Palo Alto Networks K2-Series Reviews

The primary use for this solution depends on the preference of a customer and to some extent their existing environment.  

We have to establish things like:  

• what are the business requirements  
• how we can utilize what is existing or if the client needs to upgrade equipment  
• what kind of servers do we put in  
• what kind of servers does he have on cloud  
• what kind of servers do we have on-premises  

So it all depends on the customer's requirements. If a query comes up with a client, I am happy to answer that and provide a resolution but the situation needs to consider specific needs.  

The thing I like the most about Palo Alto is that the IPS system is the strongest you can get. Even if you check with resources like the NSS Labs or Gardner — anywhere else — they all say it has the strongest IPS. It holds true even over the past five years. They are the leaders in the field.  

The reason I believe in my eyes that the IPS is the most valuable feature in Palo Alto is that the IPS is basically protecting everything. I think every two or three hours the database for the IPS signatures gets updated.  

One more feature of Palo Alto, which is not in Fortinet if you compare, is decryption. Palo Alto firewalls are doing SSL inspection and they are doing decryption as well. If we need SSL inbound inspection it is available in Palo Alto but Fortinet does not have this feature. They are not doing SSL inbound inspection. It is one more thing I would like to include as a positive feature of Palo Alto in my opinion.  

There is not really anything that needs to be improved in the product. It might be nice if it were possible for newer users to get a higher level of support.  

The company I work for now is a business I more recently joined. It has been about two years with the company but I have been dealing with Palo Alto products for 10 years now.  

We are talking about a firewall and we are not talking about a simple machine. We are talking about a machine that is not something you can just make simple. We are not talking about a general machine, so it does not really have general features. It does have multiple features. It does have processing engines — the parallel processing of Palo Alto — which is great. The stability will depend on the configuration and use. You really only have two options. You can either go for Palo Alto, or with Fortinet. These are the leaders of network security right now, so I guess those are stable or they would not be popular.  

Palo Alto has got a lot of customers now — even in the middle East. Almost every version has been scalable. That is the main reason that people are buying the product. I am satisfied with the scalability.  

The quality of technical support usually depends on your support level. If your support level is 24/7 365 then obviously your support is going to be perfect. But if you did not purchase that support, you will have some other level of support which is not 365 days. For example, they have an option for eight-by-seven which is eight hours per day seven days a week or something like that. The eight-by-seven support is not good in that case if you need it often or at times when it is not available.  

I have worked for Palo Alto as well as consulting about their products and they are really good at what they are doing, but there are pros and cons for every product. This applies especially to the goals when it comes to support. Most of the customers are not educated enough to do hands-on technical stuff on a product that is new for them every time even if they have experience with similar products. They need support because the basic concepts are essentially the same for firewalls everywhere, but the operating system and the way it does the processing is different for every type of firewall. So new users of Palo Alto may require support to set up most of the things, and if a user does not have the level of support he needs, he will be facing issues. He will not be able to finish his work on time.  

I really feel that all products have some level of technical support issues. Every product has pros and cons and even in the support level. A lot of times we will not find support in our same region. It would be located in different regions. So it happens to be pretty much normal for IT. People probably do not feel that is a good issue to face, but issues in the support are actually fine. That is manageable.  

I do have experience using next-generation firewalls, traditional firewalls, NDN (Named Data Networking) firewalls, distributed firewalls, and NSX. We still use various products but I prefer to use Palo Alto because of its capabilities.  

I am actually satisfied with the pricing of Palo Alto even though it is expensive. If you are talking about using products by a leader in the field and it is a bit expensive compared to other vendors, then that is totally fine for me because you are not compromising your security. In many other cases — like if there are budget issues — the companies can always go for Fortinet. It is also a good firewall, but it is cheaper. If you have got the budget to purchase Palo Alto, get it. If you do not have the budget, go for Fortinet or any other firewall.  

When we were looking for some different solutions, I was looking for comparisons between AlgoSec's firewall and others. I have been trying to research basically right now before purchasing another solution. We are looking for firewall management. We have multiple-vendor firewalls and we are looking to manage them from one console. From there I can manage all my multi-vendor firewalls, DMZ, internal firewalls, group firewalls, et cetera. That is why I was looking at AlgoSec, because it is capable of doing re-certification as well as integrating with NSX as well. There are a lot of things it can do. AlgoSec seems to meet my basic requirements for the solution.  

We are using multiple vendors like Cisco, Palo Alto, Fortinet, and Juniper. We are not limited to one vendor. We have different environments and different firewalls for each environment.  

But mostly, in the current market over here, the clients are preferring to go with Palo Alto as a DC (Data Center) firewall to use internally because IPS (Intrusion Prevention System) is really strong. As for Fortinet, people are preferring that as a solution for DMZ.  

On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would give Palo Alto a rating of nine-out-of-ten.  

I would not give the product a ten and it is not really because there are additional features can be included to make it a perfect ten. Nobody is perfect. Based on smaller support issues is not really something I can rate a product on. Based on their performance in being a leader of these technologies and the leaders and the inventors of next-generation firewalls — based on that, I am giving them a nine. They have better processing which Palo Alto is the only one doing. Based on that and IPS system I give them a nine. And because I am not a perfect guy, I keep one Mark.  

We are a solution provider and this is one of the firewalls that we provide to our customers.

The majority of our customers for Palo Alto products are in the banking industry.

The most valuable features are the virtualization of the firewall and the antivirus.

The ease of management and configuration should be improved.

The price of the K2 series could be lower.

I have been familiar with the Palo Alto K2 series for three years.

This is a stable firewall.

The scalability is very good.

The technical support is good.

We work with multiple vendors including Fortinet, Cisco, Juniper, and Palo Alto.

The initial setup is straightforward but when you have a more advanced configuration, it is more difficult. For example, configuring policies can be complex.

This solution is expensive compared to other, similar products.

My advice to anybody who is implementing this solution is to ensure that they have the policies correct.

Overall, this is a very good product that is doing well in the market here.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We have eight VFDs. We have the bigger firewalls. I forget the model number but they're the bigger ones. We have smaller ones—the 220s— so we have a pretty good range of Palo Alto firewalls that we use in our company.

One of the most valuable features is Palo Alto's firewall management. We find it easier to manage the firewall centrally.  

In the past, we've had trouble with Palo Alto's application filtering not getting it right. I would not be recommending layer 7 application filtering yet. That's the only hiccup with the product line. In terms of the features, I'd like to see, one of the bigger pieces missing from any firewall system is the ability to monitor and report. I don't think there are any firewalls doing this, but I'd like to see firewalls have the ability to do what Splunk is doing automatically. In other words, the ability to provide log analysis and monitoring from a visualization standpoint would be very beneficial to any firewall. That doesn't really exist today. 

There also needs to be a real methodology to maintain rules. They have rule sets in there and different ways of showing it, but the presentation isn't great. It's not a great presentation of where you have duplicate rules in place that makes it easy to find. Then again, I would say that no firewall company really has good management abilities for that. This isn't to badmouth Palo Alto. It's just that these features don't exist. So as we talk about where threat modeling and cybersecurity need to go, there's no one vendor with the best solution. It'd be nice if it would come in one platform. In other words, you buy their product, and they have a platform that includes that functionality.

We've used Palo Alto for nearly five years now. We formerly used Check Point exclusively, but now we're using Palo for all of our perimeter security and our VPN connection coming in.

Capability-wise, I think Palo Alto firewalls can pretty much handle anything thrown at them. 

I haven't done a lot with tech support. But the guys that are doing it say that outside support from Palo Alto is really good.

Check Point and Palo Alto are very similar as far as the platform's concerned. On the low-end side, maybe for smaller solutions, Check Point firewalls seem to do just fine and are even a little better. Their low-end products are better as far as performance is concerned. At the high-end, they can't touch the Palo Altos. The Palo Altos seem to be significantly better at handling more load and they can service larger throughput in their environment. I would say Palo Alto, overall, has a better, more reliable product line.

I would rate Palo Alto firewalls an eight out of 10.

We use Palo Alto Networks K2-Series in projects as a firewall.

The most valuable feature of Palo Alto Networks K2-Series is the configuration, it is very clear.

It is recommended that the Palo Alto Networks K2-Series be implemented step by step for the Panorama. Sometimes we can't overwrite the configurations because it fails.

I have been using Palo Alto Networks K2-Series for approximately two years.

Palo Alto Networks K2-Series is a stable solution.

I have found Palo Alto Networks K2-Series to be scalable.

Our clients have many users using this solution.

The premier support from Palo Alto Networks K2-Series is good. We can open a ticket if we have an issue in our department.

We have previously used Fortinet FortiGate. We switched to Palo Alto Networks K2-Series because we can receive more information.

The installation of Palo Alto Networks K2-Series was simple. There are a lot of technical documents that can be used for assistance.

We used an integrator for the deployment of Palo Alto Networks K2-Series.

We have two engineers that do the maintenance and support of the solution.

One of the benefits is we can use some of the features from Palo Alto Networks K2-Series for free. If we want more features we have to pay. There is a license to use the solution and it is paid annually.

The overall price of Palo Alto Networks K2-Series could be reduced.

I rate Palo Alto Networks K2-Series an eight out of ten.

We use the solution as a firewall product. 

I am impressed with the tool's efficiency and the variety of use cases that includes network attacks. 

I like the tool's WildFire feature. 

The tool needs to improve integration with more products from other vendors. I would like the product to add threat intelligence features as well. 

I have been working with the solution for five years. 

I would rate the product's stability an eight out of ten. 

I would rate the solution's scalability an eight out of ten. It can integrate with both large and mid-level environments. We have more than 100 users for the product. 

The tech support team is helpful. 

Neutral

I would rate the solution an eight out of ten. We use the solution on a daily basis to see the logs regarding attacks and IPs. 

I have found that Palo Alto Networks K2-Series has the best security. They are more user-friendly, older firewalls used to have to be configured using the command-line interface, but in this solution, it can be done in the GUI.

I have been using Palo Alto Networks K2-Series for a couple of years.

Palo Alto Networks K2-Series are more stable and capable than older firewalls.

The support from Palo Alto Networks K2-Series is very good.

Palo Alto Networks K2-Series are easy to install and are simple to troubleshoot.

Palo Alto Networks K2-Series is an expensive solution, the price could be reduced. They are more expensive than some of their competitors.

I have heard that Juniper firewalls are more complex when it comes to configuration than Palo Alto Networks K2-Series. The flexibility of Palo Alto Networks K2-Series is a large advantage and they use the best parts.

I would recommend Palo Alto Networks K2-Series to others.

I rate Palo Alto Networks K2-Series a seven out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for protection, especially web protection.

It's great at protecting very important aspects of our company, particularly our servers.

We enjoy the amount of visibility we have in terms of security within our infrastructure.

The initial setup is very easy.

The product scales well.

We've found the solution offers us good stability.

Technical support is helpful and responsive. 

The pricing is reasonable. 

The user interface could be improved. Right now, it's an aspect that is lacking. They should make it more user-friendly. There are too many options visible right now, which makes it confusing. They need to streamline and simplify it.

I'd like to see more data protection on the system. It needs a DLP, a Data Loss Prevention, system.

We've been using the solution for just over five years. We've used it since 2015 or so.

The solution is stable and reliable. The performance is good. there are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze.

The scalability is there if you need to expand it. It's good.

We have 100 or so users that are using Palo Alto in our organization at this time.

We do have plans to increase usage in the future. We're likely to scale it. 

The technical supports has been really good so far. They respond quickly to our requests. We're quite satisfied with the level of service.

The initial setup is quite straightforward. It's not overly complex or difficult. We found the implementation to be very easy in general. We didn't have any problems. 

The product can be expensive. It's not the cheapest option on the market.

However, I do find it to be less expensive than Cisco.

We're a customer. We also work for other companies and help install the product.

The solution is perfect. I'd rate it at a ten out of ten.

Palo Alto is very affordable and very good overall. They respond quickly to our needs. Palo Alto detects a lot of cybersecurity threats, which has been great.

We primarily use the solution as a next-generation firewall.

This company is a leader in the space.

The company is inventive and always adds a lot of great features.

The support on the solution is excellent.

The initial setup is pretty easy.

The company needs to align better with the customer. At the price point they offer, they need to be as good or better than the competition. They're losing market because they aren't there yet in that regard.

When it comes to renewing the solution, they tend to try to jack up the pricing.

We've been using the solution for almost five years now.

From a hardware point of view, we don't face any issues whatsoever. It's not glitchy or buggy. It doesn't crash. it's reliable.

The technical support has been excellent. We've very satisfied with the level of service they provide. It's one of the main selling features of the product.

Compared to the competition, support is excellent across the board.

We don't find the solution to be overly complex in terms of the initial setup. They make their implementation process pretty clear.

The deployment can happen in one week. It doesn't take too long. Sometimes, if you are new to the product, it might take a month or so.

We tend to use consultants when we implement the solution.

The licensing costs are too high. They need to become more competitive in that regard. We constantly need to bargain to get better pricing.

They tend to take advantage once the product has been sold to us. From a renewal point of view, the price is very high. They are demanding. That itself is creating a bad mark on them.

From a cost perspective, I'd rate the solution two out of ten.

I am trying to avoid Palo Alto, even though they have a very good solution, specifically due to the cost. 

We're just a customer.

From a technical support perspective, I'd easily rate them nine out of ten. If they didn't try to price gouge on renewals, I'd likely rate them higher.

Due to their pricing strategy, especially around renewals, I would not recommend them. We have 20+ firewalls, and we feel the heat when it comes time to renew the solution.