Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls Reviews

It is used for protection against attacks and it is very fast and reliable. We have a lot of use cases for it.

We are an implementation partner for Palo Alto. One of the companies we implemented its Next-Generation Firewalls for was previously using Barracuda. A ransomware attack happened and they lost all their backup data, and their configuration. Once we implemented Palo Alto for them, there were similar attacks but they were blocked.

Along with Prisma, it helps in preventing a lot of attacks, especially Zero-day attacks.

The sandboxing is valuable and they are frequently updating their signature database. We get new updates every five minutes. That makes it easy to detect new and unknown attacks.

The configuration part could be improved. It's very difficult to configure. It doesn't have a user-friendly interface. You have to know Palo Alto deeply to use it.

Also, it doesn't support open-source protocols like EIGRP. We had to find another solution for that.

I've been using Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls for the last six years.

Palo Alto suggests version 9.1.7 for stability. When new features come out, things are not as stable.

It's scalable. I recommend it for its scalability.

We generally deploy these firewalls into larger environments, but the PA-400 series is affordable.

There are problems with the technical support. When we are facing an attack, it's very difficult to get a hold of people from the TAC. It's not like Cisco, especially in India. There are very few members of Palo Alto TAC in India. Sometimes we get support from people in other countries.

The initial deployment of these firewalls is very complex. The registration is a very difficult task. You have to go to the partner portal to register and it's not user-friendly. All the other solutions are not like that. With Juniper, for example, it's very easy to handle their portal.

The deployment time depends on the customer environment but it normally takes around three weeks. Our implementation strategy is to first understand the network we are dealing with and how we can deploy Palo Alto.

The pricing for Palo Alto is very high. The price difference with other vendors is huge because Palo Alto has been the market leader for the last five or six years, and they have a reliable product. Everybody knows Palo Alto, like Cisco routing and switching. It's likely that only enterprise-level customers can afford this kind of firewall.

Palos Alto's firewalls have machine learning software and sandboxing. Everything is one step ahead of all the competitors.

Still, almost all vendors provide the same things. They call their technologies by different names, but that's the only big difference in features.

According to the industry reviews Palo Alto has been the market leader for the last five or six years. They have better technology and the hardware is also good. It's the pricing and user interface where there are issues. Apart from them, everything is fine.

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 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.

These firewalls are only used for perimeter purposes, in gateway mode.

In addition to our environment being secure, we can monitor compliance of VPN users. Security and monitoring are the two big benefits.

It's also very critical for us that it provides a unified platform that natively integrates all security capabilities. We have multiple vendors and multiple solutions. Palo Alto has to work with them. For example, when it comes to authentication, we can integrate LDAP and RADIUS, among others. And in one of our customer's environments, we have integrated a new, passwordless authentication.

Apart from the security, Palo Alto NG Firewalls have nice features like App-ID and User-ID. These are the two most useful features.

With App-ID, we can identify exact traffic. Even if someone tries to fool the firewall with a different port number, or with the correct port number, Palo Alto is able to identify what kind of traffic it is.

With User-ID, we can configure single sign-on, which makes things easy for users. There is no need for additional authentication for a user. And for documentation and reporting purposes, we can fetch user-based details, based on User-ID, and can generate new reports.

Another good feature is the DNS Security. With the help of DNS security, we can block the initial level of an attack, and we can block malicious things from a DNS perspective.

The GlobalProtect VPN is also very useful.

The solution has normal authentication, but does not have two-factor or multi-factor authentication. There is room for development there.

We have been using Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls for two years. I've worked on the 800 Series and the 3000 Series.

It's quite stable. They are launching a new firmware version, but compared to other products, Palo Alto is quite stable.

I have worked with Palo Alto's support many times and it is quite good. Whenever we create a support ticket, they are on time and they update us in a timely manner. In terms of technical expertise, they have good people who are experts in it. They are very supportive of customers.

Positive

The initial deployment is straightforward; very simple. The primary access for these firewalls is quite simple. We can directly access them, after a few basic steps, and start the configuration. Even the hardware registration process and licensing are quite simple.

The time it takes to deploy a firewall depends upon hardware and upon the customer's environment. But a basic to intermediate deployment takes two to three months.

Our customers definitely see ROI with Palo Alto NG Firewalls, although I don't have metrics.

I am not involved in the commercial side, but I believe that Palo Alto is quite expensive compared to others.

One of the pros of Palo Alto is the GlobalProtect, which is a VPN solution. GlobalProtect has broader compliance checks. I have worked on Check Point and FortiGate, but they don't have this kind of feature in their firewalls. Also, Check Point does not have DNS Security, which Palo Alto has.

If you're going with Palo Alto, you have to use all its features, including the DNS Security, App-ID, and SSL decryption. Otherwise, there is no point in buying Palo Alto.

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 use this solution as our central firewall, but not as a perimeter firewall. For our perimeter, we use another solution. 

Our organization consists of roughly 2,000 to 3,000 employees. 

Identifying applications is very easy with this solution.

I don't like the reporting. The reports it provides are not helpful. They should include more executive summaries and other important information — they're too technical.

I have been using this solution for three years. 

The stability is excellent. 

The technical support is good, but not excellent. Their responses can be quite vague and unhelpful at times. 

We used to use Checkpoint. We stopped using it because the price was too high. 

Considering our limited amount of experience, the initial setup was easy. Deployment took one month. 

A local reseller team of roughly three to five people implemented it for us — it was a great experience. 

We evaluated Palo Alto, Checkpoint, Fortinet, and Cisco Firepower. Overall, it came down to the price — that's why we went with Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls.

This solution is very particular; it's only suited to specific companies — it's a commercial opportunity. 

Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of eight. 

Basically, it is for protection and security. We are using it to make sure that our network is as secure as possible. We are able to evaluate each stack in each pocket and take certain actions as needed when we look into some of the content of the payload. 

We have on-prem deployments, and we also have SaaS-based services.

Mechanically, all firewalls work in a similar fashion, but what makes Palo Alto different is that it also has some of the threat hunt capabilities. It is a little bit better than other vendors.

As things are evolving, we want to make sure that Palo Alto is able to keep up with what is going on outside. They should continue to do more intelligence-related enhancements and integrate with some of the other security tools. We want to have a more intelligent toolset down the road.

We implemented this solution last year.

We currently have 25,000 users. Its usage won't increase a lot, but IT is changing very rapidly, and it would depend on the security model towards which we are moving. 

Palo Alto provides pretty good support.

It is straightforward. The deployment duration varies because there are different modules and components, but it doesn't mean that we have to complete everything to make it work. For the core piece of it, it would probably take a couple of months to install, configure, and test.

We have a vendor to help us. We have two or three people for its deployment.

It has a yearly subscription.

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

We have two 3000 Series Firewalls placed in our primary location. We have two sites and the secondary site uses the primary site for internet access. All traffic to the secondary location goes through a VPN tunnel. I'm a network administrator. 

The value of this solution for me is the protection from a single packet and ease of making security rules. It also doesn't require a special dedicated network team, I'm able to do it myself. It's a time saver for me and now in this pandemic period, users have access from home.  

I'd like to see some changes to the licensing policies and, on the technical side, improvement in scalability. It's not so easy to scale out your security capabilities. With the situation in business today, everybody lacks money and if you have to increase your resources and to constantly pay more for that, it becomes a problem. 

I've been using this solution for 10 years. 

It's been 10 years and I don't remember any outages because of a hardware failure or a logical error in configuration. We had problems with servers or switches initially but it works like a charm now. 

Scalability is the main disadvantage of Palo Alto. They call themselves a firewall with router capabilities but it's not a router and it requires a good bandwidth in VPN which could become a problem because you have to scale to really big hardware. We can solve the issue with other solutions, but for me the idea is to have less devices in your environment.
It's all about the hardware.  

The support is quite good. A couple of months ago, I sent an email with an issue and we got an answer in 15-20 minutes. In my experience, Palo Alto support is one of the best, maybe the best support available.

We previously used Juniper which is currently called Net Screen. I also looked at Sonic Wall. We carried out a proof of concept five years ago and they had to decide whether to go with Palo Alto or another vendor. 

For me, the initial setup is very easy. To get the device running with some capabilities but maybe not all security rules takes about an hour and it's the same for any upgrades. We have around 900 users and one admin person from our organization who deals with any issues. 

Palo Alto is an expensive solution, we currently have a three year contract. I'm not sure what our terms are. People always want cheaper, nobody wants to pay more. In our region, I think if Palo Alto was cheaper, more companies would buy the solution. 

I would absolutely recommend this product, it's expensive but I trust it. There is always room for improvement such as with scalability capabilities in Palo Alto. I know I'm not the only one who thinks this is an issue. It's possible that next time we will try virtualized firewalls, it may be a little cheaper for us. We would consider switching to something else but it would be a big move and quite complicated. Moving to a different vendor is a whole other story.

I rate this solution a nine out of 10.