Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls Reviews

We protect certain applications in the data center with Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls.

Application layer security and integration with other components that we have in our networks are valuable features.

Compared to other firewalls from Check Point, Fortinet, and Cisco, for example, Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls use the most advanced techniques. They have sandbox integration and others in the orchestrator. Palo Alto's security features are at a higher level than those of the competitors at the moment.

It's very important that we be able to integrate all security capabilities within the firewall. This is one of the key reasons why we chose to go with Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls.

We are heavily investing in technology that uses machine learning. Thus, it is important for us that Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls embed machine learning in the core of the firewall to provide inline, real-time attack prevention.

Palo Alto needs to provide more support during the design phase and with proposals. They need to be more proactive, try to anticipate issues, and then help us to implement the transformation quickly.

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

We have not had any issues with stability. I have not heard from our SOC about issues with devices either.

The scalability has been good. We are the biggest bank in Italy with 100,000 employees.

Palo Alto's technical support is extremely good and responsive. The ticketing system, however, is a little bureaucratic especially when you are in a hurry or are dealing with an emergency. On a scale from one to ten, overall, I would rate technical support a nine.

Positive

The deployment was quite easy.

We have seen a return on investment in general. Our company is moving to the cloud and toward digital transformation in the financial sector. Palo Alto plays a key role in this return on investment.

My advice to you, if you're looking for the cheapest and fastest firewall, is that the cheapest firewall is not the best for security.

We use firewall solutions from multiple vendors, and from a security point of view, Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls are one of the best in comparison. Also, you get the best value from Palo Alto with application layer security, machine learning, and integration.

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

I find it valuable to attend an RSA Conference because I get the opportunity to participate in several seminars, share, and learn from other people as well.

Attending RSAC also impacts our purchasing decisions because what I see at the conference will end up in the budget the following year or the year after that.

We use these firewalls to manage wastewater systems for over a hundred municipalities across the country. As a result, we exclusively use them in the operational technology (OT) space.

One of the key benefits is that it enables us to secure environments that may pose more significant security challenges.

The centralization capability is the most valuable feature of this solution as it enables us to monitor our systems efficiently. Additionally, the firewalls are excellent, with straightforward configuration and comprehensible interfaces that our engineers can set up with ease.

The cloud firewall solution offers a unified platform that integrates social security capabilities, but it comes at an additional cost.

I think having the ability to see the big picture is important for us, and that's not always easy to achieve. 

As for how important it is for us to have Palo Alto NG Firewalls and defense machine learning at the core of the firewall for real-time attack prevention, I think it's a bit premature to say. There are many players in that field currently, and I would prefer to see them get it right before jumping in just for the sake of being there.

A major concern is making the licensing more accessible to enable small municipalities to afford and manage their own systems independently.

I have had experience working with Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls for a minimum of three to four years.

I would rate the stability of Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls a nine or ten out of ten.

Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls are very scalable.

As far as I know, the technical support for this solution is excellent. 

My team has used it a few times and has always been satisfied with the service. I have never received any negative feedback regarding the support lines.

I would rate the technical support an eight or nine out of ten.

Positive

A lot of the municipality's systems rely on Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls to stay online, and we've found that they provide better uptime compared to most other solutions.

Our downtime has been reduced by 80 to 90% with the implementation of Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls.

I was not involved in the deployment process.

We have seen a return on investment. By centralizing our monitoring of systems, we have been able to make our lives easier.

The licensing leaves a lot to be desired. 

We buy the license and then we can't transfer the license without paying an exorbitant fee to our client if they leave us, and that just seems to be a bit of a pain point for us, and there's really no way to partner effectively to make that more reasonable.

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

As most of our environments are in the cloud, we don't have a lot of experience in securing data centers.

If a colleague at another company is only looking for the cheapest and fastest firewall, I would advise them that Palo Alto Networks is not the right solution for them. 

While it may not be the most affordable or the quickest to set up, the investment in Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls is well worth it in terms of reliability and security. 

Choosing a firewall based solely on cost and speed may result in a false sense of security and leave the organization vulnerable to breaches and downtime.

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

For security purposes, we use Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls for both the edge and data center.

The IT operations side provides us with more freedom as we don't have to worry about it as much due to the automated alerts and detection.

The DNS sync code in your filtering is the most valuable feature of the Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls.

It helps us stay informed about the activities of our end users.

As I learn more about the unified platform, I see that Palo Alto is integrating well with other standards and are innovating, so the solution works effectively.

Maintaining a good security posture is important for our organization, particularly when it comes to threats like ransomware. ITM Security plays a vital role in this, and Palo Alto Networks equipped us well to be proactive in our approach. As a result, we prioritize the importance of ITM Security within our group.

Incorporating machine learning into the firewall's core to provide real-time attack prevention is highly beneficial, particularly with features like WildFire. We have had instances where it effectively stopped zero-day attacks on the first day, and we were one of the first to encounter the issue. Within a couple of hours, they notified us that it was a security issue, allowing us to take action promptly.

I am not aware of anything that could be improved.

I think that they have been doing a good job at this point in time.

Technical support is an area that could be improved.

I have been working with Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls for six years.

Our downtime has not been reduced by Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls. We experienced a DSL firewall incident that resulted in a five-hour downtime while we discovered the bug, and although I cannot entirely blame the firewall, it was still a part of the issue. However, we have learned to deal with this inconvenience.

It's quite stable. We had one issue because of a bug. Aside from that, everything has been fine.

The scalability is excellent. We were able to enlarge the network and install additional firewalls. There haven't been many problems with that.

Technical support has fallen off. It was much better up front. The first four years were spectacular.

In the last couple of years, we're getting a lot of overseas support that seems to have little training. In the beginning, it was high, but now I would rate it a five out of ten.

Neutral

Previously, we used Cisco.

Compared to Cisco, Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls are much better in terms of being more elegant and thorough, especially when it comes to navigating log files and similar tasks.

By the nature of coming from Cisco Firewall to Palo Alto Networks NG Firewall, there was complexity involved. But with the help of third-party resources, we were able to get it done pretty quickly.

We had assistance from a consultant. They were very helpful.

The pricing is competitive.

If someone is looking for the cheapest or the fastest option, I am not quite sure what other vendors are offering in terms of pricing. However, my recommendation would be to go with Palo Alto so that they don't have to worry about the security of their job.

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.

Our current design is efficient as all our sites are routed to the Palo Alto firewall, allowing us to segregate VLANs and maintain communication between users. It's a great setup that simplifies a lot of our work.

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

In my overall assessment, I would give the conference a seven out of ten. It seems like many presentations focus on industry trends, and there is some repetition across different companies covering the same three or four topics. However, I found that Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls had some valuable insights into what the industry is doing.

It helps, as we are the ones making decisions.

We started using this solution as a basic firewall, and then, we ended up with URL filtering, IPS, and decryption.

It increased visibility, and we can see things that we couldn't see before and are able to decrypt as well. We can actually see what's going on in our network.

Decryption is one of Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls' best features because we can decrypt by category. For instance, we can decrypt everything except for bank traffic so that we don't interfere with the passwords and two-factor authentication of those checking their bank accounts at work. We can still monitor for malware and other threats that come through a secure channel. It's seamless for users. The URL filtering and IPS are both great as well.

Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls provide a unified platform that natively integrates all security capabilities. WildFire stops a lot of viruses and malware that come in from the outside. In addition, when you decrypt the traffic you'll be able to see a lot that you couldn't before. You can then integrate that into a SIEM and have visibility into all the different things that are going on. Integration with WildFire provides sandboxing and tells you if it's malicious content or not. Then, you can do URL filtering for the endpoints. All of this data goes into the SIEM. Thus, it's a really good, well-integrated software.

This native integration is very important to us because of the cost. When we get an enterprise license and get all these features on one device, we don't have to buy five devices or virtuals or set up a virtual or cloud farm to do the five things that the solution will do automatically, natively out of the box. We have been able to save money because we are able to get rid of our decryption software and are getting close to letting go of our filtering software.

It's important to us that Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls embed machine learning in the core of the firewall to provide inline, real-time attack prevention. This is important because those who exploit us daily use new tactics that are not seen at all times. They employ tactics that use applications that we currently use, such as PowerShell. If a PowerShell script comes in and it's decrypted, launched in WildFire in a sandbox, and blocked, it cuts our threat vector down tremendously.

When we go across all the workspaces, it's simple. The web-facing servers are protected with IPS, and the endpoints are protected with URL filtering in the sandbox and decryption. We log all of the MAC addresses, so we block hackers from getting into different websites when staff use a Wi-Fi connection off-site. In terms of securing data centers consistently across all workspaces, our whole ecosystem depends on having Palo Alto so that we can have one centralized SIEM where all the data is. Our SOC can investigate all the alerts that we get from all of these different areas.

Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls need better training modules. You have to do a lot of reading prior to watching the training videos, and it's good for people who are really into it. However, often you want to use a video for a TID. You want to see how to do something rather than spend 30 minutes reading and then another 30 minutes watching the class. As a result, I take third-party training classes rather than Palo Alto's training because they are a lot better.

The training should be more accessible because if everybody has to pay for training, it makes it harder for us to get in techs who are qualified to do the work. If there are clear levels and schemes for certification, it would be great.

I've been using this solution for probably five years now.

The firewalls are always on, and we haven't had any stability problems. We haven't even had any hardware failures, and the perishables are great.

The firewall's scalability is nice because you can take a VM and put more memory in it. If you virtualize, then you can scale it out. With an enterprise license, you can load several to get all different points of your internet access. For example, one could do URL filtering just for the desktop, and another one could be an IPS in front of something else.

It's very flexible, and you can use these virtuals to contain all these different situations from an architectural standpoint without having to buy other software.

Palo Alto's technical support is great, and I'd give them a ten out of ten.

Positive

The initial setup is straightforward in the sense that when you put it in it starts doing what it's supposed to do. Then, you have to turn on all the features that you want.

We mainly worked with Palo Alto Networks. They taught us a lot and have been very helpful in getting us onboarded with all of the different features.

We see a return on our investment every day. We have threat hunters who go through the data and tell other state agencies where the problems are or what we were able to stop.

We haven't had a problem with pricing or licensing because we consolidated other software to make Palo Alto more affordable.

If you're just looking for the cheapest and fastest firewall, remember that you'll get what you pay for. Check if the company is able to support its product 24/7. You have to be able to get technical support on the phone at any time of the day or night. In addition, the company has to be able to do training on its firewall, and there has to be a job market for it so that there's an employee pool from which you can pick someone who knows the software. If it's an obscure software company, and they only have two or three people in the country who are certified on it, then it would hurt you a lot because you won't be able to call these two or three people in the middle of the night and expect them to always be there. Palo Alto has a very deep bench, so they can go globally and get you tech support at any time. That's very helpful.

The price is dependent upon how many features you use. If you have a Palo Alto ecosystem where you use Prisma, IPS, URL filtering, and decryption, it's going to be affordable because you will be able to eliminate other software. However, if you're looking to use Palo Alto as just a firewall, it may not help you that much because everybody out there competes to provide a firewall experience.

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls a ten.

The value I get by attending an RSA Conference is being able to see new up-and-coming software. Some products are new to the market, and others are trying to get their product to market. A lot of times, these products have key features that others don't.

Attending RSAC helps to influence cybersecurity purchases throughout the year because we are able to see a product that we didn't know was available. We learn that there is software that does certain functions that we didn't even know we needed. There are some products at RSAC that may be too expensive, but there are others that we would consider because they are cost-effective and have feature sets that we didn't know about.

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.

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.

We use this solution to protect the perimeter and use it as a proxy for the servers.

We have the firewalls installed in our data center at present and are planning to put them in the corporate and branch offices as well.

A couple of years ago, we removed the explicit proxy for the servers and made the proxy transparent for the servers. We were able to make it softer for the servers' web filtering.

Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls provide a unified platform that natively integrates all security capabilities. They have a couple of solutions in the cloud that we are trying to add to our ecosystem.

Because Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls are installed in our data center, it is very important that Palo Alto embeds machine learning in the core of the firewall to provide inline, real-time attack prevention. We need to protect our servers.

The cloud could be improved. I would like to have more visibility of the network vulnerabilities as well.

I've been using Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls for more than five years.

The stability is good.

Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls have good scalability.

Palo Alto's technical support is good, and I would rate them an eight out of ten.

Positive

Overall, I would rate Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls a nine on a scale from one to ten.

We have had use cases for defending our resources against external access or authenticating particular traffic or appropriate traffic for access.

The key factor here is reliability. In my previous company, we had a different vendor's firewall before switching to Palo Alto network devices. 

Unfortunately, during that time, our security team was on vacation and had to be called back urgently due to a severe incident. This experience led us to switch to a more dependable, reliable, and robust system, which turned out to be the Palo Alto network device. 

Fortunately, the transition from our old system to the new one was relatively seamless, and we now have a reliable and robust security infrastructure.

In my opinion, Palo Alto has consistently been one of the best firewalls for enterprise security. 

We have encountered numerous instances where we have observed threats and attacks targeting our systems, and Palo Alto has proven to be highly reliable in blocking any malicious activity.

I would like to see some Machine Learning because I have observed new types of attacks that are able to bypass existing security rules. It is possible that implementing some form of continuous learning or education could be beneficial in addressing this issue.

Some way to learn what is normal it isn't, you know, something like that, I think that would be probably the most beneficial thing to me.

To say it's a set-and-forget system wouldn't be entirely accurate, but it is an incredibly stable and reliable system. Once it's set up and configured properly, you really just need to keep an eye on it for any necessary updates or new rules. In my experience, it's one of the most reliable systems available.

The original installation we were considering was for a small organization, and we had to take into account the fact that we were going to expand the endpoints to our entire user base, not just a select few like marketing.

We were assured that the system would have no issues handling the additional workload as we added more devices or upgraded the device.

The firewall solution that I have referred to the most during this conversation is one that I have implemented for small to medium-sized organizations.

I found the initial setup very straightforward.

I recall that the setup process for the device was straightforward and could be completed quickly. However, while the device did come out of the box, it wasn't as secure as it could have been, and I had to go in and tighten up the security settings. Despite that, compared to other firewalls with complex and cryptic interfaces, Palo Alto's firewall interface was relatively easy to use and comprehend.

There were certainly benefits in terms of time-saving and ease of learning for the user. The straightforward setup process and user-friendly interface of the Palo Alto network devices made it easier and quicker to implement, thus saving time. Additionally, the easy-to-use interface also helped in reducing the learning curve for users, enabling them to become proficient in using the device more rapidly.

Using Palo Alto has reduced the amount of downtime considerably.

Determining the impact of blocking threats is not straightforward because it depends on the severity of the threat. For example, if a threat only affected one server, the downtime would be minimal. However, if it caused an outage in the entire environment, the impact would be much greater. It is challenging to quantify the amount of downtime prevented by blocking threats.

Usually, when setting up a new firewall, it's common to get around 80% of the work done within a few days. However, with the Palo Alto network device, I recall that we were able to achieve 95% to 99% completion within just a couple of days. The device's user-friendly interface and straightforward configuration process made it easier to accomplish more in less time.

Technical support was helpful during the deployment process.

During the deployment process, I thought they were great. I had no complaints they were very knowledgeable, and we were able to resolve everything very quickly.

The organization has seen a return on investment with Palo Alto firewalls as we haven't experienced any significant breaches.

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.

We frequently recommend Palo Alto to others as we believe it is a highly effective solution for network security. It is one of those things where if someone does not have a Palo Alto, we advise them to consider it as a worthwhile investment.

For those seeking the cheapest or quickest solution, I would advise that while it may seem like a good idea in the short term, you will likely encounter issues that will require you to replace the solution soon after. Investing in a reliable and reputable solution like Palo Alto Networks may require a larger investment upfront, but will ultimately save you time and money in the long run.

The biggest value that I gain from being here is networking and finding out what other products are out there without having to go to, like, a search engine and wait or rely on the results of the search engine. I can literally wander around. And if something catches my eye, I can be like, well, that's really cool. Let me go get some more information about that.

It's really easy to just look at all the different vendors, looks at the various talks, looks at everything that's here, and get information tailored to what I wanna learn about.

I definitely can make recommendations on various products they get based on my experience, but I don't have a say in it directly.

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