Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls Reviews

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 use it to see and detect malware. It is also used for antivirus, anti-spyware, anti-malware, vulnerability, and Wildfire analysis. We support different kinds of authentication as well: Kerberos, LDAP, TACACS, and SAML. All in all, it is a security device that you can have anywhere on your network, as per the design considerations.

It is deployed in two different ways, either on-premises or on the cloud, which may require a different hypervisor. 

Nowadays, because of the pandemic, everyone is working from home or users are not sitting in the office to work. So, security has become a challenge. For that, we provide GlobalProtect, which is a VPN solution. This will connect to your organization's network, and then you can access anything that is required. This is the most widely used tool that we provide, and it is used worldwide. During the pandemic, it was a massive success for us.

Palo Alto NGFW provides a unified platform that natively integrates all security capabilities which is really important from the end customer point of view. If I have to set up an organization, I will go ahead and buy different devices or platforms. However, if I go ahead and buy Next-Generation Firewalls and put them on the edge of the network where I connect with ISPs, my Next-Generation Firewalls will take care of the security parameters. I don't need to worry about it that much anymore.

Its security profiles are a valuable feature. 

All the logs can be stored in a single place.

Panorama lets all the devices be managed centrally in a single place. This provides the best view for admins into any particular firewall, which decreases those admins' tasks because they can view everything in a single place. 

The machine learning tracks how many packets per second are coming into the firewall.

Any request coming in will go into the DNS sinkhole first, not to the user. We protect our users that way.

Within this one platform, you are getting everything that you want. This single device can provide you with antivirus, anti-spyware, volumetric protection, URL filtering where decryption is required, and file blocking with Wildfire analysis.

Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls have a Single Pass Parallel Processing (SP3) Architecture, which has a different kind of code doing the work. It increases the packet processing rate. Whereas, without the SP3 Architecture, you are waiting for each job to complete, even if you have 100 jobs assigned.

There is always scope for improvement on any particular device in any particular organization. For example, when there was change from IPv4 to IPv6, some of the firewalls still didn't support IPv6. In North America, we have seen most customers are using IPv6, as they are getting the IPv6 IPs from their ISPs. Sometimes, when they go through the firewall, it denies the traffic.

It has been almost three years.

From a stability point of view, the firewall is very stable because the PAN-OS version doesn't change very often. If a new PAN-OS version is out in the market, our engineering team checks it multiple times.

The network performance is never compromised.

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. 

I have worked with one of the TACs, where there are almost 500 TAC engineers present. They have different rules for case priority when a customer opens something. If a customer is paying more to get support, then we have a dedicated engineer assigned to that particular customer. This is much easier for the customer, as they are getting one of the best engineers out there to troubleshoot their network. They never compromise on that.

Sometimes, due to some issues, tickets don't get assigned. Or, they assign the tickets manually if something goes wrong, which is a very odd case. Customers don't understand that. So, we always apologize to customers, and say, "How can we help you out?"

Support is 10 out of 10. 

Positive

We ask the end customer, whosoever has the legacy network in their organization, if they don't need all their extra devices in order to cut down on costs. We then do an IPSec tunnel on the cloud as a gateway. From there, they can route the traffic to the Internet or wherever they would like.

Palo Alto is a unified device with a very streamlined voice. I have worked on Cisco routers and ASA as well, where you have to do a lot of stuff through the CLI and Linux shell scripting. With Palo Alto, those things are streamlined and engineering takes care of everything.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. It is very user-friendly. Everyone in an organization can learn the platform quickly. When we give training to our new candidates, they learn it very quickly. So, it is a streamlined device.

There is an interface type called V-Wire. You just connect it to your network. It will not disturb anything. You don't need to provide IPs. It doesn't need a separate Mac address. It just connects to a particular interface as a bump in the wire. It inspects your traffic, giving you an overall idea of what applications your organization is using and what user is doing what. If needed, you can deploy it in your network later on. This makes it very easy for our customer to deploy the product in their network before they buy it.

When it comes to installing a new PAN-OS version, it doesn't require you to go to Linux and write tons of commands in order to download and activate the latest PAN-OS version. You just have to download it, click the download tab, click the install tab, and then you are done. Therefore, it is hassle-free and super easy like Windows.

We have a very large team for deployment.

If you buy Palo Alto Next-Generation Firewalls, everything is in a single platform. You don't need to go and buy the Wildfire analysis to track zero-day attacks and lots of other things. Therefore, cost is cut down by 50% to 60% if you go for Palo Alto Next-Generation Firewalls.

If someone doesn't have a security platform in their network, then the following licenses will be required: antivirus, anti-spyware, vulnerability, and Wildfire analysis. There are also licenses for GlobalProtect and support.

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

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

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

If someone is in a routing and switching domain and wants to come up to a security domain, they should choose Palo Alto Network NG Firewalls.

We are happy to assist customers whenever support is missing. Over a period of time, we see customers raise tickets because they are looking for a particular feature that is not available on the platform. We don't say to our customers, "We don't support this." Instead, we take it as an opportunity, giving that information to our engineering team.

I would rate the solution as nine out of 10. I am leaving room for improvement.

We deployed the Palo Alto Next Generation Firewall on the perimeter of the network, so all traffic that flows to the company from the internet and from the company to the internet scanned by the Palo Alto Networks Firewall. In addition, all of the internal traffic from LAN users to services that are on the DMZ zone traverse the Palo Alto Firewall.

The strengths of Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls are application visibility and application awareness. Their strong point is identifying applications for traffic. So all of the policies that are configured are related to the application and not to a port.

For example, let's say you want to allow HTTP traffic and the server is not listening on the standard http port which port 80 but listens on port 25 which Is the standard port for SMTP, this is not an obstacle has the firewall is focusing on the application, it identify the HTTP application and allow the HTTP application and block any other application on port 25. So we don't care on which port the app traverses.

It is easy to install and is stable too.

There is another solution from Palo Alto for endpoints - XDR  that integrates with the firewall  thus providing protection at the network level and also at the end point but the XDR solution is only a cloud based solution. I would really like it if would be possible to implement this solution on-premises this is something that I would love to see with Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls.

The price could be lower.

I've worked with Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls within the last 12 months.

So far, it's stable. I haven't had any problem with it. I'm always authorizing to have the minor version aligned with the latest version. There haven't been any published vulnerabilities with the product so far.

I'm using the cluster, and that's a great long term solution. So I haven't needed to expand.

There are more than 10,000 employees in the company. We hope to migrate the other branches that have a different vendor to Palo Alto.

The initial setup was straightforward from my point of view.

From a financial perspective, this solution is quite expensive.

The licensing is on a yearly basis even though we close the deal for three years upfront.

I would advise that those thinking about Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls need to switch how they think about a policy on the firewall. They should not to look at it from the point of view of the service and what port that policy is related to. Instead, they should look at it from the application side. Don't pay too much attention to the port. Just look at the application. For example, the NGFW doesn't care if SMTP traverses on port 25 or 65. It just enforces the protocol.

From a technical point of view, I don't think that there's something that's missing from the Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls. So, I would rate it at nine on a scale from one to ten.

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.

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 use Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls for security purposes and to mitigate risk.

Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls enabled us to have better visibility overall.

The inline, real-time attack prevention provided by embedded machine learning is not bad.

Also, the firewalls are moderate in terms of securing data centers consistently across all workplaces, i.e., from the smallest office to the largest data centers.

We have been able to reduce downtime because we have better visibility. We're faster and can act preemptively.

Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls do not provide a unified platform that natively integrates all security capabilities.

Customer support could be improved.

I've been using this solution for about one year.

Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls are stable.

The firewalls' scalability is good.

I would rate Palo Alto's network support a six out of ten.

Neutral

We have seen a slight ROI, enough to justify the cost of the solution.

The cost is steep, but most firewalls cost a lot.

If you're looking for the cheapest and fastest firewall, I would not recommend Palo Alto NG Firewalls.

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

I place a high value on attending the RSA Conference. I get a lot out of it because I'm able to learn about up-and-coming companies. I can see what options are available, whether someone's doing it better, and if I can get a cheaper option.

Attending RSAC does have an impact on my organization’s cybersecurity purchases made throughout the year.

We mainly use the solution for traditional firewall boundaries.

The solution helped us meet our security requirements.

The fact that the Next-Gen firewalls are integrated with identity is the best. It gives us the ability to track what an individual is doing and helps us provide access to only what they need in order to do their job.

Because we want to free up our operators from the routine tasks of investigations, 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.

Technical support could be improved. Palo Alto's technical support used to be great. Whenever I had a problem, I could pick up the phone and call and get answers. That's not the case any longer.

Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls don't provide a unified platform that natively integrates all security capabilities. It's missing some features for geofencing and understanding locations.

These firewalls are primarily used for edge defense. In terms of securing data centers consistently across all workplaces, that is, from the smallest office to the largest data centers, Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls don't have a strong zero trust model.

NG Firewalls have not helped us reduce downtime in our organization. Because of technical support issues, we've taken some hits.

I've been using Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls for 20 years.

It's always been a stable product.

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.

I would rate the technical support a three out of ten.

Negative

Our ROI is that the firewalls have been used quite a few times for investigations. We've gathered the evidence we needed to act upon an issue.

These firewalls are not cheap, but they have a reasonable licensing model.

If you are considering attending an RSA Conference, note that you won't gain enough information by attending one conference. However, when you attend year after year, go through the expo, and talk to vendors, you will begin to see trends. You'll see that what's hype one year is no longer a reality another year. Thus, the experience with RSA is a multiple-year experience.

Attending RSAC has made an impact on our organization’s cybersecurity purchases. We've brought products back into our infrastructure based on what we discovered from talking to vendors at the RSAC.

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

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.