Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls Reviews

We use this solution to block malicious or suspicious activity by creating policies that define which action should be blocked or allowed.

The firewall is a security device. We use this solution to create policies like ISPs for a specific purpose. We only allow the policies for a particular application, so this is a way for the firewall to secure an unwanted connection.

The most valuable feature is the ability to deeply analyze the connection or connection type.

Overall it is good. It is reliable and easy to understand. However, the monitoring feature could be improved.

They have many solutions already. I don't think I have seen any missing features. Every device has different functions, but as a firewall, this solution has a lot.

Stability is good.

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.

Technical support is good. Once you call up with your issue, it takes around one or two hours for them to contact and give you a solution accordingly.

We were using Cisco ASA. We switched because of legal reasons and difficulty to understand. That's why they had decided to change to Firewall.

It is very easy to use. It's straightforward, easy to understand, and easy to configure.

Deployment time depends on your requirements. If you talk about the system requirements, it hardly takes up to 15 or 20 minutes for the configuration.

That said, it totally depends on your requirements: What kind of policy you require that supports what kind of block, etc.

The deployment time would change based on these requirements, but the system configuration: accessing the internet and creating policies hardly takes 20 minutes.

Deployment is configured by administrators, so if we have any kind of issue in policies or any confusion, we get tech support.

Pricing is yearly, but it depends. You could pay on a yearly basis or every three years.

If you want to add a device or two, there would be an additional cost. Also, if you want to do an assessment or another similar add-on you have to pay accordingly for the additional service.

We also evaluated Check Point and Fortinet solutions.

This solution is easy to understand, reliable, and user-friendly.

I would rate this solution as eight out of ten.

We have had a couple of big projects with government companies here in Ukraine. One of those projects involved three data centers with a lot of security and network requirements, and we implemented Palo Alto as part of this project.

The use case was to build the new data centers with a firewall that would not only work on the perimeter but also for internal traffic. We deployed eight PA-5200 Series firewalls and integrated them with VMware NSX, and they're working together.

One of the points that helped us win the tender is that Palo Alto NG Firewalls embed machine learning in the core of the firewall to provide inline, real-time attack prevention. The customer's security team was asking for this feature from the firewalls because machine learning makes things much easier than manually sitting there with some kind of SIEM and searching for all kinds of attacks and critical issues. The machine learning is really helpful because it's doing the work automatically.

We had a small project with the PA-800 Series appliance where we implemented DNS Security. DNS Security is a good feature because, in the real world with web threats, you can block all web threats and bad sites. DNS Security helps to prevent those threats. It's also very helpful with Zero-day attacks because DNS Security blocks all DNS requests before any antivirus would know that such requests contain a virus or a threat to your PC or your network.

In general, Palo Alto NG Firewalls are 

• easy to manage
• good, reliable appliances
• easy to configure.
  

They also have a good balance between security and traffic. They have good hardware and, for management, they have their own data plane. If traffic is really overloading the data plane, you still have the ability to get into the management tools to see what's going on. You can reset or block some traffic. Not all firewalls have that feature.

They have really good clients, such as a VPN client. You can also enforce security standards on workers in the field. It's a really good product. And now, for endpoint security, they have Cortex XDR. You use the same client, but with additional licenses that enable more features.

The only area I can see for improvement is that Palo Alto should do more marketing.

We work with customers, but we are not using the solution ourselves.

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.

First-level support is provided by our distributor Bakotech. They are technical guys and they really know the product. Unlike some support providers who just send you manuals to ready, they're really helpful. You can call them at any time and they get back to you shortly and help.

The initial setup is really easy. If you're working with Palo Alto Panorama, which is their management server, it's very easy to deploy a lot of appliances in a couple of days, because you're just sending out the configuration and templates on a blind device. In a couple of hours that device is working like the rest.

Another valuable aspect of Palo Alto NG Firewalls is that the appliances and software are really reliable in terms of stability and performance. Some firewall vendors don't write real information on their datasheets and, after implementing them, you see that the reality is not the way it was described. For example, when it comes to threat prevention and how much traffic appliances can handle, there was a project where we beat another vendor's firewall because Palo Alto has the real information on its datasheets.

I have some experience with Cisco, on a small project but there was a somewhat older software version, and there was a lot of lag. When changing something in the configuration, once you pushed "commit" you could go have a coffee or do other stuff for 20 minutes or more, because it took a really long time to push that configuration to the device.

If a colleague at another company said to me, "We're just looking for the cheapest and fastest firewall," I would tell them that the cheapest is not the best. If you need really reliable hardware and software, and don't want headaches after the implementation, just buy Palo Alto.

The PA-400 is really strong and not only for SOHO or SMB companies. They have a really big throughput with Threat Prevention and DNS Security enabled. It's a really good appliance in a small size. But it's not only for small companies. The PA-460 can easily handle the traffic of a midsize company, one with 100 or 200 employees, and maybe even a little more. The PA-460 can handle about 5 gigs of traffic. With Threat Prevention, they can handle 2.5 gigabytes of traffic. For a regular office, that's good. It might be a little small for big companies.

Regarding DS tunneling, it is mostly peer-type attacks. With tunneling, it depends on what type of tunneling is used. You need to look at the specific case, at things like whether it was an internal DNS tunnel or one from the outside to the inside between branches. Most of the time, you can see that kind of traffic with a firewall if you have enabled full logging and you drop the logs into a good SIEM, like ArcSight or others. You will see the anomaly traffic via tunnels. You can also switch on decryption so you can decrypt a tunnel and see what is going on inside.

We have had no issues from our customers who are working with Palo Alto NG Firewalls. They fully cover all our customers' needs.

Our primary use case was for perimeter protection.

Innovative, advanced threat protection is the most valuable feature. 

I don't see any specific room for improvement.

The user interface is probably not as slick as it could be.

I have been using Palo Alto for three years. 

We're on-premises primarily at the moment, but also a cloud product. 

The stability is generally pretty good. I haven't heard any complaints from our customers around Palo Alto's stability. It's one of the reasons why they're the leaders in this space.

We've got our own team for maintenance. My company is a large multinational with 20,000 employees.

I have contacted their support once. It's very good support. They help me to fix our problem quickly.

The initial setup was complex. It's not very intuitive. You need to know what you're doing for the initial setup, you need to be a Palo Alto expert.

If you compare it to their competitor Fortinet, Fortinet's FortiGate product is a lot easier to install, if you're not an expert.

The time it takes to deploy depends on how complex the deployment needs to be for the client. If it's a basic deployment, is going to take around two days. 

My advice would be to make sure the firewall is configured properly.

I would rate it an eight out of ten. Not a ten because you have to be really excellent before you get a ten out of me.

In the next release, I would like to have the ability to auto-generate rule and policy, based on known traffic, based on the baseline. That is a feature that I think Palo Alto should be able to have in some form or fashion to auto-generate and propose a policy and rules set, after putting the file into a learning mode for some period.

We're customer facing; each customer uses it for a different purpose. Some use NG Firewalls for IPS capability, some for application capabilities, these kinds of things.

The accessibility, antivirus, and stability features are the most valuable. It's so stable, the customer can use the decryption features without impacting performance.

Most customers ask about the choice of features. It's limited. It's not arranged well for users. Also, customers don't want to buy extra things for extra capabilities. I would like to implement individual profiles for each user. Capability, in general, is limited.

It's a very stable solution.

I am the customer's technical support. If a customer has issues, they would call me.

The initial setup was basic. It was very simple. The basic configuration will only take 15 minutes. Anyone can set it up. If a person has worked with a firewall before, they can do it themselves. You only need one person for deployment.

Licensing is on a three year basis. Customers prefer one to three years. Licencing is pretty expensive. Check Point is cheaper than Palo Alto. There's also an international license. If a customer wants to control different things, they will need an extra license. 

I've helped customers using Fortinet and Check Point. They are compromised. Their firewall is not stable. But for some features, for example, encryption, they want to use this feature, but the firewall feature isn't great. With Palo Alto, there isn't any problem, you can open any feature - IPS feature, data encryption feature - there isn't an issue.

Implementation is simple, the product is stable, but I advise if people get the firewall I strongly recommend the use of the API features. They may not be accustomed to using a next-generation firewall. If they want to use NG Firewalls, they need to use and implement the API features. They need to create uses based on the application.

My understanding is Version 9 will introduce some logic features.

I would rate this solution 9 out of 10.

I am a reseller of Palo Alto Networks.

The solution is user-friendly. It's secure and easy to understand your network visibility, control the network, and prevent attacks.

The pricing could be improved. They need to work on the setup over the firewall, VLAN, and PPPoE.

It's stable.

It's scalable.

I seldom call technical support because it's easy to understand and configure the solution.

It could be less expensive.

I would rate this solution 9 out of 10.

If you want to have a secure network, use Palo Alto. 

These firewalls are only used for perimeter purposes, in gateway mode.

In addition to our environment being secure, we can monitor compliance of VPN users. Security and monitoring are the two big benefits.

It's also very critical for us that it provides a unified platform that natively integrates all security capabilities. We have multiple vendors and multiple solutions. Palo Alto has to work with them. For example, when it comes to authentication, we can integrate LDAP and RADIUS, among others. And in one of our customer's environments, we have integrated a new, passwordless authentication.

Apart from the security, Palo Alto NG Firewalls have nice features like App-ID and User-ID. These are the two most useful features.

With App-ID, we can identify exact traffic. Even if someone tries to fool the firewall with a different port number, or with the correct port number, Palo Alto is able to identify what kind of traffic it is.

With User-ID, we can configure single sign-on, which makes things easy for users. There is no need for additional authentication for a user. And for documentation and reporting purposes, we can fetch user-based details, based on User-ID, and can generate new reports.

Another good feature is the DNS Security. With the help of DNS security, we can block the initial level of an attack, and we can block malicious things from a DNS perspective.

The GlobalProtect VPN is also very useful.

The solution has normal authentication, but does not have two-factor or multi-factor authentication. There is room for development there.

We have been using Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls for two years. I've worked on the 800 Series and the 3000 Series.

It's quite stable. They are launching a new firmware version, but compared to other products, Palo Alto is quite stable.

I have worked with Palo Alto's support many times and it is quite good. Whenever we create a support ticket, they are on time and they update us in a timely manner. In terms of technical expertise, they have good people who are experts in it. They are very supportive of customers.

Positive

The initial deployment is straightforward; very simple. The primary access for these firewalls is quite simple. We can directly access them, after a few basic steps, and start the configuration. Even the hardware registration process and licensing are quite simple.

The time it takes to deploy a firewall depends upon hardware and upon the customer's environment. But a basic to intermediate deployment takes two to three months.

Our customers definitely see ROI with Palo Alto NG Firewalls, although I don't have metrics.

I am not involved in the commercial side, but I believe that Palo Alto is quite expensive compared to others.

One of the pros of Palo Alto is the GlobalProtect, which is a VPN solution. GlobalProtect has broader compliance checks. I have worked on Check Point and FortiGate, but they don't have this kind of feature in their firewalls. Also, Check Point does not have DNS Security, which Palo Alto has.

If you're going with Palo Alto, you have to use all its features, including the DNS Security, App-ID, and SSL decryption. Otherwise, there is no point in buying Palo Alto.

We were mainly using it because we had two ISP links, so it was a kind of gateway device. Whenever a link went down, the firewall used to automatically switch over to the secondary link so that the internet connectivity is kind of highly available.

It worked fine normally.

The VPN connectors should be better. We had some challenges in terms of the VPN with Palo Alto Networks NG Firewall, and that's one of the main reasons why we moved to Sophos.

Its load handling can also be improved. There were challenges when traffic was high. During peak business hours, it did not function very well. There was a lot of slowness, and the users used to complain, especially when they were connecting from outside. We even reported this to the support team.

Their support should also be improved. Technical support was a bit of a concern while using this solution. We didn't get very good support from the Palo Alto team.

I have been using this solution for almost two to three years.

It was fine normally, but during peak business hours, it used to have challenges. We faced this issue at least two to three times a month.

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

Support was a bit of a concern while using this solution. The support that we received was not too great, which caused a lot of issues. They were not very customer friendly.

This was the first firewall that we used. 

I didn't do the installation.

I would not recommend this solution. I am sure they will come up with better models to overcome some of the challenges that we faced, but I would definitely not recommend this particular model.

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

I am currently testing Palo Alto and preparing for an exam.

The Global Protect Feature has allowed our organization to support our remote workforce. 

I have found it to be reliable and very easy to use. I haven't really encountered many problems with it because its documentation is clear and readily available on their website.

They need to provide documentation for CLI, as most of the commands, we get from Community Forums.

I have been doing research on Palo Alto for the past nine months.

It is stable.

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

I haven't had a chance to contact them.

Palo Alto is my first solution.

Initial setup is easy and subsequent changes have been easy to implement as well. 

In-house expertise. 

Sophos XG.

I would say go for it because it seems to be stable and very reliable. I've spoken to some specialists who vouch for Palo Alto. They say they've been using it in their environment, and it hasn't let them down so far.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.