Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls Reviews

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.

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 basically use it to protect our network from various malicious activities out there. We have two subscriptions. We have the WildFire subscription, which is similar to DNS filtering. We also have Threat Protection, which allows the firewall to inspect traffic up to Layer 7. It inspects applications as well as unknown applications, quarantining and stopping things. So, you are not always chasing, "What applications should I be running on this device?" It does a good job of all of that. The management of it is a little tricky, but that is how it goes.

We are running the PA-3250s. We have two of them. They operate in Active/Passive mode. Therefore, if one fails, then the other one takes over. 

It is pretty important to have embedded machine learning in the core of the firewall to provide inline, real-time attack prevention, because all these different attacks and threats are constantly evolving. So, you want to have something beyond just hard pass rules. You want it to learn as it is going along. Its machine learning seems pretty good. It seems like it is catching quite a few things.

There is a web-based GUI to do management, but you need to know how the machine or firewall operates. There are hundreds of different menus and options. I have used other firewalls before. Just implementing or designing a policy with Palo Alto, if you want a certain port to be open to different IP addresses, then that could take 20 to 25 clicks. That is just testing it out. It is quite complex to do. Whereas, with other places, you tell it, "Okay, I want this specific port open and this IP address to have access to it." That was it. However, not with Palo Alto, which is definitely more complex.

The VPN is only available for Windows and Mac iOS environments. We have a variety of iPads, iPhones, and Android stuff that wouldn't be able to utilize the built-in VPN services.

I would like easier management and logging. They can set up some profiles instead of having you create these reports yourself. However, you should be able to set it up to give you alerts on important things faster.

We have had this in place for four years. I have been at the school for almost a year and a half. So, this is my second year here at the school, so my experience with it has probably been a year and change. I use other firewall solutions, but I have gotten pretty comfortable with the Palo Alto solution.

It is very stable. We have never had any issues with any failures on it.

I haven't felt any performance lags on it. It has been handling everything just fine.

We purchased it a few years ago. Since then, we have had a lot more clients on our network, and it has handled all that fine. You go into it and just have to scale it higher. Palo Alto doesn't give you too many choices. There is not a medium; it is either very small or very big. So, you don't have a choice in that.

We have never had to call Palo Alto. Secure Works does all our support maintenance on it.

I have been here for a year and a half. Before, the firewall that they were using (Barracuda) was barely adequate for what we were doing. We got new ones simply, not because we had a software/hardware-type attack, but because we had a social engineering attack where one of the folks who used to work for us went on to do some crazy things. As a result, the reaction was like, "Oh, let's get a new firewall. That should stop these things in the future."

The initial setup was pretty complex because they did not do it themselves. They actually hired some folks who put it in. 

We use Secureworks, which is a big security company. They actually send an alert when there are problems with the firewall or if there are security issues. They handled the deployment. 

We also use another company called Logically to monitor the firewall in addition to all our other devices.

Active/Passive mode is very redundant, but they require you to buy all the associated licensing for both firewalls, which is kind of a waste of money because you are really only using the services on one firewall at a time.

I would suggest looking at your needs, because this solution's pricing is very closely tied to that. If you decide that you are going to need support for 1,000 connections, then make sure you have the budget for it. Plan for it, because everything will cost you.

If another school would call and ask me, I would say, "It's not the cheapest. It's very fast, but it's not the cheapest firewall out there."

I have been looking at different firewalls because our service and maintenance contracts are up on it. We have two different outsourced folks who look at the firewall and help us do any configurations. My staff and I lack the knowledge to operate it. For any change that we need to make, we have to call these other folks, and that is just not sustainable.

We are moving away from this solution because of the pricing and costs. Everything costs a lot. We are moving to Meraki MS250s because of their simplicity. They match the industry better. I have called the bigger companies, and Meraki matches the size, then the type of institution that we are.

If someone was looking for the cheapest and fastest firewall product, I would suggest looking at the Meraki products in the educational space. I think that is a better fit.

Its predictive analytics and machine learning for instantly blocking DNS-related attacks is doing a good job. I can't be certain because we also have a content filter on a separate device. Together, they kind of work out how they do DNS filtering. I know that we haven't had any problems with ransomware or software getting installed by forging DNS.

DNS Security for protection against sneakier attack techniques, like DNS tunneling, is good. I haven't had a chance to read the logs on those, but it does pretty well. It speaks to the complexity of the firewall. It is hard to assess information on it because there is just a lot of data. You need to be really good at keeping up with the logs and turning on all the alerts. Then, you need to have the time to dig through those because it could be blocking something, which it will tell you.

I haven't read the NSS Labs Test Report from July 2019 about Palo Alto NGFW, but it sounds interesting. Though it is a little bit of snake oil, because the worst attacks that we had last year were purely done through social engineering and email. I feel like this is an attack vector that the firewall can't totally block. So, before you put something in, like Palo Alto Firewalls, you need to have your security policy in place first.

I would rate this solution as eight out of 10. Technically, it is a good solution, but for usability and practicality, I would take points off for that.

The solution is more towards the front of the security stack.

We use both AWS and Alibaba Cloud.

The single pass architecture has helped a lot in the implementation and maintenance of Palo Alto Networks. It changed the customer's opinion on UTM platforms. In the past, when customers used UTM platforms, they feared the security features would impact the performance and slow down the network, causing some instability. However, with the single pass architecture, Palo Alto has demonstrated that you can use a lot of the security features without having an impact on the security and network performance. Therefore, most of our customers will dare to use most of Palo Alto Networks' security features.

• Application identification
• Antivirus
• Vulnerability protection
• URL filtering
• SSL VPN
• IPsec VPN

Palo Alto NGFW provides a unified platform that natively integrates all security capabilities. Most of our customers are busy. They cannot afford the time to learn very complicated user interfaces and configuration procedures. With Palo Alto Networks, they offered a unified user interface for all its NG Firewall products and Panorama. I think it reduces some of our customers' maintenance time. 

Palo Alto NGFW’s unified platform has helped our customers eliminate security holes. With a unified platform, customers can deploy the NG Firewall both in the data center edge, inside the data center, and in the product/public cloud environments. They have the same user interfaces and platform, so they can be maintained by a single unified platform called Panorama. Customers can use Palo Alto Network NG Firewalls in all the places where they need to protect their environments. This helps to decrease security holes.

Over the past one or two years, Palo Alto Networks has added a lot of features into the NG Firewall products. I think this is becoming more complicated for our customers. Therefore, we could use some best practices, best practice tools, and implementation guides for some of the complicated features.

I have been using it for eight years, though my company does not use it.

Compared to its competitors, the stability of NG Firewalls is very good. We have faced some strange problems with the hardware platform or operating system. Most of these customer cases come from complicated configs and bugs. However, stability is very good overall.

Scalability is not that good. Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls product is for middle-sized and small businesses. It has fixed parts and capacities for processing. Some of their higher-end products have the scalability to expand capacities, but only a few customers can afford their larger product.

I would rate it as eight to nine out of 10. Most of the technical engineers, who provide support for our customers, are efficient. There are one or two Tier 1 tech support engineers who often don't have answers.

Palo Alto NGFW’s unified platform has helped to eliminate multiple network security tools and the effort needed to get them to work together with each other. Before using Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls, customers might need to implement Layer 4 firewalls, IPS and possibly an antivirus, gateways, and maybe web proxies for all their devices. With Palo Alto NGFW’s unified platform, if a customer can do all the config and security policies on one platform, then this will merge all their security things onto a single platform.

The initial setup is not complex; it is straightforward. Our users only need a cable and some basic steps to configure the management interface. Then, it can set up the NG Firewall and ensure that the network and routing are working as expected in the environment. I think its steps are easier than most of its competitors. The initial setup takes one or two hours.

The full setup time depends on the features, then whether the environment or customer needs are complicated or not.

For our implementation strategy, we talk to our customers and work out documents for all their configs, which includes basic information that we need to know for implementing the firewall. Then, we follow the documents and do the implementation. We also may modify some content of the documents as the project processes.

It needs one or two employees with enough skills to manage and maintain it. They may need to modify firewalls, firewalls security rules, and possibly inspect alerts that are generated from firewalls.

By having a customer operate on a unified platform, they can do the application control, traffic control, threat protection, and URL filtering on a single platform. This effectively reduces the workload on all their networks and security tools.

Cheap and faster are the opposite sides of security. Security inspections have some technical and money costs. If you just purchase some cheap, fast firewalls, then you will lose a lot of the security features and fraud protection capabilities.

My company uses Cisco Firepower NGFW Firewall, not Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls. We started our cooperation with Cisco a lot longer than with Palo Alto Networks. We have been working with Cisco to expand their business in China for more than 20 years, which is why the leaders in our company might be choosing Cisco products.  

Most of our customers have been using Palo Alto Networks for a long time and do not want to change to another vendor. The unified user interface is a big benefit for them.

Palo Alto NGFW’s DNS Security is an effective way to detect and block DNS tunneling attacks, because most competitors do not have these techniques to detect the DNS tunneling on a single device. They require maybe a SIM or some analysts. So, this is something quite creative for Palo Alto Networks.

For our customers, I would tell them that Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls is easy to use, but probably difficult to master. It has a very easy to use interface and configuration utility, but it has a lot of advanced features that need some deep knowledge of the product.

No product can guarantee 100% evasions being blocked, but I think Palo Alto is among the top of the threat inspection vendors. From the NSS Labs Test Report, we can see that Palo Alto Networks always has a top score.

Machine learning in a single firewall is not that accurate or important for our customers. Since it will only see some network traffic, it cannot connect everything together, like endpoints and servers. Therefore, our customers do not value the machine learning techniques on a single firewall very much.

We may review the alerts generated by machine learning modules, then we can see if the alerts are real alerts, not false positives. This may tell us how efficient machine learning is.

Very few customers in China have used the Palo Alto NGFW’s DNS Security module. It is a new feature that was introduced only two years ago. Customers already know what the product can provide in terms of protection. Its DNS Security provides something that is not really easy to understand. Also, it increases the cost of the firewall because it requires another license to be implemented, and the cost is not low.

DNS Security is very impressive, and I think it will be an efficient way to block the rapidly changing threat landscape and maybe Zero-day attack methods.

Biggest lesson learnt: If you want to protect something, you need to gain visibility of the entire network. NG Firewalls provides a deep visibility into network traffic.

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

We use it to segregate traffic between different tenant instances and to manage secure access to environments, DMZ zones, and to communicate what the firewall is doing.

With Palo Alto NG Firewalls, we can pass all compliance requirements. We trust it and we are building the security of our environment based on it. We feel that we are secure in our network.

It also provides a unified platform that natively integrates all security capabilities. It's very important because it gives us one solution that covers all aspects of security. The unified platform helps to eliminate security holes by enabling detection. It helps us to manage edge access to our network from outside sources on the internet and we can do so per application. It also provides URL filtering. The unified platform has helped to eliminate multiple network security tools and the effort needed to get them to work together with each other. In one appliance it combines URL filtering, intrusion prevention and detection, general firewall rules, and reporting. It combines all of those tools in one appliance. As a result, our network operations are better because we have a single point of view for our firewall and all related security issues. It's definitely a benefit that we don't need different appliances, different interfaces, and different configurations. Everything is managed from one place.

The most valuable features include the different security zones and the ability to identify applications not only by port numbers but by the applications themselves.

The DNS Security with predictive analytics and machine learning for instantly blocking DNS-related attacks works fine. We are happy with it.

And with the single-pass architecture, it provides a good trade-off between security and network performance. It provides good security and good network throughput.

The machine learning in Palo Alto NG Firewalls for securing networks against threats that are able to evolve and morph rapidly is good, in general. But there have been some cases where we get false positives and Palo Alto has denied traffic when there have been new updates and signature releases. Valid traffic gets blocked. We have had some bad experiences with this. If there were an ability, before it denies traffic, to get some kind of notification that some traffic is going to be blocked, that would be good.

In addition, there is room for improvement with the troubleshooting tools and packet simulator. It would help to be able to see how packets traverse the firewall and, if it's denied, at what level it is denied. We would like to see this information if we simulate traffic so we can predict behavior of the traffic flow, and not just see that information on real traffic.

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

The solution is pretty stable.

The scalability is good.

In terms of the extensiveness of use, it depends on business needs. Every communication from the company is going through this solution, so it's highly used and we are highly dependent on the solution. 

In terms of increasing our use of the solution, it all comes down to business needs. If the business needs it, and we get to the limit of the current appliance, we will consider updating it or adding more appliances. At this point, we're good.

We previously used Cisco. The switch was a business decision and may have had to do with cost savings, but I'm not sure what the driver was.

The initial setup was a little bit complex, but not terrible. The complexity was not related to the product. It was more to do with needing to prepare and plan things properly so that in the future the solution will be scalable. If there were some predefined templates for different use cases, that would help. Maybe it has that feature, but I'm not familiar with it.

The time needed for deployment depends on the requirements. We also continuously optimized it, so we didn't just deploy it and forget it.

Our implementation strategy was to start with allowing less access and then allowing more and more as needed. We made the first configuration more restrictive to collect data on denied traffic, and then we analyzed the traffic and allowed it as needed.

We have less than 10 users and their roles are security engineers and network engineers. We have three to four people for deployment and maintenance and for coordinating with the business, including things such as downtime and a cut-over. The network and security engineers work to confirm that the configuration of the solution is meeting our requirements.

We did it ourselves.

I'm not sure about pricing. I don't know if Palo Alto NG Firewalls are cheaper or not, but I would definitely recommend Palo Alto as an option.

If you need additional features, you need additional licenses, but I'm not aware of the cost details.

We evaluated Cisco, Sophos, Dell EMC SonicWall, and FortiGate. Cost and reputation were some of the key factors we looked at, as well as the flexibility of configuration. Another factor was how many users could comfortably work on the solution when publicly deployed.

The fact that Palo Alto NG Firewalls embed machine learning in the core of the firewall to provide inline, real-time attack prevention is important, but I still don't completely trust it. I haven't really seen this feature. Maybe it's somewhere in the background, but I haven't gotten any notifications that something was found or prevented. At this point, we still use traditional approaches with human interaction.

Overall, what I have learned from using Palo Alto is that you need to be very detailed in  your requirements.

We use them to do quite a bit of URL filtering, threat prevention, and we also use GlobalProtect. And application visibility is huge for us. Rather than having to do port-based firewalling, we're able to take it to an application level.

We have quite a number of security pieces that are implemented for our network, such as a DNS piece, although we're not using Palo Alto for that purpose. But with that, in line with our seam, we're able to better distinguish what normal traffic looks like versus what a potential threat would look like. That's how we're leveraging the NG Firewalls. Also, we have separated the network for our databases and we only allow specific users or specific applications to communicate with them. They're not using the traditional port base, they're using application-aware ports to make sure that the traffic that has come in is what it says it is.

Machine learning in Palo Alto's firewalls, for securing networks against threats that are able to evolve and morph rapidly, has helped us out significantly, in implementation with different security software and processes. The combination allows our security analysts to determine the type of traffic that is flowing through our network and to our devices. We're able to collect the logs that Palo Alto generates to determine if there's any type of intrusion in our network.

The machine learning in the core of the firewalls, for inline, real-time attack prevention, is very important to us. With the malware and ransomware threats that are out there, to keep abreast of and ahead of those types of attacks, it's important for our devices to be able to use AI to distinguish when there is malicious traffic or abnormal traffic within our environment, and then notify us.

The fact that in the NSS Labs Test Report from July 2019 about Palo Alto NG Firewalls, 100 percent of the evasions were blocked, is very important to us. 

The SD-WAN product is fairly new. They could probably improve that in terms of customizing it and making the configuration a little bit easier.

I've been using Palo Alto NG Firewalls for about five years.

The firewalls are very stable. We've had no issues with downtime.

They're very scalable. Because we use Panorama, we're able to have global firewall rules for areas that we want to block, across the network, for security reasons. We just push those down to all the devices in one shot.

Our corporate site has about 500 users, and our 14 remote sites, because they're retail, usually have anywhere from five to 10 users each.

Their support is generally very knowledgeable. Sometimes it depends though on who you get, but they've always addressed our issues in a timely manner.

We were using older versions of Palo Alto's firewalls and we also had Cisco firewalls in our environment.

For our remote stores we're able to use Panorama, along with Palo Alto's Zero Touch Provisioning hardware. Once a device is connected to the internet and can communicate back to our Panorama, it just pulls the configurations. That means it's very easy to deploy.

It took about two to three months to deploy about 14 sites. That wasn't because we were having issues, it was just the way we scheduled the deployment, because we had to bring down different entities and had to schedule them accordingly with a maintenance window. But if it wasn't for that scheduling, within a week we could have deployed all of the remote sites.

For our implementation strategy, at our corporate site we had both old and new firewalls sitting side by side on the network. As we went to a remote site we would take them from their legacy Cisco and cut them over to the new firewall. Once that was done, we moved all of the firewall rules that were on the old firewall over to the new one.

When it comes to maintenance and administration of the firewalls, my team of five people is responsible. We have a network architect, a network specialist, two senior network specialists, and a security manager.

We did it by ourselves. We have a certified Palo Alto engineer on staff and he did all the installation.

Definitely look into a multi-year license, as opposed to a single-year. That will definitely be more beneficial in terms of cost. We went with five-year licenses. After looking at the overall costs, we calculate that we're only paying for four years, because it works out such that the last year is negligible. If we were to be billed yearly, the last year's costs would be a lot more. With the five-year plan we're saving about a year's worth of licenses.

Based on the quantity of devices we purchased, we found that the hardware price was actually cheaper than most of the other vendors out there.

If a colleague at another company were to say, "We are just looking for the cheapest and fastest firewall," given my experience with Palo Alto's NG Firewalls, my answer would depend on the size of the company and how much traffic they're going to be generating. Palo Alto is definitely not the cheapest, but if you scale it the right way it will be very comparable to what's out there.

One of the things we like about Palo Alto is the fact that the hardware appliances we have are not impacted in terms of resources. The CPU and memory stay low, so we don't have a bottleneck where it's trying to process a whole bunch of traffic and things are slow. We were looking at various brands because we were going from older hardware to newer, and we wanted to evaluate what the other vendors were doing. After that evaluation, we were comfortable that Palo Alto would be able to handle all of our network traffic without impacting performance.

We looked at Fortinet and Cisco. Cisco is a bit pricey when compared to our Palo Altos. Fortinet was definitely cheaper, but we were skeptical about their performance when we bundled all of the features that we wanted. We didn't think it was going to be fast enough to handle the network traffic that we were generating across the board. We believe Cisco would have handled our traffic, but their next-gen platform, along with SD-WAN, required us to have two separate devices. It wasn't something that would have been on one platform. That's probably why we didn't go down that road.

Part of what we considered when we were looking around was how familiar we were with the technology. That was also a big area for us. Most of the guys on our team were pretty familiar with Cisco and Palo Alto devices. They weren't too familiar with Fortinet or Check Point. We narrowed it down based on if we had a security breach, how easy would it be for us to start gathering information, remediating and troubleshooting, and looking at the origin of the threat. We looked at that versus having to call support because we weren't too familiar with a particular product. That was huge for us when we were doing the evaluation of these products.

Other than the SD-WAN, everything else has been functioning like our previous setup because it's a pretty similar license. The way that the new hardware handles URL filtering, threat protection, and GlobalProtect has been pretty solid. I don't have any issues with those.

Overall, I would rate Palo Alto NG Firewalls at nine out of 10. It's definitely not the cheapest product out there. Cost is the main reason I wouldn't put it at a 10.

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.

The product’s most valuable feature is security.

Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls work slowly for vulnerability management. Its performance could be faster.

We have been using Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls for five years.

The product is stable. I rate its stability a ten out of ten.

I rate the product’s scalability a nine out of ten.

The technical support services are good. They respond immediately.

Positive

We used FortiGate earlier. We plan to switch again to FortiGate as per our vendor’s preference.

The initial setup process is quite easy. It took less than a month to complete.

I rate the product’s pricing an eight out of ten.

We evaluated Check Point. We decided to go to Palo Alto for better pricing.

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

We primarily use the solution as a datacenter firewall for 0 trust security model

From my experience, comparing it to other products, the granularity you can have in the application is very good. The application detection is excellent. It's certainly one of the best. 

The engine detector application is usually one of the best compared to any other firewall on the market, in my opinion.  With it, I can do a lot of rules based on the application. If you have multiple internet links, you can have an application export from one link, and an application wire from another link. You can have security on the application. The security, for example, can have different functionalities. Basically, the granularity of rules is amazing in Palo Alto.

They have a good reputation for their antivirus capabilities.

The solution offers a strong URL based system or detection for malicious URL or malicious files. 

They even have a machine learning algorithm. They do a lot of very advanced detection for files and URLs. 

Once you deploy the product, you can basically forget about it. It has high customer satisfaction because it's always just working.

The solution would benefit from having a dashboard.

From a normal IPS after attack, routine attack and threat detection attack, in other words, the standard IPS detection attack, I don't see Palo Alto as very good compared to others. The standard network IPS functionality could be better. It's there in solutions like McAfee or Tipping Point, however, I don't see it here in this solution.

We've been working with Palo Alto for about six years now.

From my experience, it's the best hardware compared to other NG firewalls from the perspective of performance stability. While the other firewalls lose 50 or 60% of performance when enabling all policies, Palo Alto loses 10 to 20% maximum, even with enabled IPS and fire detection and all. From our experience performance-wise, it's one of the best hardware solutions for firewalls. 

We haven't lost performance really, so I would describe it as very stable. There are not any issues.

Since the solution is hardware, there are some limitations in terms of scalability.

Usually, in hardware, you can't say it's scalable or not due to the fact that you have the limitations built-in related to the size of the box. The box has a maximum number that it can reach. You can add more hardware, however, the hardware itself is finite.

We usually do a POC first so we can get the figures for performance and we can put in a box that can support 20 or 30 people extra for future expansion.

In general technical support is very good. That said, usually, when we face an issue, we try to solve it ourselves internally before going to level one support. 

In general, we never have had a big issue with support. I don't have much experience with the support team to tell you if they're really good or not. Usually 80% of the cases we open, we talk with the distributor and finish the operation case directly with Palo Alto. It's more like a backend request and therefore I don't have much input that would be objective.

As resellers, we also work with Cisco and some Forcepoint solutions.

I like that in Cisco there's more security parts, like IPS, and a Demandware engine.

I like Cisco, in general, more than Palo Alto if I'm comparing the two. However, from an application perspective, our application's usability and detection and firewall control using an application, it's Palo Alto that's the best on the market. That's, of course, purely from a  firewall point of view. Even in terms of detection of the applications, it has the best system.

The deployment depends on the client's environment as well as how they are using it. For example, an internet NG firewall on the internet, it takes, on average, a week between installation, integration, and tuning. Usually we don't do all the policies because we are system integrator. We do the main policies and we teach the customer and then do a handover to the user for tuning and all the installation extras.

If it's a data center project, it takes more time and effort. It takes a month sometimes due to the fact that we'll be dealing with a lot of traffic. The application and server are usually harder to control than internet applications like Facebook and other standard applications, and easier on the internet. Then there's also internal applications, custom applications, migrating applications, finance education applications, etc., which are not always direct from the customer or directly known.

In short, the implementation isn't always straightforward. There can be quite a bit of complexity, depending on the company.

In general, I prefer hardware, and Palo Alto's is quite good. However, we have a couple of virtual deployments for cases as well.

I would definitely recommend the solution. It's one of the best firewalls on the market. I've worked with four different vendors in the past, and some of the most mature NG firewalls are Palo Alto's. It's their main business, so they are able to really focus on the tech. They spend a lot of time on R&D. They're always leading the way with new technologies. 

While Cisco has more main products, Palo Alto really does focus in on NG firewalls. That's why I always see them as a leader in the space.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.