Palo Alto Networks WildFire Reviews

The primary use case for this solution is the attention to detail. IT is also easy to manage, and easy to use. It is a really good product.

The reporting feature helps our performance. 

I really like the product, it is easy to manage and easy to use.

In the duration of our use, it has been stable.

It is a scalable product. We have had no issues with scalability.

I have not had issues with technical support of this solution.

The initial setup was very easy for us. 

The pricing is OK, it is not too expensive.

We looked at other products, but found PaloAlto to be the best solution for our needs.

I would give this product a rating of 9 out of 10 due to some slight issues of performance.

Palo Alto Networks WildFire is being used as an effective zero-day threat prevention solution. When a file comes in from a user innocently clicking on a website, then downloading the file, for example, if your Palo Alto is set up in a way that detects what is happening in that traffic going through, whether the file is an audio file, a DLL, an executable file, etc., if it thinks that file is unsafe, it will ask for a second opinion from Palo Alto Networks WildFire.

If you'll imagine how a network would work: You've got your computer, then your antivirus on the computer, then you have your internet gateway. That suspicious file will stop at the gateway, rather than stopping at the computer. Think about hurdles, where you've got these people running over hurdles, and to win the race, you have to jump over every single hurdle. If you get one of those hurdles wrong, that's it. You're done. That's why we're doing this check almost at the perimeter, or at the edge of the network, instead of on the device, because once you're on the device, it means you're on the network.

What I found most valuable in Palo Alto Networks WildFire is that it's intuitive. I also love the App-ID feature, especially because it works out of the box. I can also instantly see all the traffic going out, e.g. I can just plug a firewall in, then connect one network socket to a switch, etc. There's no configuration I need to do to see it. It just tells me that you're sending BitTorrent traffic, or SLL traffic, or you're going into 365, etc. It just does that out of the box, and it's the best thing that this solution can do. Straight away you can see all the traffic going through your network.

Palo Alto Networks WildFire, because it's from Palo Alto Networks, has better visibility on everything, so they can see what's happening in the world. They recently released the Palo Alto Networks WildFire machine learning feature on the firewall, so it's them saying: "This thing's happening on your firewall, so you should do this," and it just does it for you. Rather than relying on a human to interpret these problems, it will just do it for you, and that's pretty cool. I've not played with the machine learning feature myself, but that's something I'm very keen to have a look at.

We do a lot with charities, and I'd love Palo Alto Networks WildFire to have more discounts, e.g. charity discounts, so we can protect healthcare and schools, then other than aiming at the universities and the big hospitals where it's a lot of money, we can go for the smaller schools, too. They make quite a killing there. 

Again, it's just charity pricing, but because we are a partner with them, we can do that ourselves, e.g. we can buy it and then reduce our margins on it to get them over. We feel that it's better to sell the device that's very good at a lower cost, then, we lock in with their services at the end, so work management, etc. Rather than saying, "It's going to cost you this much money, and it's too expensive to even begin with."

I've been a reseller of Palo Alto Networks WildFire for four years now.

Palo Alto Networks WildFire is a stable solution.

Palo Alto Networks WildFire is scalable, particularly if you pick the right firewall, and that's it: you can do what you need to with it.

With five being the highest and one being the lowest, I'm scoring the technical support for Palo Alto Networks WildFire a four. They're very, very good, but there is still room for improvement when some issues become more complex. If you understand the system, then you'll also understand why it is like it is.

Setting up Palo Alto Networks WildFire is easy out of the box, because you just plug in the cables you need, but the way it works is you need to have an understanding of networking, otherwise, setting it up will be difficult. If you are the right type of person, then you'll have no problems with the setup.

Palo Alto Networks WildFire is quite expensive, and this is what puts people off.

The way Palo Alto Networks WildFire works is that it's essentially a service that you get from Palo Alto as part of your subscription. You can subscribe to it at an additional cost, and the idea is it can communicate with all the Palo Alto devices in the world about a file, e.g. whether a file is suspicious or harmless.

For example, a machine in Australia downloads a file, and it doesn't know if it's a file that can be trusted or not. The Palo Alto Networks WildFire process is that it takes that file, and then moves it to the WildFire service in the cloud, so there's a transaction from the firewall doing that.

Let's say it's a Word file or something that looks suspicious, Palo Alto Networks WildFire then detonates the file, e.g. it takes that file and runs checks against it, before and after, and then it sees the difference and says, "Well, this actual file contains a payload." The way that it works then, is that there are attackers or people who are trying to subvert systems, and they will say, "Oh, if this file is running on a virtual machine, like in a sandbox environment, don't do the thing that you're going to do, only when it's a physical thing, like actual hardware.

The Palo Alto Networks WildFire process is a process that goes through all these other checks, e.g. it runs on physical, on virtual, on different types of Linux, MacOS, etc. This file is checked against all these different environments to see if it's okay or not, so this is done off the box, off the firewall.

This is the service that you pay for as part of that subscription, so when it's done, essentially that file is marked as safe, that's cool. If it's marked as bad, then that file, the hash is taken from it, so it's easily identified, then through the Palo Alto Networks WildFire subscription, all the firewalls in the world then get that information within just one minute, if you set it to that. It will say something similar to: "Look out for this file if you ever see it", and then all the machines now knows that the file is dodgy or suspicious. That's what Palo Alto Networks WildFire does.

Palo Alto Networks is very well rounded. They're building an ecosystem: the Palo Alto ecosystem. You've got global protect VPNs and they are the armor that works on the whole ecosystem. They also have integrations, e.g. there are other applications from HP that plug into the device, because it's got the APIs there.

For the deployment and maintenance of Palo Alto Networks WildFire, one person can do it, but it's a special tool, so a network staff that just looks after a server would probably struggle with it, just because of some of the concepts that you need to use. There are specific trainings you'd need to do to get the best out of it, but one specialist could do it, e.g. it's not unheard of.

My advice to others looking into implementing this solution is for them not to be put off by the cost. It's similar to looking at cars, e.g. there's a reason people like Jaguar cars over the Fords. I've always got this mantra that if you have a network, if you have a data network, and if it's going to cost you, e.g. if you look at the fines associated with various industries, and if you're a school that gets a data breach, it'll cost you this much money. The question is: "Can you afford that much money as a company?" If your answer is "No", then you have to look at mitigating it. I would suggest looking at Palo Alto Networks WildFire and saying, "Well, we do these types of things to protect your network."

If you still don't want to pay that money, then chances are, you don't particularly care about security. If you want to pay for that kind of thing to stave off the bigger fine that results from getting a data breach, or getting hacked, etc., then that's how we think about it. Don't be off put by the cost when you're looking at it. Palo Alto Networks WildFire is a very comprehensive device. They are the best firewalls in the world.

There are also other solutions like UTMs and XGs, e.g. if you like Fortigate, but everyone I've shown the Palo Alto to instantly said: "This big screen here: I can see all the traffic going through", and you just filter it at the top, and it just makes more sense to people. It's very intuitive.

My rating for Palo Alto Networks WildFire is eight out of ten. It's not a perfect score because of its cost.

I use this solution for protecting endpoint devices from malware.

The most valuable feature of this solution is how it keeps up-to-date with viruses.

It has the ability to block bots that are trying to come into the network, and the Dynamic updates, pushing to the Palo Alto firewall. For example, if information comes into the enterprise and there are some new viruses, it automatically sends it to WildFire to validate. 

If it's new, they flag it, change it, and update all of the different firewalls across the globe, to inform everyone of what is going on.

The support is good but they could be faster.

I have been using Palo Alto Networks WildFire for approximately six years.

It's a very stable cloud-based solution.

It's the cloud, it scales quickly.

Technical support is alright but we have to wait for a while.

I am also acquainted with Fortinet.

Pricing could be improved.

I would rate Palo Alto Networks WildFire a nine out of ten.

WildFire has been instrumental in blocking a number of new threats, before common desktop anti-virus tools were able to detect them. When Wannacry first came out, wildfire was detecting it and dropping incoming threats within seconds. We were dropping over 10,000 files per day with no additional firewall load at all.

Dynamic analysis.

I am very happy with WildFire and can see no obvious areas of improvement at this point.

This product is rock solid in terms of stability.

There were no problems with scalability. We have rolled out more firewalls to clients, and no scalability issues were found.

Technical support is fine. We have never needed to contact them regarding WildFire.

We previously used Fortinet. However, we found it to miss a lot of incoming viruses, because at the time, they had no sandbox style service.

The setup was very easy. Simply license the feature and enable it within your scanning profiles.

This feature is implemented in-house.

As soon as it began dropping incoming threats, measured in days, that desktop scanners could not find, it hit its ROI.

It's not particularly cheap, but it is absolutely worth it.

We evaluated Fortinet and Cisco.

Do it.

I primarily use the solution for my client's companies. 

I did not find anything that makes it more unique than other equivalent products.

The initial setup is very simple.

The solution is stable.

The scalability is acceptable. 

Technical support is great.

The solution needs more third-party integration. 

The automation and responsiveness need improvement.

They need to be able to escalate technical support issues in a more effective way.

The solution is a bit too expensive. 

I've used the solution for many years. IT's been a while. 

The solution is stable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable. 

The solution does have the capability to scale. It can scale to a certain extent. 

Technical support was perfect. That said, it's hard to escalate. We're mostly happy with technical support. It's just that the escalation process takes too much time.

We are working with a similar product to WildFire at the moment. The features are the same, however, the stability and reliability are better.

The initial setup is very straightforward. It's not overly complex or difficult. A company shouldn't have any issue with the process.

The pricing could be a bit better. 

I'm a freelancing security consultant.

I'd advise new users to just double-check the admin guide, the organization guide, before beginning.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten. 

We primarily use Wildfire products to prevent attacks. As resellers, we showcase the Wildfire capabilities like handling known and unknown threats on the customer side. 

The way that the solution quickly updates to adjust to threats is the solution's most valuable aspect. When there's a security attack, within five minutes, all Wildfire subscribers have access to updates so that all systems will be safe. Its threat prevention is way better than other vendor products.

In terms of threat prevention capabilities, the solution doesn't need any improvements that I can see. We've been quite satisfied.

The size of Palo Alto's cloud is big but it could be easier to use from a product management perspective.

I've been using the solution for nine months now. I'm new to Palo Alto Networks but I have been using the solution since I started working with Palo Alto Networks on the reseller side.

We've dealt with technical support in the past. Once you open a ticket from the support portal, you will be assigned an engineer. That engineer will only focus on your case until it is solved. It's unlike other vendors that don't necessarily give you the same engineer or service representative for the same ticket. It offers good continuity when there are issues to be resolved. We've been quite satisfied with their level of service.

I've used Sophos Firewall in the past. They can also block or scan threats. 

The solution is very straightforward. Setting it up is easy. We just create a Wildfire profile then apply it on the security parcel. It is pretty straightforward.

The pricing of the solution is a bit higher, but it's worth the extra money you will spend because of the protection that you get.

I really recommend Palo Alto Networks. Out of 10 stars, I would give 11. 

I would recommend the solution because it's so easy to deploy and when you read the security profiles, it's very easy to handle, unlike other vendors. When it comes to threat protection, the features are easy to use and understand.

Our primary use cases are for firewalls, cloud, and on-premise.

It helps us when segmenting and securing the network and all sort of technologies, all sort of next generation needs. It's the next generation phases of firewall like anti-virus, sandboxing, wifi, and VPN. 

All of the features are quite good. 

Other vendors have some sort of bandwidth management built into the firewall itself and Palo Alto is missing that.

If there was anything extra for the endpoint security and VNC that would be good, but again it's coming with Palo Alto and must come with some additional cost.

It's very stable. With respect to scalability and stability both, I would say are quite scalable and very steady. I haven't seen any issues.

This solution is being used corporate-wide, more than a couple thousand people. 

Most of the time their technical support has been perfect. A few times a few of the tech support engineers did not have strong knowledge. Overall, though, it's good. 

I have worked with Cisco, Fortinet, Juniper, CheckPoint, too many of them.

The initial setup was straightforward. The setup took less than an hour, it's a simple firewall setup. 

It's a stable product. It's pretty expensive but with respect to value for money, it's okay.

I would rate it a nine out of ten.

• App-ID
• User-ID
• Ease of deployment and usability
• Filtering Mechanism like SP3 Engine

From a technical perspective this has given us a new high as this is how a technology solution should function. From a sales perspective, we have been able to pitch the solution to new customers as it seems cheap to customers when we bundle the solution, compared to getting each device for individual functions.

• IP SLA tracking
• GRE tunnel support

I believe these are the major improvements in the pipeline.

I've been using it for four years.

It crashes too frequently for a few boxes, which could be expected from a new vendor as it evolves. The best part is RMA, as you get the box back quickly if you have it in the contract.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

If it is Arrow support, it's pathetic. I wouldn't recommend them. However, if you go directly with the PA team they are the best tech junkies I have worked with.

6/10.

We used to have Netscreen as our favourite, but it went EOL. Being an MSP we have to have expertise with all the devices. Although, Netscreen is our favourite.

I would say that this is difficult to answer, as the setup would be adaptable based on the mode you use, and the way the firewall can be configured. If you ask an expert it would be straightforward. If you ask a newbie, it would be not that difficult to configure if you follow the mentioned steps.

Go forward, this is an amazing device to be implemented if you have the cost to bear.