Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls Reviews

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 use the solution to access clients.

I like the configuration of the product. The configuration is quite simple to understand. The product is easy to manage.

The solution has a lot of features. However, there are no deep configurations available. The functionalities are limited. Other products offer more customization.

I have been using the solution for the last five years.

The product is stable.

The product is currently being used by three of our customers. We provide them with dedicated VMs.

The local support is good. The response is slow when I try to reach out to technical support on the customer portal. It might be because the tickets I raised were P3 or P4 tickets. However, I do not get proper responses for P2 tickets either. I get a good response when I call support directly.

We also use FortiGate, Check Point, Forcepoint, and SonicWall. We use the tools based on our clients’ requirements.

The initial installation was easy. It was not difficult for me because I am familiar with many products.

The solution is worth the money. However, there are other tools that provide features similar to Palo Alto but are less expensive.

The solution’s cost is a little high compared to other products.

I will recommend the tool to others. It is a fine product. If someone is looking for DLP and other features, the product might not suit them. The product has good URL filtering features. Overall, I rate the solution a seven or eight out of ten.

We use it for our edge firewalls and our east-west and north-south traffic for our firewalls. We have also deployed each firewall to every site for our Layer 3 connections back to our data center.

Since we've integrated it into our east-west traffic and north-south traffic, I feel that it has reduced the number of viruses or other things in our endpoints. I wish to expand it more all the way to our endpoint computers so that we have end-to-end firewall security through Palo Alto.

It provides a unified platform that natively integrates all security capabilities. This is very important to me because I'm in IT infrastructure. I take care of the entire operations network and everything that flows north and south, east and west, and inside and out of our data center. It's very important that we have Palo Alto to protect us.

It embeds machine learning in the core of the firewall to provide inline, real-time attack prevention. When any packet comes through the network, everything is like a first pass. It goes through every single part of our network, and we don't have a delay in alerts or network security. It stops any attack on the line.

I like all the threat alerts and WildFire. I also like scanning because everything that comes into our network via customers is scanned. We're an electric company, so every one of the bills is scanned and emailed in and out of our network. 

I like the reports, but I wish the reporting was a little better. When I set up the automatic reports to come in, they're pretty basic. I would like them to be a little more advanced at the ACC monitoring and things like that. I still enjoy all the daily alerts that I get and all the daily PDFs and reports, but I just feel that it could expand upon the visualization of the reports.

I've been using this solution for seven years.

The stability is great. They're not going anywhere. They're the industry leader.

It doesn't matter whether you are small or large, Palo Alto will fit your needs.

I'm in Pacific Standard Time. During the day, I have great support, and after 5:30, I don't have great support. During my business hours, I would rate their support as a ten out of ten. I love Palo Alto's support. However, at night, when the sun changes and I go to a different area, it's not always the best at level 1. If the incident was like having a system down, the support would be better, but after hours or 5:30, I have a harder time.

We were using Cisco ASA. We switched because of its ease to use and the GUI. There is also Single Pass Architecture, which is related to the way a packet flows through our network. It doesn't have to go through one area into another area. It's all at one, and it just separates. It gives me the best visibility of our network and firewalls.

It has decreased the time of technicians in researching the vulnerabilities. We also do web filtering, so that helps. Web filtering has changed things because we used to use Websense, and it's night and day.

It's very expensive. However, we usually use all of the subscriptions and threat alerts on any firewall that uses the internet. For each edge security endpoint, we use all subscriptions. Otherwise, we just utilize the threat alert, the antivirus, WildFire, etc.

Palo Alto is the best firewall company. Whether you're a small company or a large company, it will fit your needs.

By attending this RSA Conference, I was hoping to find new security solutions. However, I seem to like my existing Palo Alto security solutions. In terms of the impact of the RSA Conference on our organization’s cybersecurity purchases, it depends on what we're looking for at the time of attending an RSA Conference. Right now, we're looking for something that I didn't really see here. We're looking for security, but this means we need a security operations center (SOC), whereas we're small. We just don't have that type of network. This is almost too much. However, that's why we have Palo Alto Networks.

I would rate it a nine out of ten. It's not perfect, but it's pretty good. Palo Alto is the best firewall security network that I could possibly purchase.

We use Palo Alto as our perimeter firewall. We also use the GlobalProtect VPN solution.

It gives visibility into different threats. There is a wide range of threats that can be identified.

We collect logs from Palo Alto into our Rapid7 SIEM solution. It's pretty well integrated. This integration is important because we don't necessarily want a solution from the same vendor. I know Palo Alto has Cortex for collection. Being open to other vendors in order to ingest the data or logs is a great thing.

Palo Alto has embedded machine learning in the core of the firewall to provide inline, real-time attack prevention, which is important because AI is the future. All cybersecurity companies are going to start using it. It's definitely a good thing. We just need to make sure that there's still the human component because AI can still fail.

Palo Alto has a wide range of different appliances or virtual machines. It can be installed anywhere from a small branch to a data center. It helps to secure small businesses to large enterprises.

The most valuable feature is advanced URL filtering. Its prevention capabilities and DNS security are also valuable. It pinpoints any suspicious activities and also prevents the users from doing certain things. For example, DNS security prevents users from reaching certain websites, so it's really interesting.

Palo Alto should improve their support. It's sometimes difficult to get the right technician or engineer to fix the problem as soon as possible.

We have been using Palo Alto for at least five years. 

They're pretty robust. They also have Unit 42, which is their threat intelligence team. They make you feel safer because they can identify the threats and then implement protection from those into their firewall.

Scalability is pretty good on the virtual side. Because the virtual environment licensing model is based on credit, if you don't wanna use UI protection tomorrow, you can get rid of it and use those credits for another product or another license.

Because of the pandemic, there's a lot of turnover and the quality of the support technicians is not great. I hope they will improve. I would rate their support a seven out of ten.

Neutral

I didn't use any other solution previously.

It was straightforward. They have great documentation. We use Palo Alto in the Azure environment, and their Azure documentation is one of the best documentation I've ever seen. It's very detailed. It can be confusing sometimes because there's a lot of information, but it's definitely good. They're good at documenting, and their knowledge base is really interesting for troubleshooting. There's a lot of useful information.

We deployed it ourselves. We didn't use any company to deploy it.

It's hard to tell. It's preventing attacks, but I don't have any specific case where I can say whether a particular attack would not have been blocked by another vendor.

It can be quite expensive, but there's a good incentive for the three-year contracts. The part that is especially confusing is for the virtual environment. The credits or the licensing system can be very confusing.

We didn't evaluate any other options.

As a result of my experience with Palo Alto NGFW, to a colleague at another company who says, “We are just looking for the cheapest and fastest firewall,” I would say that the cheapest and fastest means there is a potential risk of breach. Even though Palo Alto is quite expensive, it definitely makes you feel secure. The configuration of the appliances or virtual machines is pretty straightforward, so you don't need to be highly trained in order to be the administrator of the platform.

It's important to attend an RSA Conference even if you're already a customer. That's because you might not be necessarily aware of the new products, so going to an RSA Conference can help you identify new solutions that may be valuable for your company. 

Attending an RSA Conference will have an impact on our organization’s cybersecurity purchases made throughout the year afterward. There are a lot of different vendors that I've found, and I will probably get in touch soon.

Overall, I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

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

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

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

Overall, it is a good networking device product.

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

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

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

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

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

The stability of Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls is good.

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

Neutral

Previously, we worked with Cisco Secure Firewall.

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

I was not involved in the deployment.

Another team was responsible for running the proof of concept.

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

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

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

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

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

We 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.

Our primary use case is to provide our clients with an internet gateway. 

The best feature is the packet inspection; compared to solutions like Cisco and FortiGate, Palo Alto's packet inspection is much less CPU intensive, allowing it to detect threats embedded within packages more quickly and efficiently. 

Palo Alto Networks NGFW provides a unified platform that natively integrates all security capabilities; it's easy to integrate with other platforms, and we never faced any issues doing so.  

Using Palo Alto Networks NGFW's unified platform, our clients have eliminated multiple network security tools and the effort needed to get them to work together.

The solution doesn't support routing in virtual firewall creation, and we want that to be enabled. 

We've been involved with Palo Alto Networks since 2008 and are a reseller, so we implement the solutions for our clients.

The solution is very stable; we don't have any problems with the stability. 

The product is very scalable. Most of our customers are enterprise-sized financial institutions with over 3,000 branches. 

Palo Alto Networks doesn't directly support Pakistan but rather through distributors. Out tickets go to the distributors, which are then forwarded to Palo Alto.

Neutral

The initial setup is very straightforward; we can complete it three to four hours after activating the licenses.

The product is expensive. With one being the cheapest and ten being the most expensive, I give it an eight.

I rate the solution nine out of ten. 

Palo Alto Networks NGFW is an excellent solution; 90% of the financial institutions in Pakistan use it as their ultimate gateway. 

People are just starting to get into machine learning in Pakistan, so we're not 100% sure of its capabilities and potential. I believe machine learning becomes more efficient in a cloud environment than a hybrid one, though I have yet to research this thoroughly.

To a colleague at another company who says they want the cheapest and fastest firewall, Palo Alto Networks provides an expensive solution, but you can't compromise on security. You can buy the most inexpensive firewall, but you'll have to purchase add-ons and subscriptions to enable a complete security infrastructure in your organization. One solution for every situation that doesn't require any additional services is a better choice. 

I advise those considering the solution to understand where they want to deploy it in the organization, as a broad installation is best for internet gateways. Next, the sensitivity of the data is important; for a financial institution like a bank, I recommend Palo Alto NGFWs because of the quality of the security and machine learning.

We use Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls mostly for firewalls.

Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls saves our company time and resources, which equals money.

Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls saves us time. The solution's firewalls have secured our company, and we don't have to worry about anything.

I would like more reporting and metrics in the solution.

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

It is a stable solution.

It is a very scalable solution.

We have seen an ROI with Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls because it saves us time. We haven't worried about any security issues and feel very protected with Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls.

It is expensive but is worth the price.

Before choosing Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls, we did evaluate other options.

We're fine with the firewall and not shopping around for a firewall.

The fact that it embeds machine learning in the core of the firewall to provide inline, real-time attack prevention is invaluable to me.

Palo Alto NGFW provides a unified platform that natively integrates all security capabilities, which is invaluable to me.

It does a great job of securing data centers consistently across all workplaces, i.e., from the smallest office to the largest data centers, and we have zero complaints.

Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls have helped us reduce about twenty extra hours a week of downtime in our organization.

I rate the value we receive from attending an RSA Conference a ten out of ten.

Attending RSAC will surely have an impact on our organization's cybersecurity purchases made throughout the year afterward.

Overall, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.