Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls Scalability

Donald Keeber - PeerSpot reviewer
President at Margate Net

I am not absolutely certain they have done a good job in scaling out. They may start to suffer now and going forward because there are other, more cloud-ready platforms out there starting to shine over Palo Alto. They are not the prodigal son anymore.

It has limited scalability since it is still very hardware-centric. They have a cloud VM model, but I haven't had too much experience with it.

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Matt Gahafer - PeerSpot reviewer
Network Engineer at Samtec, Inc.

It is very scalable. The Panorama management tool makes it very easy to add a new firewall. You can add one, 10, or 100 firewalls, deploying them quickly and keeping the same security posture that you had in place previously with other devices.

I have not noticed any trade-offs from security versus network performance at all. I think they are both running very well. We haven't lost network performance with an increase in security or vice versa.

The entire company is using the solution. We are a manufacturing company who manufactures electronic interconnects. We have our own marketing department, engineering, learning development, HR, accounting, and IT. Thus, we have a broad spectrum of users who are using the solution.

We actually have a very small staff. There are only five of us who are actively administering the Palo Alto environment. We have around 40 locations worldwide with just over 8,000 users globally.

We are using it at every facility. We are using it as a gateway router as well as our next-gen firewall. We have no plans to change all that. We are pretty happy with how we are configured. So, I think we will keep that trajectory.

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Marcin Chudzik - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Security Engineer Implementation&Support at T Systems Poland

Palo Alto firewalls are scalable because we can find models suitable for any infrastructure in the company's portfolio. 

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Buyer's Guide
Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
767,847 professionals have used our research since 2012.
MartinFerguson - PeerSpot reviewer
Managing Director/Co-Founder at Azured

The solution is scalable and we have never reached the limits. We stuck with Palo Alto because of their Next-Gen capabilities, and we have about 500 clients using this solution as a service.

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NimeshaBalasuriya - PeerSpot reviewer
Security Engineer at Sri Lanka Telecom Ltd

I'm not seeing scalability problems in my scenario, but overall Palo Alto is doing well in terms of scalability. I'm using ten licenses for V systems and the port density is good.

There are five firewall administrators, two engineers, and three technical staff. In my department, there are thirty users and during the work-from-home scenario, all of them are connecting through the SSL VPN. Thirty plus users in our organization and the request for the service that is in our country, in our broadband customer segment are 1,500 thousand.

The solution is at the end of the life cycle and we are in the process of upgrading.

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John Sayer - PeerSpot reviewer
President at JTS Network Consulting, LLC

Their product line includes sizeable chassis-based firewall systems that can do multiple virtual firewalls within a single platform. Even their middle-tier products have that capability. Some of our customers have numerous divisions that need separation between departments, so those scalable features come in handy. Most are organizations with one or two firewalls per site. Still, I've worked with large enterprises that had tens or hundreds of firewalls in their overall environment to maintain a separation between departments and to separate users from servers.

Palo Alto also has a product called Panorama that lets you centralize the configurations of vast numbers of firewalls. It acts as a central point for changing firewall settings, and you can push the changes out to a subset of firewalls in your environment or all of them. The bottom line is that Palo Alto can scale up NG firewalls to massive numbers of platforms.

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Ali Mohiuddin - PeerSpot reviewer
Security Architect at a educational organization with 201-500 employees

The scalability is amazing. When you look at the data sheet, sometimes you'll find that the equipment won't perform well under the same load. However, if something is mentioned on the data sheet and you implement it, you'll find places where you have high CPU and high memory utilization. When you buy something, maybe it should be 50% load, but when you put it into actual implementation, you find out that the CPU and memory remain very high.

With Palo Alto, the CPU and memory are both intact. It's performing well under load. We have different timings where we have a large load and it goes down and then goes up again. In both scenarios, the product is very good. The CPU performs well. Especially during upgrades, it was very stable and straightforward.

We have plans to increase usage. We're doing a migration in the cloud right now, and we plan to move a lot of our services to the cloud. This is where we'll either add more virtual firewalls in the cloud or increase the size and capacity of firewalls that we have there.

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Muhammad-Nadeem - PeerSpot reviewer
Lead Network Security Engineer at PTA

I give the scalability a ten out of ten.

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MJ
Senior Network Administrator at a financial services firm with 11-50 employees

In terms of scalability, they have a huge range of models, so depending on what your requirements are, you can scale up from the very base model that goes from 100 megabits per second to the largest one that goes to 10 gigs per second. They have a wide range of appliances that you can upgrade to based on your needs.

In terms of the traffic that can pass through the firewall, it has been fairly good for us. We have not had to upgrade our network. Being a small company, we don't have too many users. In the past eight years, we have not had to change our bandwidth for the increase in traffic. Whatever we selected four years ago, they remain the same. We have not had to upgrade the hardware capabilities just because our traffic is increasing, but in terms of feature sets, we have added more and more features to the appliances. When we started off with Palo Alto, we were only using the firewall features, and then slowly, we added a VPN for mobile users. We added a VPN for site-to-site connectivity, and the scalability has been good. We have not had to upgrade the hardware. We have just been adding features to the existing hardware, and it has not caused any deterioration in the performance.

We have about fifty users that are split between the East Coast and the West Coast. Each coast has only about twenty-five users. All in all, we have about fifty users using these products.

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QV
Director Of Technology at La Jolla Country Day School

We purchased it a few years ago. Since then, we have had a lot more clients on our network, and it has handled all that fine. You go into it and just have to scale it higher. Palo Alto doesn't give you too many choices. There is not a medium; it is either very small or very big. So, you don't have a choice in that.

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AG
Manager at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

The solution is scalable with the Azure environment. I believe it is scalable because we have many data connectors. We were able to speed up the process within the hybrid environment.

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Sachin Vinay - PeerSpot reviewer
Network Administrator at Amrita

It is scalable. There is a VM solution also, so it is completely scalable. 

We have about 3,000 users in our branch office. In terms of our plans to increase its usage, we are also planning to go for Palo Alto as our main firewall. We are planning to go with the higher-end version.

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GH
CyberSecurity Network Engineer at a university with 5,001-10,000 employees

The scalability is wonderful. In the last iteration that I did, I folded 12 different firewalls into one box, across campus, without any problems with network degradation.

Without our two boxes, we have 16 firewalls set up. There are two of us responsible for maintaining the system, and our job titles are cybersecurity network engineers. 

The way the interfaces are set up makes it really easy to use. Also, the different routing protocols that you can use within the box make life easy when it comes to setting them up. 

The product covers the entire university. We use it at the edge for one of the departments, and it acts as their edge firewall. They pay for their solution and we maintain it for them.

We have deployments in other campuses, as well.

As we segment the network, depending on the zoning, we will be adding new interfaces to do certain things, such as setting up DMZs.

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Ishan Kumara - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager Data Servicers at Union Bank of Colombo

The solution is scalable. We have three people that monitor the solution and maintain it.

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AdamBrenner - PeerSpot reviewer
Solutions Architect at NTT Global Networks Incorporated

Palo Alto is quite scalable and versatile.

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KUMAR SAIN - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. Network and Security Engineer at Shopper Local, LLC

The solution is scalable but has room for improvement at an enterprise level.

We have around 1,000 people using the solution.

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OM
Chief Architect at a recruiting/HR firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

It is scalable with what we need. I am not looking at thousands and thousands of devices, so it is well within what we need for our few hundred devices.

We often didn't deploy tools because it was too hard to try and manage them with our small team. This solution has enabled our small team to be way more effective than they were before. It gives us the visibility and control that we need.

We have a senior network administrator and about five operational guys. There are also some service desk-level guys and about 12 of them have visibility into activities, but they don't actually change things. Change control is quite closely guarded.

We have deployed the solution in a couple of data centers. We are deploying it across 30 offices this year and plan to do the next 30 to 30-ish offices in the next 12 to 18 months, as some of their hardware retires or has expired. We are not pushing it out too fast. We are going with the cadence of the business.

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GT
Network Security Engineer at Diyar United Company

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

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BR
Manager - Project at a consultancy with 10,001+ employees

The solution is scalable.

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Afzal H. Shah - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. Manager (IT Security & Operations) at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

It's scalable. If you use the virtual solution, you may need to change the subscription.

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AA
Specialized Engineering Services at Netcontroll

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

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

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JS
IS&S Europe and Global Infrastructure Manager at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

I don't think that product is really scalable. You have to either replace it with a higher version or use what you have. I think that's the only way. You cannot add something to increase its capacity, so you have to replace the current equipment to a new version or a new, higher version.

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NS
Head Of CERT at a logistics company with 10,001+ employees

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

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MC
CISO at a construction company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls are very scalable.

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AP
Sr Network Engineer/DBA at a energy/utilities company with 201-500 employees

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

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HP
Security Architect at a government with 10,001+ employees

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.

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AF
Chief Data Center Operations at a government with 10,001+ employees

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.

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Gabriel Franco - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Service Delivery Engineer at Netdata Innovation Center

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.

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RG
Security Operations Manager at a retailer with 10,001+ employees

Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls have good scalability.

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SK
IT Specialist at a government with 501-1,000 employees

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.

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YP
Network administrator at a educational organization with 201-500 employees

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

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YN
Network Solutions Architect at Ecobank Transnational Incorporated

It is quite scalable. I have been able to create a lot of zones to subinterfaces for a number of environments. I don't really have any issues regarding scalability. It meets my expectations.

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TG
Senior Network Engineer at a tech services company with 201-500 employees

The scalability is good.

In terms of the extensiveness of use, it depends on business needs. Every communication from the company is going through this solution, so it's highly used and we are highly dependent on the solution. 

In terms of increasing our use of the solution, it all comes down to business needs. If the business needs it, and we get to the limit of the current appliance, we will consider updating it or adding more appliances. At this point, we're good.

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RP
CIO at a government with 201-500 employees

Across the product line, the NG firewalls scale very well. Within the individual units, however, there are some limitations. It's not always clear to resellers as to what those limitations are. Therefore, as your organization grows you may start to bump into those limitations unexpectedly.

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HI
IT Supervisor at a educational organization with 51-200 employees

We haven't fully used the capabilities of the firewall, but we purchased a larger scale to prepare for potential future growth.

The firewall is deployed across all six schools and the district office, protecting the entire infrastructure, including switches, access points, and other devices.

This is approximately 3,500 to 4,000 devices.

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ImranKhan3 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Technical Consultant at Ericsson

The product is scalable and very easy to configure; we enjoy the configuration and operation of the firewall. 

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DS
Sr. Infrastructure Solution Architect and Engineer at a aerospace/defense firm with 10,001+ employees

This solution is a firewall that's a hardware appliance, and that's not the direction the industry is heading. Everybody is going toward a software-defined perimeter. Palo Alto doesn't have a strong say on it. They took what they had for their hardware and just put it in the cloud without understanding what being cloud-centric is all about.

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Satria Ady Pradana - PeerSpot reviewer
Consultant at PT. Mitra Integrasi Informatika

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

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Srinivasa Rao R - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Engineer at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

The scalability of this solution depends on the management CPU that is being utilized. To manage high level traffic, it requires high-specification hardware to be used, or performance can be affected.

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HE
System Engineer - Security Presales at Raya Integration

If you choose a model, from PA-3000 or PA-400, or the PA-5000 Series, you should size it correctly from the beginning, and you must consider expansion, otherwise you could face a big problem, as it's not scalable. But, if you have a big company, and you've chosen it as a data center firewall, you can choose a modular version, so that it is easily scalable.

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Amol Kurane - PeerSpot reviewer
Deputy General Manager IT at ARAI

Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls is a scalable solution.

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LuisSilva6 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director of Information Technology at Four Seasons Hotels

Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls is scalable. We have about 250 people using it at our hotel.

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AC
Engineering Manager at a security firm with 11-50 employees

Scalability is an important issue. It is very scalable.

We are currently protecting around 11,000 endpoints.

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Gokul Anand - PeerSpot reviewer
Deputy Manager at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees

Scalability is always available. If you are ready to invest the money, then you can add another box. Every device has its limitations though. NGFW has its own limitations, where it cannot scale beyond a certain point. Those limitations have already been published and users need to be aware of them when they are planning to buy a firewall.

The size of my environment is 3,000 to 4,000 users. We are a larger organization with 60 to 80 VLANs. There are approximately 3,600 endpoints accessing them. Day in, day out, we have a lot of network access change requests coming in that need to be performed. 

In terms of maintaining the firewalls for our space and cost, there are about 15 team members. It is a huge environment with 10 different clusters of Palo Altos. From our operational perspective, we need 15 team members.

On a practical scale, it depends on the size of your organization. If it is a small organization, I think two to three members should be sufficient enough to handle the solution. When you have a smaller organization with a maximum of 20 different VLANs, where there is a size limit of 50 to 100 users/employees, then two or three members would be sufficient enough to handle it. However, it all depends upon the number of endpoints that are the nodes and how many nodes the firewall is protecting.

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Özden Aydın - PeerSpot reviewer
Technology Consultant at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

The scalability is very good. If our customer has distributed networks, Palo Alto is a good solution.

In general, the solution is good for midsize companies, between 100 and 2,000 users.

We plan to increase our usage of Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls in the future.

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TL
Cloud Infrastructure Engineer at a energy/utilities company with 10,001+ employees

In terms of scalability, the cost is a limiting factor. We can buy a large number of them, but it would not make financial sense for us to do so due to the high cost.

In contrast to the cloud environment where you can scale incrementally and horizontally, in our case, we have to purchase the entire unit. As a result, scaling our responsibilities becomes challenging.

We have around 2,000 compute resources that need protection, so getting a large firewall is necessary to safeguard our environment.

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JB
CISO at a comms service provider with 51-200 employees

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

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KP
Solutions Architect at HCL Technologies

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

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

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RC
Security Team Technical Manager at ECCOM Network System Co., Ltd.

Scalability is not that good. Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls product is for middle-sized and small businesses. It has fixed parts and capacities for processing. Some of their higher-end products have the scalability to expand capacities, but only a few customers can afford their larger product.

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SC
Network Engineer at a computer software company with 5,001-10,000 employees

Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls are scalable. We have around 10,000 users.

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LM
Manager, Cyber Security Risk & Compliance at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees

The firewalls' scalability is good.

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Security and IT Infrastruture Senior Manager at a retailer with 1,001-5,000 employees

The solution is not very scalable. We need to define our requirements and purchase the correct product for our needs.

We are an enterprise company with over 3,000 people. All the network traffic goes through the solution but we have five people that work directly on the solution.

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TC
Compliance Analyst at a international affairs institute with 11-50 employees

I haven't encountered the need to scale the solution yet. Our current setup meets our requirements and has been working well for us. Given that we are a small company, we have not felt the need to look into scaling it at this point.

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MS
Security Unit Manager at EEMC

In terms of scalability, no security products are scalable to upgrade. Not ever. While assuming you are dealing with scalability, you have room to increase or to have room to expand, but actually, you don't because there is limited support. Even if you bring in the highest model, it's still limited.

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AA
IT engineer at a financial services firm with 201-500 employees

When it comes to virtual machine editions or the cloud, I think they are more scalable than hardware. 

We have three administrators, 1,000 end users, and up to 400 servers that use Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls.

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AV
CAO at Bank "LVIV"

I would rate it 10 out of 10. The current user base for Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls in the environment is one thousand users. Plans are in place to increase usage in the future, particularly with the intention to upgrade for higher speed.

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NP
Head of Engineering at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

Palo Alto's scalability is not as good as that of Check Point. With Check Point, I can integrate the firewall with other products.

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TM
Team Leader at a manufacturing company with 51-200 employees

So far, it has been scalable enough to hit multiple divisions.

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Tuvshinjargal Batsaikhan - PeerSpot reviewer
System Engineer at DLP

The solution is scalable. We have 60 people that use the solution in our organization.

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PC
Software Engineer at a tech vendor with 501-1,000 employees

It's pretty scalable. Palo Alto does a great job across the board from small businesses to large enterprise solutions.

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BT
Manager, Global Security Operations at a non-tech company with 10,001+ employees

We can easily add nodes into Panorama with no problem. As such, scalability is not an issue. We have an enterprise environment with approximately 15,000 users in multiple countries.

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RS
Senior Network Analyst at a non-profit with 1,001-5,000 employees

The scalability is also good. They provide good options for scaling. The only thing that I would think about is that, in the newer firewalls, they have increased the performance but decreased the number of concurrent VPN connections or users. The new, compact devices have better performance, but they have reduced the number of users that can connect. Maybe that's a marketing strategy to sell higher-end models.

In my organization, everybody is using the Palo Alto firewalls because they're connected to the VPN, but the management and operations aspects are limited to the folks in IT.

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ES
Network Analyst at a recreational facilities/services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

We have about half a dozen core firewalls and 30 to 40 remote firewalls. We haven't hit any scaling limitations yet. What we have is functioning well. At some point, our main firewall in our data center might be overwhelmed, but it has pretty high throughput numbers on it. So far, we haven't hit any sort of limitations. So far, so good.

The physical appliances are sort of tiered. You have your entry-level, which is good for 300-megabits of threat detection. The next ones have 800-megabits of threat detection. So, if you have a site with around 50 people, you can get the entry-level. However, there is always a point that if you have too many users doing too many things then the physical appliance just can't handle it. Then, you need to upgrade to a higher-level appliance. This is expected. When that happens, we will just sort of get the higher-level model or plan for two years of growth to get the right size. Therefore, as far as scalability, it just comes down to planning. 

As far as the management platform, that would be more of a case of just adding CPU cores into your virtual machine as well as more memory. So far, we haven't had any scalability limitations. It is possible that we will see it at some point, but we haven't so far.

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WD
Director IT Security at a healthcare company with 501-1,000 employees

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. 

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TI
Senior Network Security Engineer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

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

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KK
IT Network Engineer at a energy/utilities company with 201-500 employees

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

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DB
Program Manager, Cybersecurity at a wholesaler/distributor with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

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BM
Cloud and Data Center Ops at a financial services firm with 201-500 employees

Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls are easily scalable.

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IK
Security Expert at a aerospace/defense firm with 10,001+ employees

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.

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Faisal Ghaus - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Presales Consultant at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

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

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CD
Deputy Project Leader for CVE at a tech services company with 1-10 employees

It is a very scalable solution.

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NK
M&B at a computer software company with 11-50 employees

The current solution is satisfactory, but we require more scalability from Palo Alto.

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Ahmed Hesham - PeerSpot reviewer
Network Security Engineer at Raya Integration

I don't think Palo Alto and Fortinet firewalls are scalable. Only Cisco is scalable. For clustering, Cisco activity models like the 4000 model are better. For example, if the firewall is undersized due to expansion, you can cluster and add more appliances to the system.

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Nils Paley - PeerSpot reviewer
Network responsible at NMD

I rate the product’s scalability a nine out of ten.

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TH
Manager IT Security & Infrastructure at Currimjee Jeewanjee & Co. Ltd.

Scaling is easy. We currently have about 1,000 endpoints.

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ŁC
IT Architect at a computer software company with 501-1,000 employees

We have more than 700 people using the solution in my company.

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GP
Server Administrator and Operation Manager at a computer software company with 501-1,000 employees

We have not proven the scalability yet. We're planning to extend our office within the next year or six months to eight months. We are buying some appliances for the process of extending our office.

Currently, around 1,000 people use this solution.

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JH
Information Security Analyst at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

It's a good product for securing all types of workplaces. It's specifically good for data centers, which are all brick-and-mortar houses. Small businesses must also have it because they don't have the ability to have everything in a cloud or virtualized firewalls and other things like that.

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LH
Information Security Specialist at a government with 501-1,000 employees

It has been as scalable as you would expect.

I have experience working on both small office networks as well as larger ones spanning multiple locations, typically around three to five locations.

I have worked with a range from small office setups with around fifty devices to larger ones with a scale of maybe a thousand, two thousand, or even five thousand devices.

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Ferenc Balku - PeerSpot reviewer
System Engineer at a tech vendor with 1-10 employees

We work with hardware platforms, and they are usually slightly over designed to be on the safe side. The virtual firewall is highly customizable, but I have experience with the hardware platforms, and there is an upper limit on those, but I haven't had any scaling issues thus far.

In Hungary, where I live, the population is 10 million, similar to London. When I say we have 1000 end-users, it may seem like a small number, but that's relatively high for Hungary. Other vendors also supply the solution here, so 1000 is just our customers.

I mostly do deployments and maintenance alone. There are three systems engineers at our company.

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MA
Network Security Head at a government with 51-200 employees

The scalability of the firewalls could be improved. You can't scale the physical firewalls because Palo Alto doesn't support clustering. 

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JC
Network Manager at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

We have about a thousand users.

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VV
Vice President of Digital Transformation at Sysnet Global Technologies

It's very scalable. We have 300 users in our company.

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SG
Network Administrator at a real estate/law firm with 201-500 employees

They're very scalable. Because we use Panorama, we're able to have global firewall rules for areas that we want to block, across the network, for security reasons. We just push those down to all the devices in one shot.

Our corporate site has about 500 users, and our 14 remote sites, because they're retail, usually have anywhere from five to 10 users each.

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MV
Senior Staff Security Engineer at a renewables & environment company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Its scalability is also good.

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Jorge Huaman - PeerSpot reviewer
Technology Manager at Italtel

The scalability is very strong. The vendor provides has high availability.

Our clients are medium sized businesses.

Palo Alto is not a cheap solution. It is expensive. But because of its technology it pays itself back. In each case we work with the vendor to obtain a major discount for their business. I give that discount to our customer, who benefit from the services that we can bring them.

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MV
Quality engineer of the 1st category at Modern Expo

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

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Ryan Dave Brigino - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Engineer at Es'hailSat

The solution can only scale according to the sizing that a company has purchased. It depends on the size of the firewall that you will buy. For example, right now, we have this firewall with 24, which means our scalability is limited to 24.

They do have higher-end models for companies that have planned for bigger deployments.

At this point, we have about 200 users and three admins.

We're happy to use it for our perimeter firewall and so we are not planning to change it anytime soon.

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AK
Chief of IT security department at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

We don't have any problems with the performance. It works very good. We have not had any problems. If we compare with Check Point, Check Point is not really good in stability, not for monitoring. That is why we didn't choose Check Point to move to Palo Alto.

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AM
Partner Alliance Director at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees

We haven't tried to expand the solution or to scale it up. It's not an aspect of the solution our company has explored just yet. Therefore, I can't speak to its capabilities in this aspect. I'm not sure what exactly is possible.

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VinodPol - PeerSpot reviewer
Vice President and Head - IT Telecom, Software License Management and Collaboration at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

This solution is definitely not scalable. Although it is a next-generation firewall, it has its limitations in terms of policies. At one point in time, it becomes the bottleneck, which is something that we have to optimize.

We are using this firewall at between 10 and 15 locations.

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AM
Information Security Specialist at UAEU

We are using their big boxes, like the 7,000 series. So it's already at that level. We're already using 120 GB, like three 40 gigs and it's working fine for us. You can scale as you wish.
We have over 10,000 people using the service through this firewall. It's working 24/7 and it's been that way for the past two and a half years. 

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ST
Technology consultant at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

The Palo Alto firewall cannot increase the RAM and we can't do that either. We're unable to increase any physical boundaries of the firewall. That is one of the cons of Palo Alto. Our organization is pretty large and I am currently working on Palo Alto for three clients. I have a total of about 10 clients who are using the Palo Alto firewall. 

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RK
Sr. Product Management Specialist at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

It is much more scalable in a cloud deployment, but for an on-prem deployment, the hardware has to be replaced if the volume goes up to a certain level.

We have very few customers of this solution. We probably have five to ten customers.

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Ragesh Alappurath - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Network Engineer at Almoayyed Computers

The scalability of this solution is fine. 

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KR
Sr. Solution Architect at a tech vendor with 501-1,000 employees

If you size everything appropriately, you shouldn't have any issues with scaling. It's quite good. Users can scale it up if they need to.

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GS
Analyst at a non-tech company

Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls scale up enough for my workplace. Beyond that, I could not say. 

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JH
Marine Consultant/Captain/Senior DPO at Jan Arild Hammer

We haven't scaled it because if you want to scale it upwards, you have to change the firewall.

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it_user1049139 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Manager at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

The scalability compared to other products is not good. You need to change the box whenever you want your number of connection sessions to increase. 

You can't just upgrade the parts with a software key or with adding additional hardware. You need to replace the entire box. It's not scalable. 

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GP
Professional Services Consultant at a tech services company with 201-500 employees

It is scalable. We have small and big clients.

For small clients, there is the PA-220 device, which is very small but still very productive and secure. 

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TB
Network Security Engineer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Its scalability has been fine for our use cases. It is good for large-scale environments, and there are no problems.

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ST
System Engineer at asa

For LAN purposes, we have 700 plus users.

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RK
Vice President & Head Technology Transition at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

The solution is scalable, yes. We don't plan on increasing usage.

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GS
Security Consultant at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

Since the solution is hardware, there are some limitations in terms of scalability.

Usually, in hardware, you can't say it's scalable or not due to the fact that you have the limitations built-in related to the size of the box. The box has a maximum number that it can reach. You can add more hardware, however, the hardware itself is finite.

We usually do a POC first so we can get the figures for performance and we can put in a box that can support 20 or 30 people extra for future expansion.

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MG
Presales Specialist at a tech services company with 1-10 employees

The scalability is really good because they have a chassis version of appliances. They plan to build new chassis. But for the really big projects here in Ukraine, we can easily cover what we need with the PA-8000 Series with Palo Alto chassis appliances.

In our project with the three data centers, each data center was able to process 40 gigs.

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IG
Head of Information Network Security at FRA

The solution is very scalable. We are trying to increase usage. We are planning already to increase our internet center. We are planning to extend our users to around 1,500. Currently, we have about 700 users.

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DL
Sales Solutions Engineer at a tech services company with 201-500 employees

I think that the product is very customizable. If you don't need to protect a lot of assets, you can buy a small firewall at a low price for small needs, but if you need you can buy a bigger solution with more features. Scalability is very easy with Palo Alto Networks.

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MM
Head, Information Technology at a construction company with 201-500 employees

For our current size and our projected growth, it is sufficient. We are expecting to grow to about 1000 users. This is the type of bandwidth we need, based on our typical usage. The specific model we bought can scale up to that number. We built in that room for growth.

In addition, we can expand the scope not just as a firewall but also by doing some sandboxing and through integration with endpoint security solutions.

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Chong Kah Wooi - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Manager at Ipenet Solutions

It's scalable.

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SM
Technical Manager at PSR

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

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

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JJ
Solutions Architect at a comms service provider with 51-200 employees

I don't need more scalability. I can use the new features without changing the hardware. The features are completely inside the hardware, so I have no issue with the scalability. Most of our customers are big businesses.

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SZ
Team Lead Network Infrastructure at a tech services company with 1-10 employees

We have a variety of customers ad they all have a different amount of users. Some have 50 users. Some have 100 users. Some have 1,000 users as well. It varies quite a bit. In that sense, it scales to meet the customer's needs.

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AE
System Engineer at IRIS

It is scalable in that the performance is good and you don't need a large cluster to operate it.

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SP
Senior information technology consultant at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

As it is cloud-based, the solution is easily scalable.

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MS
Senior Network & Security Administrator at a consultancy with 1,001-5,000 employees

In terms of scalability, normally, we procure the devices based on the future perspective, so there should be a lot of scalability. We never face scalability issues with Next Generation Palo Alto Firewall - it comes with the scalability.

We have around 11,000 to 12,000 users across the globe.

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MM
System Administrator at a mining and metals company with 51-200 employees

Our version is not scalable. The new version is scalable on the network interface. It comes with slots where you can put your SFP if you want a fiber or copper. 

We have almost 600 users who use it for accessing the internet. We have about 50 to 70 VPN connections.

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MG
President at MT-Data

I don't work with enterprise-class products. I'm not in that environment. However, so as far as I know, Palo Alto has products that will go that large. Panorama may be able to scale quite well. You can manage all your appliances out of it. They are a very popular license.

Their GlobalProtect license is very much like Cisco's AnyConnect. It does the endpoint security checks. It makes sure they've got the latest patches on and the antivirus running and they've got the latest antivirus definitions and whatnot installed before they allow the VPN connection to happen. It's quite nice.

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AM
Network Engineer at Vibs

The scalability is very good.

We have a small number of clients with this solution in place.

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BE
Network Security Engineer at Data Consult

The solution is scalable because they are now using the next generation security network. They are integrating with endpoint protection. Palo Alto now has traps, so they integrate their traps and the next generation with the cloud. So it is scalable.

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RR
Network Engineer at Acliv Technologies Pvt Ltd

There are no scalability issues to date.

We have about 2,500 users behind the firewall using this solution. I think we don't have any requirement to increase usage. Currently, we have around 2,500 users, but if this increases, we may need a new requirement.

We hired one or two people to maintain the solution.

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AL
Cyber Security Specialist at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

We tend to work with enterprise-level organizations.

The scalability is quite good. If a company needs to scale, it can do so with ease.

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AS
Director, Middle East, East India & SAARC at DMX Technologies

It is not very scalable. We had around 100 users. We had around ten people in our IT team.

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PS
Technology Engineer at a computer software company with 51-200 employees

Highly scalable as the HA deployment allows you to pair up to eight devices at once. 

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TM
Sr. Engineer at a comms service provider with 51-200 employees

We set up this solution for companies of all sizes, from small to large enterprises. One of our clients is a telecom, which is quite sizable. They have the most complex configuration. The solution, however, is able to work for any company, no matter what the size. In that sense, it's a scalable option.

That said, the NG firewall is not a typical product that we can scale up on a whim. If we want to scale up in this product, we need to buy a higher series. We have to replace it. If we want to scale out this product, we can do a roll out in another location. Therefore, you can expand it out, however, you do need to change the sizing, which means getting a size or two up.

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HC
Cyber Security Trainee at Macroview Telecom Limited

Scalability has not been a problem. Our customers for this firewall are large companies in industries such as banking.

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JC
Technical Manager El Salvador at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

With this kind of solution, you need to be careful in terms of planning because once you have the appliance, it is very difficult to scale too much. You need to carefully select the right appliances because if you need to run more services and traffic beyond the ones you have selected, you would have to replace the appliance. You would have to upgrade it. We currently have 100 users in our organization who use this solution.

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ST
Senior Network Security Engineer at Locuz Enterprise Solutions Ltd

Scalability has not been an issue. It's good.

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MS
ITSM Engineer at a comms service provider with 11-50 employees

We went from 4 devices to 16 devices, and it was not a big problem. Currently, we don't have any plans to increase its usage. Our network won't grow over the next two years. It will stay as it is.

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MJ
CIO/CTO at a manufacturing company with 501-1,000 employees

We have hundreds of users in the company and have not tried scaling it.

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TA
Senior solution architect at a comms service provider with 51-200 employees

This next-generation firewall solution is scalable. We have more than 500 users and we plan to continue using it.

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KZ
Network Security Engineer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

I work on the system integrator side and work with multiple customers, and this is a scalable solution. 

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VS
Team Leader at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

The scalability is good. We have approximately 500 users using this solution in my company.

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ME
Security Presales Solutions Architect at a tech services company with 201-500 employees

It is scalable. They offer multiple platforms, such as hardware appliances as well as virtual appliances. You can deploy as many virtual appliances as you want. Palo Alto supports the latest technologies, such as micro-segmentation, and NSX integration with Nutanix Acropolis Hypervisor. They offer multiple options to cover almost every deployment scenario and architecture for most of the customers.

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SK
Network Security Engineer

We have 10 employees using this solution in my organization. We are in the beginning phases of testing and will increase usage if the test phase results are favorable.

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RN
Lead Consultant at a tech services company with 1-10 employees

The product is scalable and it can be integrated with third-party solutions.

We have many clients who are using this firewall.

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BF
Network Engineer & Security Specialist at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

If you got the product for 100 users and the company has grown to 500 people, this product will not be scalable. You will need another hardware that has more resources.

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TT
Cloud Security Engineer at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Its scalability is very good. We have hundreds of customers.

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HD
Network Engineer at a tech services company with 201-500 employees

I think scalability's the same as any other firewall. If we look to scale five years later, it will be scalable to perform the change. This model on Palo Alto makes it easy to add a new network, so Palo Alto offers more scalability.

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it_user1056699 - PeerSpot reviewer
Chief Executive Officer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

The scalability is not so good. Because if you want to upgrade, you have to change the service completely. We have about 2000 users.

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OO
Sales Engineer at a wholesaler/distributor with 51-200 employees

My impression of the scalability is that it is easy.

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TM
Partner & vCISO at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

It is very scalable.

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Buyer's Guide
Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
767,847 professionals have used our research since 2012.