Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls Reviews

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 use Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls for segmentation and basic routing. They are the gatekeepers for the network.

I like being able to investigate anonymous VPNs and also like to use traffic-capturing features. We've had some anonymous VPNs coming to our network, and we're trying to make sure that internal users are not able to use those to get past our security.

Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls have a very nice interface for logging and monitoring. I find it easy to navigate and use, and the interface is organized as well. I can find answers within a couple of hours and have seen time savings.

We have Azure firewalls that are licensed through Palo Alto. It's super important that Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls provide a unified platform that natively integrates all security capabilities because we are moving almost entirely to Azure. Thus, the more Azure integration we have, the better it's going to be for us long term.

These firewalls have been efficient at securing data centers consistently across all workplaces.

We haven't had many downtime issues with Palo Alto.

The customer-facing side needs to be improved in terms of the engagement and involvement of support staff.

My first exposure to this solution was about a year and a half ago.

The firewalls are relatively stable. We have a few that go up and down, but that has more to do with licensing issues than with the firewall itself.

Technical support needs to be improved with regard to the time to respond and the response itself. We've been getting the same responses over and over again. It would help us out a lot if the technical support staff were more engaged or involved.

From what I've heard from our firewall engineer, I would rate technical support a four out of ten.

Neutral

We utilize GlobalProtect and have seen a better return on investment with regard to security and peace of mind.

Licensing is a big issue for us because of the complexity and the lack of engagement from Palo Alto. It has been hard to talk with them as we don't get the best answers.

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

Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls are not the cheapest and fastest, but they are one of the top ones in terms of the most effective firewalls.

Overall, I would rate NG Firewalls an eight out of ten. They're definitely a top competitor.

I love the opportunity to see technical demos and take hands-on tours with some of the products at RSA conferences. They are the best part because I get to learn and gain exposure to new technology. It is particularly helpful when we want to look at other avenues.

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.

We are basically using a double protection layer in which we take care of all our DMV, VPN, tunnels, and internal network. We are basically using it for application based configuration  controlling our traffic on applications with layers four to seven. We are customers of Palo Alto and I'm an information security specialist. 

I like the training material they provide and the reporting is very good. The solution is very easy to configure, and very easy to understand and explain. Compared to firewalls offered by their competitors, I find it easier to use and more thorough. The most important thing the solution provides is, of course, the firewalling up to the application level.

There could be improvement with their logs, especially their CLI. When you go to the command line to understand the command line interface it's tricky and requires a deep understanding of the product. We recently faced one issue where the server side configuration changed and it wasn't replicated at the firewall. It required us to tweak things and now it is working fine. Finally, the HIPS and audio call features could be improved. 

I've been using this solution for two years. 

In the past two years I haven't had any issues with the stability. That applies to the hardware, software, upgrades, updates, new feeds. I haven't faced any big issue, you can say that. 

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. 

The initial setup is not complex. It took us 15 to 20 days because we were migrating from the other firewall. The strategy was to take the backup and simultaneously create a leg and transfer to that. The first time we deployed, we used the integrator recommended by the vendor. That worked very well. Our team worked with the integrator. We planned everything and they supervised us. 

We currently have four people helping with maintenance. They are security admins and their job is with the firewalls, like configuring and maintaining and upgrading all those things. 

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

The advice I can give is that this is a good solution: Easy to deploy, easy to manage, easy to understand, reporting is very good, and it will give you the full picture up to the layer seven. Their VPN service is very good. 

The good thing is that whenever you need to train anyone on these devices, it's very easy to explain. Previous firewalls I've used, required a lot more work before you could configure. This isn't like that, it takes maybe 30 minutes and it's done. 

We use them to do quite a bit of URL filtering, threat prevention, and we also use GlobalProtect. And application visibility is huge for us. Rather than having to do port-based firewalling, we're able to take it to an application level.

We have quite a number of security pieces that are implemented for our network, such as a DNS piece, although we're not using Palo Alto for that purpose. But with that, in line with our seam, we're able to better distinguish what normal traffic looks like versus what a potential threat would look like. That's how we're leveraging the NG Firewalls. Also, we have separated the network for our databases and we only allow specific users or specific applications to communicate with them. They're not using the traditional port base, they're using application-aware ports to make sure that the traffic that has come in is what it says it is.

Machine learning in Palo Alto's firewalls, for securing networks against threats that are able to evolve and morph rapidly, has helped us out significantly, in implementation with different security software and processes. The combination allows our security analysts to determine the type of traffic that is flowing through our network and to our devices. We're able to collect the logs that Palo Alto generates to determine if there's any type of intrusion in our network.

The machine learning in the core of the firewalls, for inline, real-time attack prevention, is very important to us. With the malware and ransomware threats that are out there, to keep abreast of and ahead of those types of attacks, it's important for our devices to be able to use AI to distinguish when there is malicious traffic or abnormal traffic within our environment, and then notify us.

The fact that in the NSS Labs Test Report from July 2019 about Palo Alto NG Firewalls, 100 percent of the evasions were blocked, is very important to us. 

The SD-WAN product is fairly new. They could probably improve that in terms of customizing it and making the configuration a little bit easier.

I've been using Palo Alto NG Firewalls for about five years.

The firewalls are very stable. We've had no issues with downtime.

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.

Their support is generally very knowledgeable. Sometimes it depends though on who you get, but they've always addressed our issues in a timely manner.

We were using older versions of Palo Alto's firewalls and we also had Cisco firewalls in our environment.

For our remote stores we're able to use Panorama, along with Palo Alto's Zero Touch Provisioning hardware. Once a device is connected to the internet and can communicate back to our Panorama, it just pulls the configurations. That means it's very easy to deploy.

It took about two to three months to deploy about 14 sites. That wasn't because we were having issues, it was just the way we scheduled the deployment, because we had to bring down different entities and had to schedule them accordingly with a maintenance window. But if it wasn't for that scheduling, within a week we could have deployed all of the remote sites.

For our implementation strategy, at our corporate site we had both old and new firewalls sitting side by side on the network. As we went to a remote site we would take them from their legacy Cisco and cut them over to the new firewall. Once that was done, we moved all of the firewall rules that were on the old firewall over to the new one.

When it comes to maintenance and administration of the firewalls, my team of five people is responsible. We have a network architect, a network specialist, two senior network specialists, and a security manager.

We did it by ourselves. We have a certified Palo Alto engineer on staff and he did all the installation.

Definitely look into a multi-year license, as opposed to a single-year. That will definitely be more beneficial in terms of cost. We went with five-year licenses. After looking at the overall costs, we calculate that we're only paying for four years, because it works out such that the last year is negligible. If we were to be billed yearly, the last year's costs would be a lot more. With the five-year plan we're saving about a year's worth of licenses.

Based on the quantity of devices we purchased, we found that the hardware price was actually cheaper than most of the other vendors out there.

If a colleague at another company were to say, "We are just looking for the cheapest and fastest firewall," given my experience with Palo Alto's NG Firewalls, my answer would depend on the size of the company and how much traffic they're going to be generating. Palo Alto is definitely not the cheapest, but if you scale it the right way it will be very comparable to what's out there.

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

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

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

Other than the SD-WAN, everything else has been functioning like our previous setup because it's a pretty similar license. The way that the new hardware handles URL filtering, threat protection, and GlobalProtect has been pretty solid. I don't have any issues with those.

Overall, I would rate Palo Alto NG Firewalls at nine out of 10. It's definitely not the cheapest product out there. Cost is the main reason I wouldn't put it at a 10.

As a Security Engineer, I use this solution for protection. I put in additional rules and also use the solution for forensic investigations and to look at traffic logs.

I like that Palo Alto Networks does a good job of keeping the firewall updated with the latest threat signatures.

We use Panorama, so we're able to manage an entire array of firewalls in one console. It's really useful because we can make one change and deploy it to all of our firewalls.

Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls do a great job at providing a unified platform that natively integrates all security capabilities. For example, we can easily export our firewall logs into our SIEM. We have so many tools to manage that having a unified platform makes our job easier.

This firewall is great at securing data centers consistently across all workplaces.

We have high availability, and Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls helped reduce downtime.

The performance of the Panorama interface needs to be improved. It tends to be very sluggish at times.

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

I have not heard of any complaints or issues regarding the stability of the firewalls.

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.

I haven't had to call technical support, but my colleagues have. They've always spoken positively about the experience and would probably rate the technical support an eight out of ten.

Positive

My organization used Cisco Secure Firewall ASA and switched to Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls because Cisco was lagging behind in many features. For example, the management interface on the ASAs was awful compared to that in the NG Firewalls.

We have absolutely seen an ROI in the fact that we haven't ended up in the news. We can look at any time and see all the threats that have been stopped by Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls.

If you are looking for the cheapest and fastest firewall, I would say that it's a risky angle to take. Security costs money, and you'll get what you pay for.

The benefits I receive from attending an RSA conference are networking, meeting people and having conversations face-to-face, making contacts in the industry, getting suggestions about products, and attending briefings about specific products.

Also, attending RSAC can have an impact on your organization’s cybersecurity purchases because you may find out about products that you hadn't heard of before.

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

I use NG Firewalls for perimeter defense. 

We've seen better throughput compared to our previous firewall. End-users are happier with their connections through Palo Alto. 

Palo Alto offers better Layer 7 protection than competing solutions by Cisco and Fortinet. I also like the VPN client more. The interface is simple, so administrators can deploy and configure it much faster than other firewalls. The interoperability with other vendors is excellent. We can connect Palo Alto firewalls to all our other solutions. 

I would like to see more artificial intelligence. However, that is going beyond firewalls to products like Prisma. Palo Alto has those features in an entirely different ecosystem. It isn't a problem. Machine learning is valuable, but I rely more on threat intel. 

I have been using Palo Alto's solutions since 2014.

I rate Palo Alto NG Firewalls a nine out of ten for stability. We have had zero downtime except for scheduled maintenance. The firewalls are in a cluster that never goes down.

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

I rate Palo Alto's support a seven out of ten. It is good overall but worse in some regions. The first level of support will usually do nothing for you. If you're an IT company, you're not looking for level-one support. You need to escalate. Other vendors have a direct support line for enterprise clients, but not Palo Alto.

Neutral

Palo Alto has a better interface and integration with other solutions than competing vendors. The only drawback is the price. Go with FortiGate if you're looking for a firewall that is cheap and decent. If you can't afford Palo Alto, FortiGate is the next cheapest. 

We can deploy Palo Alto firewalls faster and easier than most other solutions. We assess the traffic, buy the appropriate size, and implement it. 

Palo Alto firewalls are expensive, but they're worth what we pay. 

I rate Palo Alto NG Firewalls a nine out of ten. Technical support has some room for improvement, and there are several minor issues that aren't worth mentioning.