F5 Distributed Cloud WAF (Web Application Firewall) vs. Palo Alto Networks Next-Generation Firewalls - PA Series

It helps our website to manage well during high traffic seasons and Holidays. This plaform manages the website overall performance and also protect it against DDoS attacks during these High demand period. It also protects transactions done on our website for the booking of services and products buying by our customers and keep their data safe.

Incentivized

It is well-suited for a company needing strong edge security with ease of administration. It comes standard with many features such as VPN, Application ID and "Day-1 Config" that make the networks it protects secure from the very start. Palo is definitely a premium product and is much more expensive than other firewalls, but the value is realized immediately. The robust options for firewall rules/policies allow the administrator to apply security in new and creative ways to hit the sweet spot between security and usability.

Incentivized

• Layer seven attacks are becoming far more common. Traditionally it was always layered three, layer four, where you get an additional firewall, but with the application layer attacks become more frequent, more popular, et cetera. So having the web application firewall protecting us, and then with the recent Log4j, that's the most recent use case when it gave us that instant level of protection whilst we remediated the Log4j that we had that and the F5 Distributed Cloud WAF was protecting us.
• I have a great relationship with the account manager, my account manager, and I think he drives the best price possible, um, for me, and I'm happy with that price.
• F5 Distributed Cloud WAF is always innovating and evolving.
• We run a very competitive proof value where we run numerous competitors against each other, and then we evaluate from that and then make the selection, and F5 Distributed Cloud WAF was the winner.

Incentivized

• The PA handles VPN connectivity without missing a beat. We have multiple VPN tunnels in use for redundancy to cloud-based services.
• The PA has great functionality in supporting failover internet connections, again with the ability to have multiple paths out to our cloud-based services.
• The PA is updated on the regular with various security updates, we are not concerned with the firewall's ability to see what packets are really flowing across the network. Being able to see beyond just IP and port requests lets you know things are locked down better than traditional firewalls.
• It is a great overall kit, with URL filtering and other services that fill in the gaps between other solutions without breaking the bank.

Incentivized

• Better integration between different F5 solutions
• Fail over between devices feels unstable if there are thousands of objects attached to the traffic-group. Needs to be more simpler.
• We have seen issues with malicious user detection where we have used open protocols due to legacy applications, and have been caught with legitimate traffic being blocked.

Incentivized

• Setting up certain things can be somewhat complicated due to the numerous options and abstractions involved.
• It would be nice to have somewhere to get simple canned reports easily.
• It would be nice to be able to remove options we never use from various setup dialogs.

Incentivized

We gave it an 8 because it protects our web apps well and is reliable. The WAF is flexible and meets most of our needs. It could improve in user interface and make integrations easier, but overall, it’s a solid and effective security tool for us.

Incentivized

The PA5220s have far exceeded what we have expected out of them. It was a bit of a learning curve coming from another vendor, but everything falls into place now with ease. The capabilities of the solution still surprise us, allowing us to remove other costly hardware and providing a single point of management needed

Incentivized

I believe is a solution that was designed from the start to be simple and easy to use. Coming from Imperva, it simply eased the burden and complexity of managing and securing our apps on different environments (cloud and on-prem). It easy to scale and very quick to deploy (as a cloud waf should be), provide us with DevOps integrations, visibility and automatic insights from multiple events that guarantee peace of mind for us analysts and opp managers.

Incentivized

It can be a little tricky at first if you have never used the product or a firewall before. If you have experience with firewalls in general, it does not take long to learn the Palo Alto Networks Next-Generation Firewalls - PA Series interface. They offer great training resources and knowledge base articles to help get up to speed.

Incentivized

Seems no issue

Incentivized

Unnoticed slowness

Incentivized

I never contacted support for this product.

Incentivized

We've run into a couple undocumented bugs, but that seems to happen with every brand and technology. Any time we've had to engage Palo Alto support they've always been professional, knowledgeable and prompt. In almost all cases we've been able to resolve our issues without having to escalate our tickets.

Incentivized

Online training saves me lots of time

Incentivized

Just make sure you origin servers have F5 IPs allowed.

Incentivized

It provides fewer false positives and a more granular approach to eliminating them, allowing us to focus on threats. Also, with the need to secure both on-premise and cloud-based web applications, we can only use Azure on the cloud part, but we still need to cover on-premise apps with WAF, so we would need to double the time to deploy and manage. Also, its flexibility of deployment scenarios offers us a faster time to deploy WAF without adjusting the app delivery process to WAF's existence.

Incentivized

We are using Cisco ASA before in our environment but when it comes to deep scanning & layer 7 security it doesn't have that capability. After using Palo Alto Networks Next-Generation Firewall we are using sandboxing & advance malware protection that provides high-level end-user security. Also after implementing it we can easily monitor user-level traffic.

Incentivized

Dont see any issue so far

Incentivized

• The biggest gain for us was speed. Before F5 Distributed Cloud WAF, onboarding a new app to our WAF stack meant manual rule tuning, traffic sampling and regression testing. Right now, we spin up a service, tag it with the right policy and its ready (production ready) within hours

Incentivized

• We used to outsource our Firewall and it's management. Not only did we find their SLA's to be lacking, in general, but communication between us was horrible. Many times we could not understand them and that resulted in less than desirable rule creation or troubleshooting.
• Since we no longer have to pay a company for 24/7 management (and SLOW SLA's) we are saving a ton of money each year. Also our fellow employee's are much happier that things can be resolved in a timely manner.

Incentivized