check Point compared to Palo Alto. Palo Alto is very straightforward and nice to use.

In our environment, troubleshooting has been easy. Anybody can leverage the Palo Alto traffic monitoring. In Cisco ASA and Check Point, you also have these capabilities, but capturing the traffic to see is one thing, while doing the interpretation is another thing. Palo Alto is more user-friendly and gives us a clearer interpretation of what is happening.

One thing that I don't like with Palo Alto is the command line. There isn't a lot of documentation for things like the command line. Most documents have a graphic user interface. Cisco has a lot of documents regarding command lines and how to maneuver their command line, as there are some things that we like to do with the command line instead of doing them with the graphic interface. Some things are easy to do on a graphic interface, but not in the command line. I should have the option to choose what I want to do and where, whether it is in the command line or a graphic interface. I think Palo Alto should try to make an effort in that aspect, as their documentation is quite poor.

We would rather use Cisco Umbrella for DNS security.

I compared the price of Palo Alto Networks with Juniper Networks firewall. The Juniper firewall is quite cheap. Also, Palo Alto Networks is a bit expensive compared to Cisco Firepower. Palo Alto Networks is in the same class of Check Point NGFW. Those two firewalls are a bit expensive.

It gives us visibility. In my opinion, the first firewall that I would put on our network is Palo Alto Network and the second would be Check Point.

Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls is a very good firewall. It is one of the best firewalls that I have used.

I would rate Palo Alto Networks as nine out of 10.

We have had a couple of big projects with government companies here in Ukraine. One of those projects involved three data centers with a lot of security and network requirements, and we implemented Palo Alto as part of this project.

The use case was to build the new data centers with a firewall that would not only work on the perimeter but also for internal traffic. We deployed eight PA-5200 Series firewalls and integrated them with VMware NSX, and they're working together.

One of the points that helped us win the tender is that Palo Alto NG Firewalls embed machine learning in the core of the firewall to provide inline, real-time attack prevention. The customer's security team was asking for this feature from the firewalls because machine learning makes things much easier than manually sitting there with some kind of SIEM and searching for all kinds of attacks and critical issues. The machine learning is really helpful because it's doing the work automatically.

We had a small project with the PA-800 Series appliance where we implemented DNS Security. DNS Security is a good feature because, in the real world with web threats, you can block all web threats and bad sites. DNS Security helps to prevent those threats. It's also very helpful with Zero-day attacks because DNS Security blocks all DNS requests before any antivirus would know that such requests contain a virus or a threat to your PC or your network.

In general, Palo Alto NG Firewalls are 

• easy to manage
• good, reliable appliances
• easy to configure.
  

They also have a good balance between security and traffic. They have good hardware and, for management, they have their own data plane. If traffic is really overloading the data plane, you still have the ability to get into the management tools to see what's going on. You can reset or block some traffic. Not all firewalls have that feature.

They have really good clients, such as a VPN client. You can also enforce security standards on workers in the field. It's a really good product. And now, for endpoint security, they have Cortex XDR. You use the same client, but with additional licenses that enable more features.

The only area I can see for improvement is that Palo Alto should do more marketing.

We work with customers, but we are not using the solution ourselves.

The scalability is really good because they have a chassis version of appliances. They plan to build new chassis. But for the really big projects here in Ukraine, we can easily cover what we need with the PA-8000 Series with Palo Alto chassis appliances.

In our project with the three data centers, each data center was able to process 40 gigs.

First-level support is provided by our distributor Bakotech. They are technical guys and they really know the product. Unlike some support providers who just send you manuals to ready, they're really helpful. You can call them at any time and they get back to you shortly and help.

The initial setup is really easy. If you're working with Palo Alto Panorama, which is their management server, it's very easy to deploy a lot of appliances in a couple of days, because you're just sending out the configuration and templates on a blind device. In a couple of hours that device is working like the rest.

Another valuable aspect of Palo Alto NG Firewalls is that the appliances and software are really reliable in terms of stability and performance. Some firewall vendors don't write real information on their datasheets and, after implementing them, you see that the reality is not the way it was described. For example, when it comes to threat prevention and how much traffic appliances can handle, there was a project where we beat another vendor's firewall because Palo Alto has the real information on its datasheets.

I have some experience with Cisco, on a small project but there was a somewhat older software version, and there was a lot of lag. When changing something in the configuration, once you pushed "commit" you could go have a coffee or do other stuff for 20 minutes or more, because it took a really long time to push that configuration to the device.

If a colleague at another company said to me, "We're just looking for the cheapest and fastest firewall," I would tell them that the cheapest is not the best. If you need really reliable hardware and software, and don't want headaches after the implementation, just buy Palo Alto.

The PA-400 is really strong and not only for SOHO or SMB companies. They have a really big throughput with Threat Prevention and DNS Security enabled. It's a really good appliance in a small size. But it's not only for small companies. The PA-460 can easily handle the traffic of a midsize company, one with 100 or 200 employees, and maybe even a little more. The PA-460 can handle about 5 gigs of traffic. With Threat Prevention, they can handle 2.5 gigabytes of traffic. For a regular office, that's good. It might be a little small for big companies.

Regarding DS tunneling, it is mostly peer-type attacks. With tunneling, it depends on what type of tunneling is used. You need to look at the specific case, at things like whether it was an internal DNS tunnel or one from the outside to the inside between branches. Most of the time, you can see that kind of traffic with a firewall if you have enabled full logging and you drop the logs into a good SIEM, like ArcSight or others. You will see the anomaly traffic via tunnels. You can also switch on decryption so you can decrypt a tunnel and see what is going on inside.

We have had no issues from our customers who are working with Palo Alto NG Firewalls. They fully cover all our customers' needs.

We use Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls to manage the villains. Basically, to protect the environment. 

I like that they are more stable than the previous ones, and they allow a lot of other features.

It would be better to have more tools to control Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls. We don't have too many tools to access Palo Alto. For example, the IT team doesn't have access to it. We can see it physically and see if it's running or not. We need to contact a special team to receive that information. I would also like to see more reporting in the next release.

I have been using Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls for two years.

Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls is stable.

Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls is scalable. We have about 250 people using it at our hotel.

We use Trustwave, a company that provides the devices. We have an agreement with them, and we're satisfied with the support.

We used to use Juniper and Fortinet.

The initial setup is pretty much straightforward. It takes us about two hours to set up and deploy this solution. It takes a team of two guys to deploy and maintain this solution.

I would recommend this solution to new users.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls a nine.

We deployed the Palo Alto Next Generation Firewall on the perimeter of the network, so all traffic that flows to the company from the internet and from the company to the internet scanned by the Palo Alto Networks Firewall. In addition, all of the internal traffic from LAN users to services that are on the DMZ zone traverse the Palo Alto Firewall.

The strengths of Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls are application visibility and application awareness. Their strong point is identifying applications for traffic. So all of the policies that are configured are related to the application and not to a port.

For example, let's say you want to allow HTTP traffic and the server is not listening on the standard http port which port 80 but listens on port 25 which Is the standard port for SMTP, this is not an obstacle has the firewall is focusing on the application, it identify the HTTP application and allow the HTTP application and block any other application on port 25. So we don't care on which port the app traverses.

It is easy to install and is stable too.

There is another solution from Palo Alto for endpoints - XDR  that integrates with the firewall  thus providing protection at the network level and also at the end point but the XDR solution is only a cloud based solution. I would really like it if would be possible to implement this solution on-premises this is something that I would love to see with Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls.

The price could be lower.

I've worked with Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls within the last 12 months.

So far, it's stable. I haven't had any problem with it. I'm always authorizing to have the minor version aligned with the latest version. There haven't been any published vulnerabilities with the product so far.

I'm using the cluster, and that's a great long term solution. So I haven't needed to expand.

There are more than 10,000 employees in the company. We hope to migrate the other branches that have a different vendor to Palo Alto.

The initial setup was straightforward from my point of view.

From a financial perspective, this solution is quite expensive.

The licensing is on a yearly basis even though we close the deal for three years upfront.

I would advise that those thinking about Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls need to switch how they think about a policy on the firewall. They should not to look at it from the point of view of the service and what port that policy is related to. Instead, they should look at it from the application side. Don't pay too much attention to the port. Just look at the application. For example, the NGFW doesn't care if SMTP traverses on port 25 or 65. It just enforces the protocol.

From a technical point of view, I don't think that there's something that's missing from the Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls. So, I would rate it at nine on a scale from one to ten.

We are basically using a double protection layer in which we take care of all our DMV, VPN, tunnels, and internal network. We are basically using it for application based configuration  controlling our traffic on applications with layers four to seven. We are customers of Palo Alto and I'm an information security specialist. 

I like the training material they provide and the reporting is very good. The solution is very easy to configure, and very easy to understand and explain. Compared to firewalls offered by their competitors, I find it easier to use and more thorough. The most important thing the solution provides is, of course, the firewalling up to the application level.

There could be improvement with their logs, especially their CLI. When you go to the command line to understand the command line interface it's tricky and requires a deep understanding of the product. We recently faced one issue where the server side configuration changed and it wasn't replicated at the firewall. It required us to tweak things and now it is working fine. Finally, the HIPS and audio call features could be improved. 

I've been using this solution for two years. 

In the past two years I haven't had any issues with the stability. That applies to the hardware, software, upgrades, updates, new feeds. I haven't faced any big issue, you can say that. 

We are using their big boxes, like the 7,000 series. So it's already at that level. We're already using 120 GB, like three 40 gigs and it's working fine for us. You can scale as you wish.
We have over 10,000 people using the service through this firewall. It's working 24/7 and it's been that way for the past two and a half years. 

The initial setup is not complex. It took us 15 to 20 days because we were migrating from the other firewall. The strategy was to take the backup and simultaneously create a leg and transfer to that. The first time we deployed, we used the integrator recommended by the vendor. That worked very well. Our team worked with the integrator. We planned everything and they supervised us. 

We currently have four people helping with maintenance. They are security admins and their job is with the firewalls, like configuring and maintaining and upgrading all those things. 

Yes, we evaluated other options. Cisco was there, as was FortiGate. We were using Juniper at that time, and then Palo Alto came into picture. We carried out a comparison of pricing, support, features, etc. and then we made our choice. It was really the next generation features and application level security that were key to our decision. 

The advice I can give is that this is a good solution: Easy to deploy, easy to manage, easy to understand, reporting is very good, and it will give you the full picture up to the layer seven. Their VPN service is very good. 

The good thing is that whenever you need to train anyone on these devices, it's very easy to explain. Previous firewalls I've used, required a lot more work before you could configure. This isn't like that, it takes maybe 30 minutes and it's done.