Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls Reviews

I use NG Firewalls for perimeter defense. 

We've seen better throughput compared to our previous firewall. End-users are happier with their connections through Palo Alto. 

Palo Alto offers better Layer 7 protection than competing solutions by Cisco and Fortinet. I also like the VPN client more. The interface is simple, so administrators can deploy and configure it much faster than other firewalls. The interoperability with other vendors is excellent. We can connect Palo Alto firewalls to all our other solutions. 

I would like to see more artificial intelligence. However, that is going beyond firewalls to products like Prisma. Palo Alto has those features in an entirely different ecosystem. It isn't a problem. Machine learning is valuable, but I rely more on threat intel. 

I have been using Palo Alto's solutions since 2014.

I rate Palo Alto NG Firewalls a nine out of ten for stability. We have had zero downtime except for scheduled maintenance. The firewalls are in a cluster that never goes down.

The scalability is excellent because you can always purchase a bigger firewall as you grow. 

I rate Palo Alto's support a seven out of ten. It is good overall but worse in some regions. The first level of support will usually do nothing for you. If you're an IT company, you're not looking for level-one support. You need to escalate. Other vendors have a direct support line for enterprise clients, but not Palo Alto.

Palo Alto has a better interface and integration with other solutions than competing vendors. The only drawback is the price. Go with FortiGate if you're looking for a firewall that is cheap and decent. If you can't afford Palo Alto, FortiGate is the next cheapest. 

We can deploy Palo Alto firewalls faster and easier than most other solutions. We assess the traffic, buy the appropriate size, and implement it. 

Palo Alto firewalls are expensive, but they're worth what we pay. 

I rate Palo Alto NG Firewalls a nine out of ten. Technical support has some room for improvement, and there are several minor issues that aren't worth mentioning. 

We use the solution to protect our network environment. We use three versions: 230, 440, and 820. 

Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls embed machine learning into the core of the firewall to provide real-time attack prevention, which is wonderful.

We check the machine learning logs to secure our networks against threats that are able to evolve more rapidly. 

I find the solution to be comfortable and easy to use. While I cannot completely authenticate my devices, I am able to distinguish between private devices and use them for authentication in some way, which is very helpful. The URL filtering feature is also helpful and I am very satisfied with the firewall delivery.

Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls provide a unified platform that natively integrates all our security capabilities through Cortex XDR.

I give the solution's single-pass architecture for performance and security an eight out of ten.

There are many valuable features within the solution. This includes security, a user-friendly firewall, antivirus, and global protection.

Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls' documentation, features, and user-friendliness are excellent.

The VPN has room for improvement.

I have been using the solution for two and a half years.

For the most part, the stability is good but we sometimes face problems with the VPN connections.

The solution is scalable. We have 150 people that use the solution.

We often don't have to open a ticket as the documentation provided is usually comprehensive, and we can usually resolve most issues on our own. The one time I submitted a ticket, the technical support was not able to resolve the issue.

Positive

I previously used Forcepoint Next-Generation Firewall which is cheaper than Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls but I prefer Palo Alto because it is user-friendly and supports more devices and features. 

I was not involved in the initial setup but I did migrate the 820 to the 440 and it was straightforward. The migration took a few hours.

Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls are expensive.

There is an additional cost for support.

I give the solution nine out of ten.

The maintenance consists of regular updates only.

Currently, we do not use Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls across our entire network but we have plans to extend them in the future.

I recommend Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls to others.

We are resellers. We're testing this solution in our network and learning about the scalability, how to set up the firewall, and the rules. It's a layer 7 firewall, so we want to know about the capabilities and detection.

The solution is deployed on-premises.

The most important feature is the firewall. We can make rules to filter the application layer of traffic. It's a very helpful feature.

The interface is user-friendly. It minimizes clicks and the need to type comments. With the GUI, we just have to drag and drop. It's quite helpful. For those who don't have a lot of experience with Palo Alto, there's a lot of good documentation.

The machine learning is very good. From our tests, the detection is quite good. I would rate the machine learning a nine out of ten.

I would like to see more integration.

I have used this solution for about eight months.

I'm a consultant and appliance tester. My job is to test the network and know how it works.

The stability is good.

I don't know about the scalability because we only have one appliance, which we haven't upgraded.

I haven't contacted technical support, but all of the answers to my questions are available in the documentation.

We previously used Fortinet.

The installation is straightforward. It's just a simple button. The deployment took less than two hours.

We used four people for testing the capabilities and for the deployment. There were also three or four people outside my team who were involved.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten. 

To those who are interested in using this solution, what I would first say is that Palo Alto is a leader in Gartner. I would give them recommendations about the technical side, what we have done in our testing, the protection rate, the benefits, and how quickly and accurately the firewall can detect threats.

This solution helps us standardize. We have a presence in the Americas, the Pacific, and Europe and have to manage three firewalls. The previous solution made it difficult to standardize, but with Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls, it's a little simpler. It just makes it a pleasant experience overall.

Security is the biggest thing nowadays, including threat response, incident response, and root cause. We found that a lot of the logging and dashboard capabilities offered by Palo Alto fill the missing skill gap that you run up against. It makes it easier for our tier-two staff to get involved in some of the deeper root cause analysis. The dashboards, logs, and reports make it easier for our staff to dive right in and not get lost in what tools they should use. It's easy because they're all right there.

Our firewall engineers like the automations that are involved with the firewall rules. For example, we integrate with Azure, and Azure constantly updates the IP addresses for their whitelists. There are hundreds. With the previous solution that we had, our firewall administrators had to hand-jam a lot of their IP addresses, so it became more of a deterrent to manage the firewall because of the overhead involved. Now that it's automated with Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls, they've been more apt to use the tool than they did previously.

It allows our firewall administrators to speak more confidently when we have an incident response. When they detail their root cause analysis and possibly what the problem is, the leadership receives that information with a little more confidence, and it's a little more palatable. This makes our lives easier when dealing with an incident response.

From a leadership perspective, the reports are genuine, palatable, and easy to understand. They allow me to make logical leaps.

There are servers that go along with Palo Alto, at least for the identity management part. We chose to use a Windows platform, so the only maintenance involved is the patching of the servers and then the occasional agent upgrade for the servers. Palo Alto versions would need to be upgraded as well, along with security patches.

For the most part, we don't see it as a lot of overhead in terms of maintenance. We try to have a maintenance weekend each month for our network team, in addition to a patch maintenance weekend for our system administrators. Overall, we really haven't had to patch.

As part of our internet filtering, we integrate heavily with Active Directory, and we use security groups to separate staff into two groups: those who should have full access to the internet and those who should have limited access. It may be just the way the topology is for our domain controllers and that infrastructure, but at peak usage, there seems to be a delay in reading back against the security group to find out what group the user is in.

We've been using it for roughly five years.

It's deployed on-premises, but we are presently moving into Azure, so we are looking at the Palo Alto appliances for that environment as well.

Stability-wise, we have three regions in which we use Palo Alto, and we are not pegging the resources for these boxes at all. They're meeting and exceeding our expectations in terms of stability, but we're definitely not pushing them to the limit.

In terms of the scalability of the appliance itself, there are some licenses that you can upgrade where you don't have to bolt on any hardware. You may have to upgrade a module. The supporting appliances are VMs that we stand up in the data center, and those handle more of the identity management pieces of the Palo Alto solution.

Palo Alto's technical support has been great. We recently had an issue with DNS where we were having difficulties tracking where an endpoint was making DNS requests. We got a little lost in some of the admin consoles for Palo Alto. We opened a service request, the call was returned within two hours, and an administrator from Palo Alto stayed on the phone with our engineers for about three hours and really helped us by generating some unique queries.

I would rate technical support an eight out of ten with respect to the engineers. They've been very responsive and quick. They have always followed up within the timeframe that Palo Alto said that they would.

Positive

We switched because of the end of life in a hardware's life cycle. With us moving into the cloud and having a much larger endpoint presence, we wanted something that was a little more robust. We also had fewer head counts for our firewall or network administrator staff. So, we wanted a tool that we could access easily and not have such a large training curve. We went with Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls because it made a little more sense for us.

In terms of ROI, protecting our customers is obviously number one. The implementation of our previous solution required agents to be installed on all our endpoints. That was a little more difficult because we have a large number of endpoints globally. The administrative overhead to manage the updates for those agents was not favorable.

Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls allowed us to rely more on the existing infrastructure, Active Directory, to help us with identity management and security groups. It has made it simpler to manage.

We evaluated two other options. 

The sales team that assisted us with refining our requirements and explaining some of the new feature sets that are coming out helped us see that some of our requirements were no longer needed. It really helped us to learn more about the service that we were looking for, and Palo Alto just made it an easier discussion for us.

I recommend fully engaging Palo Alto's sales team. They're very knowledgeable and very friendly. We have three regions, PAC, Europe, and the Americas, and time zones and the quality of support always come into question when you're spread out. We haven't seen any gaps no matter what time zone we had a problem with in terms of sales and post-support. It has been great all the way around.

Overall, I would give Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls a rating of eight on a scale of one to ten.

It is on-prem. We wanted to implement a multiple architecture for our network security. That is why we looked at the Palo Alto product. It is famous for its multi-layer security architecture and firewall.

There are five users: two senior expert administrators and one junior administrator from our data center team and two security engineers from our security team.

It has a solid network security with some robust tools. We can block unexpected attacks, especially zero-day attacks. Since they use the Pan-OS engine, they can collect attacks from all over the world and analyze them. They can then protect against zero-day attacks and unexpected attacks.

There are regular signature updates. You are filtering your objects from external sources. It has also helped to prevent external attacks more quickly. We have the solution enabled to prevent SQL injection attacks.

Palo Alto blocks loopholes where we cannot fix all our vulnerabilities, providing protection.

With secure application enablement, we can protect against application ID. 

Another feature is its malware detection and prevention. DNS Security filters URLs, blocks malicious domains, and provides signature-based protection. They also have Panorama security. We prefer Palo Alto Networks for our parameter security because of these features.

It is not like a traditional firewall. It has sophisticated technology that uses machine learning against cyber attacks, preventing them.

The DNS Security feature is capable of proactively detecting and blocking malicious domains, which are a headache because you can never filter enough. Malicious domains increase in number everyday. That is why using machine learning is a perfect solution for preventing these types of malicious domain attacks.

We don't have to use other advanced technologies due to the solution's UTM capabilities, such as antivirus, anti-spam, and anti-spyware.

With its single-pass technology, the firewalls are capable of analyzing SSL traffic using less CPU and memory.

I would like them to improve their GUI interface, making it more user-friendly.

I would like the dashboard to have real-time analytics.

We have been using it for almost three years.

Compared to other solutions, it is very stable.

The technical support is perfect. I would rate them as nine out of 10.

Positive

Before 2008, we used only core firewall architecture for our network. Then, we needed to enhance our security as we moved toward the cloud. We needed to protect our network from external threats so we decided to go with multi-layer architecture. 

We use several products: Palo Alto, Checkpoint, and three products. Among those products, Palo Alto's performance and product security features are very good. 

We only used Juniper firewalls for our core Firewall. We switched because we wanted to move to a multi-layer architecture.

The initial setup was straightforward. The initial configuration took one to two hours. You need to configure the policies and features. Since we had to do performance tuning, it took us two to three weeks.

It is very easy to deploy. It needs two network engineers.

It is a good investment with the five-year extended support. You don't have to pay any additional costs for five years. You also save on costs because you don't need to purchase other products or technology to manage attacks. That can all be done from Palo Alto. We have seen a 20% to 30% return on investment.

Compared to other products, the pricing is flexible and reasonable. 

We did a PoC with several products, then we selected Palo Alto for its enhanced security features and multi-layer aspects. We also selected it for its speed and performance. Performance doesn't slow down when analyzing SSL traffic.

We are currently using a single firewall architecture. Next year, we will probably move to a dual firewall architecture.

I would recommend Palo Alto Networks NGFW, especially for parameter-level security.

I would rate the product as 10 out of 10.

I'm working in a company that focuses on giving support to different enterprise companies. We help customers with a virtual environment as well as on-prem firewalls.

Before the COVID situation, most of the firewalls were on-prem firewalls, and during the pandemic, there were a lot of problems trying to deliver the firewalls and put them in place. It was taking a lot of time. So, most of the customers have taken a virtual approach for that. A lot of customers with on-prem firewalls are going for a virtual approach.

We are using the most recent version of it.

Palo Alto NG Firewalls help you a lot to have a context of everything. With traditional firewalls or Layer 3 firewalls, we're more focused to determine the source and destination IPs on a specific port. It could be USB or something else, but with next-generation firewalls, you can have more information, such as the user who used it, as well as the application consumed by this user. That's a genuine value that these next-generation firewalls bring in understanding that a user on the network is consuming Port 443 but using Facebook. It is determined by the payload. It can examine the packet, check the payload, and identify the applications. The next-generation firewalls are also more focused on protection.

There are new features that are based on machine learning to protect your network and identify any vulnerabilities. They are pretty good too. With the normal firewalls that we have, the policies are based on ports and IP source and destination. For example, as a part of my policy, I have allowed UDP ports 145 or 345, and for authentication, I have allowed LDAP and other protocols. However, there is a possibility of a breach. Even if I have determined that the traffic is from my active directory servers to the users, when I internally open ports 145 and 345 for all the protocols and all the applications, it creates a vulnerability in my network. If I create the specific rule where I establish that my application is going to be LDAP, and these ports will only be open for LDAP, I am closing the gap. I'm making my network safer, and I'm being more specific and more granular. That's the detail we need nowadays to prevent different types of attacks. The idea is to be more specific and only give the permissions that are needed. We should try to avoid giving more privileges because that creates a vulnerability gap. The customers appreciate being specific and having very descriptive rules for their use cases and blocking other types of communications, which is not that good with normal firewalls.

Palo Alto NG Firewalls embed machine learning in the core of the firewall to provide inline, real-time attack prevention, which is very important. Attackers are innovating every moment, and the attacks are becoming more sophisticated and unpredictable. They are not as predictable as they were in the past. Therefore, it is important to have something at the back in the form of machine learning to help you to interpret and analyze any kind of attack in real-time and protect you from a breach. Technology is very important because you can lose a lot of money or information if you don't have a good security posture and the right tools to prevent a breach or attack.

The machine learning in Palo Alto NG Firewalls is helpful for securing your networks against threats that are able to evolve and morph rapidly. They have advanced threat prevention and advanced URL filtering. WildFire is also useful. It gives you an analysis of malicious files. It detects the files in the sandbox and lets you know in minutes if a new file could be malware, which is helpful for advanced threat prevention. It can quickly give you a lot of context and protection.

DNS security is something that is the focus and a part of the threat prevention profile, and you get different types of options. They collect a lot of information from the experience of other users to determine different problems, such as a malicious page or domain, and use advanced predictive analysis and machine learning to instantly block DNS-related attacks. Their Unit 42 Threat Intelligence team helps the security teams a lot to determine and prevent threats. I haven't had any issue with DNS security. Generally, we recommend the step-by-step approach during the implementation. We recommend starting with a couple of users, analyzing the traffic, and ensuring that the signatures are accurate and policies are established. You have an option to put exceptions for DNS signatures, but in my experience, I didn't have to make many exceptions. You can definitely do it, but it is generally very accurate.

DNS Security provides protection against sneakier attack techniques like DNS tunneling. For DNS tunneling, my approach is to use an SSH proxy. There is a feature in Palo Alto to decrypt SSH traffic and block the application. For example, you see it as SSH, but after you decrypt that traffic, you can see it as SSH tunneling and you can actually block it. You can put things like a sinkhole in order to prevent this traffic.

Palo Alto NG Firewalls provide a unified platform that natively integrates all security capabilities, which is very important. You get a lot of information. For example, in the monitor tab, you can review whether files are transmitted or not, received or not. You can also see the logs related to a threat or a URL that is malicious or is being blocked by your profiles. You have all that information in your hand, and you can review it in a very organized way, which has been very valuable for me. It helped me a lot to understand the problems that a customer can have in the field.

Palo Alto NG Firewalls allow you to enable all logical firewalling functions on a
single platform. You can segment your network into Zones. With Zones, you can separate and allow the traffic in a more specific way. For example, you can separate your visitors or guests into different zones. It is helpful in terms of the cost. This is something that could help you to reduce the cost because you don't have to put in a lot of tools for doing the same thing, but it is something that I'm not an expert in.

The first time I came across these firewalls, what surprised me the most was their web user interface. It is complete and gives you a lot of information. You can do 80% of the things related to your network and firewall through the web UI. In some of the other devices, the UI is not as complete. App-ID is also very valuable in customer networks. When you're seeing a lot of traffic in your network, you can see in your web UI which users have the applications that are consuming the most bandwidth. You have a broad context, which is very good.

Palo Alto can do a little bit better when it comes to the User-ID part. I've been facing problems related to double authentication. You have a computer user, but you also have a VPN user, and when you do a single sign-on to another page, these logs can sometimes generate a problem notification. It doesn't happen a lot, but in some networks, it could be a problem. It would be very helpful to have the ability to restrict the connections that you can have in your VPN. For example, if you have the credentials, you can connect with the same user account from different computers or devices. If you have the domain information, you can connect from different devices. That's a problem that they need to address and resolve. They should ensure that at any moment, only one person is connected through a specific user account.

I have been using this solution for almost five years.

There are no issues with stability. In most cases, they are very stable. 

We recommend our customers to have an HA configuration with active/passive, which is very good in Palo Alto. It takes seconds to change from one firewall to another, which provides reliability and prevents loss of service because of a hardware problem or a network problem on a device. Having an HA environment makes your network resilient.

It depends on the type. If you have a virtual firewall, it is easier to scale to meet your needs. It also depends on the work that you have done during the implementation. It depends on your design, which should be based on a customer's current needs and growth. There are Palo Alto firewalls with different throughput rates to support traffic and encryption. That's why you need to determine and talk about the expectation that a customer has for growth. We do a lot of that so that the customers can have a very robust tool that will help them to secure their network during the coming years without the need to change the device. We understand that it is a huge investment, and they want this product to be there for them for the maximum duration.

For the firewall part, there are complete and very good resources out there to help you. Most of the time, I go through them, and someone has had the same issue in the past. There is a lot of information about the issues that have been solved in the past and how to troubleshoot them. They're very accurate with that. They're very good.

Positive

It depends. If a customer has had another firewall, you need to go through an analysis of their network to understand the rules they have and then translate and introduce them to the Palo Alto methodology. Palo Alto helps us a lot with tools like Expedition, which is a migration tool. Expedition helps you to import the existing configuration from other brands. Overall, it is very straightforward if you have experience. Otherwise, there is a lot of documentation about how you can use the Expedition tool in order to have a successful migration. 

If it is a greenfield deployment where the customer is going to have it for the first time, the configuration is very straightforward. If you don't have any other firewalls, the implementation duration depends on the granularity that a consumer wants and the complexity of their network. The main job is going to be related to the authentication of the users and User-ID. In general, if you have just ten rules, you can do it in three to four days.

In terms of maintenance, they are continuously checking and reviewing if there are some breaches or there are any exploits or new applications. It is continuously updating itself on a weekly or daily basis. They are continuously developing new versions. They have a lot of documentation that we share with the customers for information about the best-recommended version or the version with fewer issues. Their documentation is complete in that aspect, and it gives you a lot of information. You have access to the known issues of released versions. Palo Alto is continuously working on new versions and fixing the glitches of previous versions. You might have to upgrade to a new version because a particular problem is resolved in it.

To someone who says that they are just looking for the cheapest and fastest firewall, I would say that I understand that businesses need to reduce the cost, but such a solution is an investment, and in the future, it's going to help you. If you go to the cheapest solution that could do most of the things, but not all, you could face problems. You could have a breach that would cost you a lot more money than having a good security posture. The number of attacks is going to increase more and more. We have to take them seriously and invest in new and powerful tools for protection. The investment that you do today can save your company tomorrow.

They are trying to come up with new things and innovate every year with new licenses. For example, a couple of years ago, they brought the IoT part, which is something that became popular. They try to innovate a lot and bring out new licenses, but you need to understand your needs to know which licenses are better for you. You should consult a good team and obtain a license that is good for you. That's because not all the licenses are important for your environment. For example, if you are not familiar, or you don't have any future plans for IoT, you don't require a license for that. You should focus on the licenses that you really need and are going to generate value for you. You should focus on your security needs and understand which firewall model can give you the protection and the ability to grow over time based on your projections. Your licensing should include good threat prevention, URL filtering, DNS security, and WildFire in order to have a very secure environment. 

It is a complete solution, and it provides a lot of protection to the users and the network, but it is not something for device protection. For that, you would need something like Cortex, which can help you determine abnormal behavior in an endpoint. 

Palo Alto is trying to combine different products to protect different areas. A next-gen firewall is very good for your network, but, for your endpoints, you can have Cortex. These two solutions can then work together. They speak the same language and have a full integration to protect all your environment. Nowadays, there are a lot of people working from their homes. They are exposed to different types of threats. They connect to your environment through a VPN, but when they disconnect, they do their daily tasks on the device, and while doing that, they may go through a bad page or execute a file that can corrupt the computer. You can determine this and stop attackers from connecting to and infiltrating your network. Palo Alto tries to separate the breaches or the attack areas, and they have a very good product in each area. You can make these products work together in order to have a very strong platform.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

I have deployed it as my internal firewall in the cloud. I also have it on-premises as my perimeter firewall. I am also running Palo Alto in my DMZ. 

I'm using the PA-5532 Series. We have cloud and on-premises deployments. The cloud deployment is on the Azure public cloud.

We are using it on Azure Cloud as an internal firewall for filtering the east-west traffic. At the same time, we are using this firewall as a second-layer firewall in our perimeter for filtering the application URL and other things for the users. We are using another firewall as a perimeter for the DMZ. So, all internal applications that are connecting users are connecting through this firewall. We have other vendors as well, but the main applications are going through the Palo Alto firewall.

Its predictive analytics work very well for blocking DNS-related attacks. We are moving malicious URLs to the unknown IP in the network. They are reconfigured.

Its DNS security for protection against sneakier attack techniques, such as DNS tunneling, is good.

I'm using most of its features such as antivirus, anti-spam, and WAF. I'm also using its DNS Security and DNS sinkhole features, as well as the URL filtering and application security features.

In terms of application filtering and threat analysis, it's a little bit better as compared to the other UTM boxes, such as Sophos or other brands. It is secure and good in terms of application classification and signatures. It is a trustable solution.

In terms of the network performance, I am not very happy with Palo Alto. Other solutions, such as Fortinet, have better throughput and network performance.

I am in GCC in the Middle East. The support that we are getting from Palo Alto is disastrous. The problem is that the support ticket is opened through the distributor channel. Before opening a ticket, we already do a lot of troubleshooting, and when we open a ticket, it goes to a distributor channel. They end up wasting our time again doing what we have already done. They execute the same things and waste time. The distributor channel's engineer tries to troubleshoot, and after spending hours, they forward the ticket to Palo Alto. It is a very time-consuming process. The distributor channels also do not operate 24/7, and they are very lazy in responding to the calls.

It is expensive as compared to other brands. Its pricing can be improved.

I have been using this solution for more than four years.

Its stability is fine. I'm happy with it.

It is scalable. Its usage is extensive. We are using it daily. It is our core device.

Their support is very bad as compared to the other vendors. The support ticket is opened only through the distributor channel, and it takes a lot of time to get a solution for the issue. I'm not happy with their technical support. I would rate them a four out of ten.

Neutral

Palo Alto is the main core product in our case, but we also have Fortinet, Check Point, and Cisco ASA firewalls. Fortinet is one of the key products in our network.

The process of configuring Palo Alto devices is very easy. There is not much in it, but if we want to add or remove a device in Panorama, it is a very complicated setup. Adding, deleting, and updating a device from Panorama is very difficult. The interaction between Panorama and Palo Alto devices isn't good. They need to improve that. FortiManager works very well in terms of device interaction and other things.

The deployment duration depends on the customer infrastructure and where they want to deploy the box, such as in the data center or at the perimeter, but for me, generally, two days are enough for the setup. I provide customers the ways to design a secure network, and they can choose whatever is convenient for them based on their existing network.

In my environment, there are the four network security engineers who are the owners of these devices. We take care of the deployment and management of security devices.

Its price is higher than other vendors. They need to re-think its pricing. 

With Fortinet, the SD-WAN feature is totally free, whereas, with Palo Alto, I need to pay for this feature. With Fortinet, there is one licensing, and I can get many things, whereas, with Palo Alto, I need to go for individual licensing.

I'm working in a systems and data company, and I recommend Palo Alto and other firewalls to many people. The users can choose one based on their budgeting because Palo Alto is expensive as compared to other brands.

Palo Alto NGFW’s unified platform hasn't 100% helped to eliminate security holes. In some cases, we are using other products. I'm mainly using it for WAF and securing my DMZ infrastructure. It is working well in terms of the functionalities in layer 3 and layer 4.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

Generally, it is used for the main function of the firewall. It protects the applications and the servers of clients from attacks. We use it as a perimeter firewall for the traffic from the internet, and it is also being used because one of the customers needed a solution for PCI compliance. We have put the firewall between servers inside the network to do segmentation. So, with the firewalls, specific communication is open between the clients and the servers, between the servers, and between the servers, applications, and the database.

We have PA-5000 and PA-850 series firewalls. In terms of the version, we are using version 9.1, which is not the most recent version. It is the previous one. We manage all firewalls from Panorama.

The most important benefit is that we can manage VPNs inside this firewall. We have integrated it with Active Directory. We provide a certificate to a user, and the user of the certificate can connect with the GlobalProtect VPN, which is a Palo Alto solution. With this solution, we can easily manage about 1,000 VPNs daily. It supports integration with Active Directory, and it is very easy for us to manage the VPNs. Before using Palo Alto Next-Generation firewalls, there was another solution, and we had a lot of issues with that.

Palo Alto NGFW provides a unified platform that natively integrates all security capabilities. Our main customer is going for PCI certification, and a part of the certification requires the use of these kinds of firewalls to protect all the information that they have.

Palo Alto NGFW’s unified platform helped to eliminate security holes and protect from various threats. 

We have firewalls that automatically update the signatures every 15 minutes. It is very important for us because if something happens, we know that the threat will be eliminated because the firewall is updated to the latest signatures.

The trackability is most valuable. When a port is open for a protocol, such as port 443 for HTTPS, it can look inside the traffic and identify or verify the applications that are using the port, which was previously not possible with traditional firewalls.

It is very important that Palo Alto NGFW embeds machine learning in the core of the firewall to provide inline, real-time attack prevention. If something is different, the firewall identifies that based on the behavior of the traffic and alerts us. It can also block that so that nothing more happens.

We use Panorama to manage all firewalls. There is a dashboard, and there is a tab that shows you the real-time traffic that is passing through the firewall. We are able to get all the insights about the traffic.

We use ACC which is a tool for verifying the activity or traffic within your network. Currently, in ACC, the time of the samples that they offer is about five minutes. When you try to go down to a shorter duration, you can't. You only have five minutes. They can provide samples for shorter durations, such as one minute.

I have been using this solution for eight years.

In terms of usage, all the traffic is passing from these firewalls. In general, there are about 3,000 users and 1,000 servers. All the traffic travels through these firewalls. At this moment, there are no plans to increase its usage.

When we were migrating from one model to another, Palo Alto gave us a chance to replace the hardware because the previous model was old, and there was no support. We were able to acquire a new box at the same price that we would have had to pay to repair and maintain it. 

There is another person that is in charge of that. Their support is only in English, which has been challenging, but now, we have engineers who can talk in English.

It wasn't easy because we were migrating from Check Point to Palo Alto. It was difficult at the beginning, but after that it was easy. Overall, the implementation took us three months because we could only do it in certain time windows. It was implemented in phases.

There were some applications that didn't work fine in the beginning. We had to see what was happening and identified the issue.

In the beginning, we used Palo Alto, but after that, we did everything in-house. The support from Palo Alto was fine. Their support person helped us. We are in Mexico, and he helped in translating the support information from English to Spanish in the beginning. We had a few big issues, but in the end, we solved all of them. Now, I can operate these firewalls.

Its price is comparable to other companies. The license is on a one-year or three-year basis. It depends on the customers what they want to go for. There are some features that require an additional license, and there is also the cost of the support.

I would recommend this solution. It is a good solution. I would rate it a nine out of ten.

We are using it for network layer protection. And we have added all the Layer 7 protection there is, such as sinkhole protection and spyware and adware detection.

When you have the advanced URL protection enabled on a Palo Alto NG Firewall, the load on the application layer is reduced. The web application firewall features are already enabled in Palo Alto and those features give you an extra layer of protection, even if you have another technology above the Palo Alto firewall. That extra layer of protection is an opportunity that we have with Palo Alto.

The most important thing is that it's really user-friendly. I have almost stopped using the CLI because I like the graphical interface. You can do whatever you want on a single screen, including all the configuration and implementation, using Panorama. You don't have to switch from one place to another. And the best part is that you can manage multiple Palo Alto devices. We do have other companies' devices and for them we need to go to the CLI. But with Panorama, you almost get everything you need. It is very important for managing all the technology and features on the device, and for adding multiple devices, on one page.

Palo Alto also gives you a lot more options to troubleshoot and fix problems. That really helps our operations team.

Another valuable feature is the sinkhole option. If a malicious packet travels across the firewall, the firewall detects it as malicious traffic but it doesn't stop the traffic then and there. That way the attacker assumes that they have been successful but they have not. It's a type of honeytrap. It allows us to keep on responding to those packets.

Also, when the firewall does network discovery it can detect a malfunction or bugs or a configuration issue. That is very important. If your endpoint system is not functioning properly, it gives you an extra layer of protection in the network discovery field. It shows you all the options and all the data if your system is not compliant.

The Single Pass architecture is a nine out 10. A single pass is always good.

Palo Alto keeps coming out with antivirus and malware updates. When we have to integrate those updates we face some problems with the cloud platform, not the on-prem setup. The device works fine, but sometimes the sync doesn't happen on time.

It's not an issue that happens all the time, just sometimes. It's not a major issue. The device doesn't go down. It is not a priority-ticket situation.

Also, while Palo Alto is doing really well, they should bring out some small devices. As of now, we have the PA-800 Series firewall and the 440 Series firewall. A small Palo Alto firewall would be helpful for low-budget companies.

For the last six to seven months I've been using Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls for architectural purposes. My job is to build infrastructure for our clients to support their functions. I also used Palo Alto for other clients in my previous organization for almost two years.

Scalability is something that I assume is feasible when you have Palo Alto in the cloud. In that case it's feasible to scale it very well, and you don't have to manage it. You just need to order it and it can be scaled per your request.

But with an on-prem setup it can be difficult if you want to scale anything. Then you need to order the physical device and do all kinds of configuration. I haven't really worked on scaling physical devices.

Support is really nice, but they keep on adding features, so regular training is really required for Palo Alto technical support. Every other day, every week, every month, they come up with something new. Sometimes, even technical support doesn't know about an update when it is still in the transition phase. They should have short-term training to be aware of when they are launching a particular new feature.

With more and better training, they will end up saving a lot of time, because they won't have to search for information or ask their colleagues or their engineering team about new features that have been added. That way, customers will be happy.

Positive

The initial deployment is absolutely straightforward. It's a very easy configuration. You just need to follow the instructions.

And the best part is that you get a lot of training material over the internet. I used to think that Cisco gave the best training materials over the internet but I was wrong. If you have any problem, you can Google it. There will be a lot of answers for Palo Alto NG Firewalls on the internet itself.

If everything goes well and if you don't have a major configuration to implement, you just want to set it up, the maximum it would take is one to two hours, because the image deployment is very easy. Once the device is racked up properly and all the cables are connected, you just need to boot up with the latest image and start the to-the-box and through-the-box configurations. Both configurations can be done within two to three hours.

The pricing is fair enough. 

This year, the pricing has increased. They played it really smart by increasing the support license costs and decreasing the platform costs. If you don't want to go for that particular license, you can opt out. The pricing model is very helpful, especially for small companies. If they don't want URL Filtering because they don't have any URL options, they can opt out of the URL Filtering.

I haven't seen Panorama go down in my entire tenure. I've worked with different companies. For example, I worked in Cisco TAC. Cisco users used to say that Firepower, the unified platform, was down and that they could not manage anything. Even though all the other components were running, they could not do any configuration because the unified configuration page itself was down. And, unfortunately, you don't have the ability to configure anything using the Cisco CLI anymore.

But I would give a slight edge to Cicso's technical support over Palo Alto's. I would rate Cisco's support at nine out of 10, and Palo Alto's at eight. Cisco gives priority to its customers.

Before you go ahead and invest in Palo Alto, look at as many reviews as you can. Do proper research before you deploy any firewall.

If someone says they are just looking for the cheapest and the fastest firewall, I would tell them to go for the PA-800 Series and their problem will be solved. Also, for small office requirements, you could go with the PA-440. The PA-450 and 460 will be a little expensive. If your requirements are to set something up for less than 100 users, the 440 will do it.

Our company, in particular, always wants an extra layer of protection. They don't remove any extra layers of security. But an advantage of Palo Alto NG Firewalls is they are sufficient to tackle complications

Palo Alto's firewall is stable, helpful, and user-friendly.

Almost all of my deployments are regulated to each firewall perimeter or as a data center firewall. The perimeter firewalls are deployed to control the user traffic and establish IPv6 VPN connections between a company's headquarter and its branches. This solution comes with threat prevention and URL filtering licenses for perimeter deployment. For data center deployments, the solution is deployed as a second layer of protection for the network traffic, especially for VLANs. It also prevents lateral movement of network attacks.

Almost all of my deployments in the Middle East are deployed on-prem. There is no acceptance of cloud solutions, especially for government and banking rules.

Palo Alto Networks Next-Generation Firewall comes with full visibility into the network traffic. The administrator of this next-generation firewall can troubleshoot the traffic, network issues, or connectivity issues that busted through the Palo Alto Next-Generation Firewall, then detect whether the problem is from the client side or the server side. This solution helps the administrator to troubleshoot and have their network up and running all of the time.

A feature introduced by Palo Alto with the version 10-OS is embedded machine learning in the core of the firewall to provide inline, real-time attack prevention. Machine learning analyzes the network traffic and detects if there is any usual traffic coming from outside to inside. Because of Palo Alto, organizations detect around 91% of malicious attacks using machine learning. The machine learning helps customers by implementing firewalls in critical and air gap areas so there is no need to integrate with the cloud sandbox. 

I integrate Palo Alto with different Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) solutions as well as Active Directory to control the traffic based on users and integration with the email server to send notifications and look at domain recipients. I also integrate Palo Alto with Duo as a multi-factor authentication, which is easy to integrate. 

They have introduced more security components that can be integrated. We are talking about Cortex XDR and WildFire. These are natively integrated with Palo Alto Networks. These help to predict malicious attacks on the endpoint and network. WildFire is easy to deploy and integrate.

SP3 architecture helps distribute the bucket into different engines. Each engine has their own tasks: the networking engine, the management engine, and application and security. Each one of these tasks is done by a single task or dedicated CPUs and RAM for handling traffic.

I have been using this solution for about four or five years.

They have a stable solution, stable hardware, and stable software since they have released multiple OSs. If there are any issues, they release a new OS. Each month, you will see new batches with a new OS introduced to customers. You can update it easily. 

With Palo Alto Networks, you have a dedicated management plan. Therefore, if you face an issue regarding the management interface, e.g., the GUI and CLI of Palo Alto Networks, if you have any problem on that you can restart it without effects on the data streams.

The technical support team is great. We have no tickets open with Palo Alto. There are distributed tech centers worldwide that do not have Palo Alto employees, but have the capability to solve your problem in an easy way. They help you to close your gaps or pains.

Positive

I am expert with next-gen Firewalls, especially in Fortinet and Palo Alto. I am NSE 4, NSE 7, and PCSAE certified.

Palo Alto has introduced new features in their next-generation firewall, such as SD-WAN. However, the technique of SD-WAN implementation is not easy to understand. It is not easy to deploy at this moment. Maybe, in the future, they can improve the process and how the administrators, partners, or support team can easily deploy this SD-WAN solution on their next-generation firewall. The SD-WAN solution from Fortinet is easy to do. It does not take more than five or 10 minutes. When we talk about Palo Alto, it takes extra effort to implement SD-WAN.

If you are looking for a great firewall that helps you stop attacks as well as giving you visibility with the administration, this firewall is the best choice. You should not look at the price the first time. Instead, you should look into the solution's productivity and return on investment.

There are some differences in regards to the integrations between Palo Alto and other vendors. Palo Alto handles the traffic using Single Pass Parallel Processing (SP3) engines unlike other vendors, like Fortinet, who use ASIC processors to handle the traffic. The SP3 engine is a different, new architecture for next-generation firewalls. The SP3 engine curbs the traffic and makes the decision based on the buckets, then it evaluates the bucket and other features regarding routing. 

SP3 helps the customer when we talk about data sheets and the performance of the administration firewall. We introduce SP3 to show them real numbers. When we talk about Fortinet, they introduce a different performance number for networking and application throughputs. With Palo Alto Networks, the deduplication between the firewall throughput to the full inspection mode throughput is minimal. There is no big difference between the networking throughput and full inspection mode throughput.

I use DNS security from other vendors, not Palo Alto. I have tested Palo Alto with some scripts in regards to exfiltration and about 50% to 70% of exfiltration attacks could be stopped by Palo Alto. This year, Palo Alto has improved its DNS security against data exfiltration attacks. They enhanced the DNS security features with Palo Alto Networks Next-Generation Firewall by introducing a cloud solution. The solution now forwards these DNS requests to the cloud, which can analyze it using machine learning and artificial intelligence to decide if it is legitimate traffic or not.

The integration is based on the customer environment and what they need. Enterprise customers have some regulations and compliance so they need to send all their logs to the same solutions. We can integrate it using a syslog protocol over UDP. So, it is easy to integrate Palo Alto with some solutions. However, with other Palo Alto technologies or solutions, I integrate them just with WildFire. WildFire is a dedicated solution related to sandboxing and can be deployed on-prem or in the cloud.

The NSS Labs Test Report information has previously helped me to convince customers to buy Palo Alto Networks Next-Generation Firewalls. However, I am now not using the NSS Labs Test Report. Instead, I am using Gartner reports to offer customers Palo Alto Networks Next-Generation Firewalls.

Machine learning on the Palo Alto Networks Next-Generation Firewall was introduced on version 10.

I would rate this solution as nine out of 10.