Someone else made the decision to buy the initial Palo Alto gear. When they left, I had to learn the Palo Alto gear. At that point, I said, "I know Palo Alto. I like it. Why would I change away from it?" So, I have looked at different solutions throughout the years, but Palo Alto is one of the best out there.

We use Cisco Umbrella for DNS. We have done this for 15 years since it was open DNS as part of an MSF stipulation.

There is another company out there that I like quite a bit in the firewall space who does a really good job and has a very fast, inexpensive firewall. That is Fortinet. My two favorite firewall companies are Fortinet and Palo Alto. I recommend Fortinet in cases where people don't have the money, as you can get a very nice solution from Fortinet for a lot less money. Fortinet is a good player. I like Fortinet. 

Palo Alto's interface is a little nicer to work with, e.g., a little easier and more intuitive than Fortinet. This makes Palo Alto a little nicer for the end user, but Fortinet is a kick-ass solution. I would never downplay it. It is definitely really strong. For $600, you can get a fully functional next-generation firewall on Fortinet, and you can't do that with Palo Alto. That is a world of difference in pricing.

When we were looking to switch, we narrowed it down to two or three. Then, we obviously decided to go with the Palo Alto product. Palo Alto had better specifications for their hardware.

We've evaluated a couple of other products in the past to make sure that we still have the right solution in the market.

Before choosing Palo Alto, we evaluated Check Point and FortiGate.

Many people are just looking for the cheapest, fastest firewall, and my answer is always the same. It's a cliche to say you get what you pay for, but when you opt for the cheapest product, you have to understand that the costs of an attack are monumental. We had a customer who deployed SonicWall firewalls because they wanted something inexpensive that provides a basic level of functionality. They have spent three weeks trying to recover from a ransomware attack because the firewall didn't prevent them from downloading files into their environment, and it lacked some of the features a Palo Alto firewall has.

I tend to use examples like that. It's like switches. When everything's working great, you can go to the local store and buy yourself a cheap and expensive switch, and it'll be fine. But when there are problems, how do you recover? And what can you do with the firewall that will protect you against attacks you don't anticipate? That's where Palo Alto shines. You know you are protected when you deploy it.

Other products are less expensive because they don't provide the same level of functionality. They'll talk about threat prevention, anti-spyware, and malware functions, but they have not been updated automatically like Palo Alto and they lack zero-day functionality. Maybe they don't have some other components, like data leakage protection or file download protections to thwart a concerted attack against organizations.

I always ask people what it would cost to shut down their business for several days. This customer had a solid backup strategy for their servers at least, enabling them to start using cloud-based versions of all their servers within three days. They still were out of business for three days. Now that we've put Palo Alto firewalls in place, they feel confident that's not going to happen again.

I get nervous when people say it can't happen, but we haven't seen it happen with the Palo Alto firewall with the capabilities and features we enable on these boxes. When people say they don't want to spend that money, they need to consider it as something protecting their entire business. An internet connection isn't a nice-to-have; it's the lifeblood of their business, being protected by the firewalls.

We chose Palo Alto right away because we couldn't go with the same vendor, which was Fortinet. We needed a different vendor, and the only option left was Palo Alto.

Before moving to Palo Alto, we did evaluate other options. In those days, we tried out the Check Point firewall. We tried out Fortinet, but Palo Alto was the one that met our needs in terms of the features available and the ease of learning its features and configuration. We went for it also because of the price comparisons.

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

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

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

We didn't evaluate anything other than FortiGate and Palo Alto.

We knew about Palo Alto and that's what we wanted, so we did not evaluate other vendors or products.

I've worked with my SE on this with at least four or five other schools that did not use Palo's, but since turned to use them. I speak with my SE often, and I also speak with my colleagues at other schools about my experiences. I generally explain what my experience with Palo Alto is compared to what I've had with other firewalls.

I evaluated Check Point and decided to use Palo Alto because of its performance. Palo Alto can be used with fewer CPUs. 

As a solutions architect group, we are what you would call "vendor-agnostic." We evaluate any solution that seems like it may be viable to provide clients with some advantages. I will never go to a customer and say that these are the only products that we are going to support. However, if there is something that a client wants to use which I feel would be detrimental to their business or that doesn't fit their needs, I will encourage them to look at other solutions and explain why the choice they were leaning towards may not be the best. When a solution they want to use means that no matter what we do they are going to get broken into, I'll let them know. It isn't good for their business or ours.

That said, some of the most requested or considered firewall solutions by clients beside Palo Alto are Fortinet, Firepower, and Meraki. Looking at each provides a background into how we look at solutions and how we evaluate options for clients. You have to look at the benefits and disadvantages.

Cisco Firepower NGFW (Next-Generation Firewall)

I think that Firepower can be simplified and can be made into a more viable product in the Cisco line. I think that Cisco has the ability to get into the Firepower management platform and trim it, doing so by breaking down all of the different areas of concern and configuration and categorizing them into overviews, implementation across the board, and steady-state management. If they were to do that, then users could start at the top layer and drill down more as they see fit to customize to their needs. I believe that Cisco can do that with Firepower and make it a much better security tool.

Firepower is not just a firewall, it is an SD-WAN. It is an application that Cisco sells that gets loaded onto an ASA 5500 series appliance (the appliance has to be the X platform). It is not a bad solution. I can use it to get into your network and protect a lot of your customers who will be running traffic through it. But a problem that you are going to get into as a result of using Firepower is that it is extremely difficult to configure. Security engineers that I have handed the setup after a sale came back from the service and asked me never to sell it again because it was very difficult for them to set up. However, it is also very secure. The difficulty is in using the GUI, which is the console that you would log into to set up your rules and applications. It can take about 10 times as long as Meraki to set up, and that is no exaggeration. Palo Alto is easier to set up than Firepower, but not as easy to set up as Meraki. But, the security in Palo Alto is phenomenal compared to Meraki. Firepower is pretty secure. If it was a little easier to operate, I'd be recommending it up one side and down the next, but ease-of-use also comes into play when it comes to recommending products.

I'll support what Firepower has to offer considering the quality of the security. But I can't take anyone seriously who is proud of themselves just because they think their firewall is next generation. It might have that capability but it might not be 'next generation' if it is set up wrong. Some vendors who sell firewall solutions that I've spoken to admit to dancing their customers around the 'next generation' promise and they make amazing claims about what it can do. Things like "This firewall will protect the heck out of your network," or "This firewall has built-in SD-WAN and can save you lots of money." These things are true, perhaps, depending on the clients' needs and the likelihood that they will be able to properly manage the product. 

Firepower is a capable solution but it is difficult to set up and manage.

Cisco Meraki NGFW (Next-Generation Firewall)

Meraki was a horrible acquisition by Cisco and it is harming their name. All of us who are familiar enough with the firewall know how bad that firewall is and we know that Cisco needs to make changes. The acquisition is almost funny. The logic seemed to be something like "Let's buy an inferior security solution and put our name on it." That is a textbook case on how not to run a company.

If Cisco wanted to improve Meraki, the first thing they need to do is simply activate the ability to block an unknown application. Start with that and then also improve utility by blocking every threat by default like other products so that users can open up traffic only to what they need to. That saves innumerable threats right there.

There are situations where Meraki works very well as is. One example is at a coffee shop. What the coffee shop needed for their firewall solution was to have a firewall at every location for guests. The guests go there to eat their donuts, drink their coffee, and surf the internet. The company's need was simply to blockade a VLAN for guest access to the internet while maintaining a VLAN for corporate access. They need corporate access because they need to process their transactions and communications. All corporate devices can only communicate through a VPN to headquarters or through a VPN to the bank. For example, they need to process transactions when somebody uses their debit card at a POS station. It works great at the coffee shop. 

It works great at department stores as well. All employees have a little device on their hip that enables them to find what aisle a product is in when a customer asks them. If the store doesn't have the product on hand, the employee can do a search for another store that does have it in stock right on the device. They can do that right on the spot and use that service for that device. For that reason, they are not going across the internet to find the information they are searching for. They are forced into a secure tunnel for a specific purpose. That is something you can do with Meraki. If you don't let employees surf the web on the device, then Meraki will work.

I can actually give you the methodologies in which hackers are able to completely hack into a Cisco customer's network and steal extremely valuable information. Meraki is the most simple of all firewalls to infiltrate in the industry. It is an extremely dangerous piece of hardware. What comes into play is that Meraki, by default, does the opposite of what all of the other firewalls do. Every firewall not called Meraki will block every means of attack until you start saying to permit things. The Meraki solution is the opposite. Meraki, by default, blocks nothing, and then you have to go in and custom key everything that you want to block. This is dangerous because most people don't know everything in the world that they need to block. With Meraki, you have to get hacked in order to be able to find out. Now, tell me who really wants that.

An example of this is that Meraki cannot block an application it doesn't know about, which means that all unknown applications are forever allowed in by Meraki. If I am a hacker and I know that you are using a Meraki firewall, I can write an application to use for an attack. When I do, it is unknown because I just wrote it today. If I load it up on a website, anybody that goes to that website using a Meraki firewall has this application loaded onto their computer. Meraki can't block it. That application I wrote is designed to copy everything from that person's computer and everything across the network that he or she has access to, up to a server offshore in a non-extradition country. I will have your data. Now I can sell it or I can hold you for ransom on it.

Customers love it because it is simple to configure. I don't even need to be a security architect to sit down at a Meraki console and configure every device across my network. It is an extremely simple device and it's extremely cheap. But you get what you pay for. You are generally going to suffer because of the simplicity. You are going to suffer because of the low cost and "savings."

All I can say about Meraki is that it is cheap and easy to use and fits well in niche situations. If you need broader security capabilities, spend a few bucks on your network and get a better security solution.

Fortinet FortiGate NGFW (Next-Generation Firewall)

I'm supportive of Fortinet because it is a decent next-generation firewall solution. While not as secure as Palo Alto, it is a cost-effective and reasonably reliable product. I have customers choose it over Palo Alto. But if they decide to use this solution, I want to charge them to manage it for them. The reason for that is, if anything goes wrong in the network and they get hacked, my client will likely get fired and replaced. If anything goes wrong in the network and I am paid to manage their firewall, I am the one in trouble if they get hacked — not the client. I apply my services to the network, make sure everything is working as it should and give them my business card. I tell them that they can give the business card to their boss if anything goes wrong because the guy on the card is the one to blame. That way I remain sure that nothing will go wrong because of poor administration, and my client contact sleeps better at night.

Fortinet is sort of middle-of-the-road as a solution. It has a relative simplicity in setup and management, it has a lower price and provides capable security. Fortinet FortiGate still gets some of my respect as a viable alternative to Palo Alto.
     

Comparing the Complexity of Setup

Firepower is the most complex to set up. The second most complex is Palo Alto. The third is Fortinet. The fourth is Meraki as the simplest.

Rating the Products

On a scale from one to ten with ten being the best, I would rate each of these products like this:

• Meraki is a one out of ten (if I could give it a zero or negative number I would).
• Fortinet is seven out of ten because it is simple but not so secure.
• Firepower is seven out of ten because it is more secure, but not so simple.
• Palo Alto is a ten out of ten because the security side of it is fantastic, and the gui is not a nightmare.
  
  

An Aside About Cisco Products 

It is interesting to note that the two offerings by Cisco are on completely opposite ends of the spectrum when it comes to the learning curve. Firepower is on one end of the spectrum as the most difficult to configure and having the worst learning curve, and Meraki is on the other as the easiest to configure and learn. Both are owned by Cisco but Cisco did not actually develop either of product. They got them both by acquisition.

We looked at Cisco and Fortinet. The reason that we went with Palo Alto was they were fairly cost-effective. They were also a bit easier to manage. The central management and control of Palo Alto was a little bit nicer than the Cisco side of things. I think everyone achieves the same things in slightly different ways. The way Palo Alto achieves their centralized management and control resonated a bit better with us and our requirements.

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 evaluated other features, but we chose Palo Alto early on in the process because of the features and usability.

We continuously review firewalls, whether it's Check Point or Fortinet, or Cisco. But Palo Alto has been the best for us.

After evaluating Cisco Firepower and Palo Alto, we decided to go with these two options. However, after trying out Firepower, we realized that it was not a good fit for us and we knew we didn't want to proceed with it.

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 deal with Fortinet Fortigate firewalls, Forcepoint firewalls, and Cisco firewalls every day. We sell and implement them, like Palo Alto.

Palo Alto now has the IoT license on the firewall. They can protect you from DNS attacks. The WildFire license is a very rich license, and other vendors don't have that. And if your firewall is an internet edge firewall, Palo Alto GlobalProtect will give you a host compliance check without adding anything else. Also App-ID and Content-ID are very good and very mature, unlike with other vendors.

I have also used Palo Alto NGFW’s DNS Security for two of my customers. It's a good addition to the firewall, but it's not perfect. Palo Alto is not specialized in DNS attacks. There are a lot of companies that specialize in DNS attacks. They are more mature than Palo Alto in this area. Palo Alto is not like Akamai or Infoblox or EfficientIP, as those companies are specialized in DNS, DNS servers, and DNS attacks. Palo Alto is not only a DNS company.

When when we first looked at Palo Alto, it came in as the top recommendation from a source that we trusted. We didn't actually look at other vendors at that time. 

At the time, we had the full support of our CEO and team, who recognized the urgency of the situation as our entire system was down. This rare backing from everyone helped us to quickly implement a solution.

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

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

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

We would rather use Cisco Umbrella for DNS security.

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

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

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

We evaluated Fortinet as well as Cisco.

The firewall we use is recommended by our county office of education, which also uses the same application. 

This makes it easier for us to collaborate with the county and share reports between different departments.

We are always evaluating other vendors and are currently looking at Cisco. Though both Palo Alto and Cisco firewalls are feature-rich and provide very good value, Cisco is better at customer engagement. They are easier to talk to as well.

We actually tested multiple solutions, and choose this one because it gave us the most benefits in one product.

Our process for evaluating firewall solutions usually involves consulting Gartner for their feedback, having sessions with our analysts, and focusing on the leading firewall manufacturers.

We evaluated several firewall manufacturers, including Check Point and Fortinet, but ultimately, we as a group decided that Palo Alto was the best fit for us. 

The decision was not solely mine but rather made by our managers based on the evaluations and presentations given by each vendor. 

We were particularly impressed with Palo Alto's presentation and even visited their headquarters located south of San Francisco. And we just felt comfortable, and it was a good decision.

I am using three or four firewalls from different vendors. I know their capabilities as well as the strengths and weaknesses of each vendor. 

We have evaluated different firewalls and found Palo Alto best suited for boundary networks. Fortinet handles our user-facing firewalls. Between FortiGate and Palo Alto, there is Cisco.

We did a SWOT analysis on all the firewalls. We determined the best firewalls based on their throughput and protection suites. For example, a user-facing firewall doesn't need to be jam-packed with security features. However, a perimeter firewall is between the trusted and untrusted networks, so more security features are needed.

We are using a different DNS Security solution, so we haven't used Palo Alto NGFW’s DNS Security.

We evaluated Cisco and Fortinet.

During our evaluation process for selecting a firewall vendor, we prioritize performance as the number one factor. 

Price range is ranked second in importance. 

Other important factors include ease of use, API support, and next-gen features, all of which are used as evaluation criteria. We have previously used Magic Quadrant, but it is important for us to carefully choose our firewall vendor.

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.

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

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

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

When we were moving away from SonicWall, we evaluated FortiGate and Meraki's solutions.

In my opinion, I was impressed with FortiGate's system on a chip. It was really fast compared to Palo Alto's, but I think Palo Alto has a better feature set and interface. As for SonicWall, we had several reasons for leaving. Regarding Meraki, I find their management interface not suitable for my needs, and they seem to be more of a consumer-grade or prosumer-grade product.

Yes, was fortinet

We evaluated Fortinet and Check Point.

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.

We didn't evaluate any other options.

Another team was responsible for running the proof of concept.

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

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

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

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.

We evaluated Cisco, Juniper, and Dell among other solutions before ultimately choosing this solution. Cisco can be complex in terms of device management compared to other options, for example. Cisco can be cheaper than Palo Alto, but that is not always the case.

When assessing firewalls for securing data centers consistently and across all workspaces or places, Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls are suitable products. 

From my experience, they have demonstrated excellent performance.

While it may not necessarily decrease downtime, it also doesn't cause any increase in downtime.

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

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

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

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.

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

I have also worked on Check Point and FortiGate, the hardware firewall. The Check Point Firewall has three-tier architecture where one security gateway & management server is there & smart dashboard is deployed on Windows. The application is required to control the Gateways. On other hand In Palo Alto, we just take GUI access of the firewall or Panorama to deploy any security policies and the architecture is very simple. As mentioned, the downside of Palo Alto is that there is a limitation to the number of objects that can be created. 

We looked at Cisco Meraki, but I wasn't really all that happy with it. 

Overall, Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls is a market leader.

With other devices, you need a controller and console to manage them. That is not the case with Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls, where most of the work is done through the GUI. If you want to deep dive, then you go to the CLI. 

Cisco ASAs give some information on the Nexus Firewall, but they are not streamlined. Whereas, Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls is a streamlined device and easy to use.

We actually did not but we were using two or three other products already, so we had a good idea of what to expect.

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.

We called in proposals for different products, bigger players, like Check Point, Fortinet, Cisco. We set the criteria we need and had them make proposals. We found, based on the submissions, that Palo Alto seemed to be the one that had the most complete solution. We did a proof of concept to prove that whatever they said they can do, they can do. Once we passed that stage we proceeded with the purchase of the Palo Alto unit.

It came down to the technical evaluation we did. They did well in terms of performance. In addition, we liked the support terms that were proposed by the reseller. We also looked at certifications and reviews, at the NSS Labs reports, and other industry ratings. Palo Alto seemed to be up there. Also, looking toward the future, we can actually subscribe to sandboxing services in the cloud. There are also options for us to integrate with endpoint security solutions.

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.

Our clients compare it with Check Point. Palo Alto Network has the application granularity. It enables you to handle the applications, policies, and Policy Optimizer. There is no need for splitting the management plane and the processing plane. In Check Point, you need two devices. You need one device for the management and one for the gateway. Palo Alto has both in one, which is a good feature.

Check Point is a kind of cheaper solution, and we can deploy that application on open servers. The open servers option in Check Point has a huge cost-saving. In terms of performance, I will always choose Palo Alto Network because its IPS feature is superior to Check Point. It is much better than Check Point.

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.

Palo Alto, Cisco.

We also evaluated Check Point and Fortinet solutions.

Sophos XG.

I work with Fortinet as well as Palo Alto. Palo Alto has very extensive logging that Fortinet doesn't offer. To get that with Fortinet you need to purchase FortiAnalyzer for reporting. The logging is so extensive in Palo Alto that you can generate a report and get an analysis on the same firewall. You don't need to procure anything else. The documentation of both Fortinet and Palo Alto is up to standard. They both have very extensive documentation for their products. Both of them offer the same level of knowledge base for their customers and are up to the mark. In terms of support, Fortinet and Cisco allow you to directly open a case and get an engineer on the line. Cisco follows the same model. I'm unable to do that with Palo Alto from Pakistan. 

We evaluated Sophos, SonicWall, and Fortinet.

We are currently looking for a better-priced solution.

I have evaluated Sophos firewalls and I found Palo Alto solutions better because of the protection and web filters.

We previously had Check Point and eventually compared it with the Palo Alto screening, which proved that Palo Alto was the best. It was not a difficult choice.

I didn't look at any other vendors.