FireMon vs Palo Alto Panorama

• Built-in compliance and security reporting - By scheduling reports, we automate the information gathered and get it to the correct department for remediation, freeing up resources for other tasks.
• Ping Path Analysts - this plays a big help in our environment. With over 300 IT personnel, communication is sometimes lost. Changes to architecture happen frequently with our dynamic and worldwide presence, including cloud. It is important to get it right the first time, in a secure and efficient manner.
• Security Manager - Organization, optimization, and metrics that can easily be tracked and help make future decisions on the appropriate coarse of action. For example, I've taken multiple firewalls which had high CPU and memory utilization, reprioritized the policies, and cut those metrics in half.

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• Being able to create common rules that can be maintained on multiple firewalls is very beneficial to our management of the different functional needs of the firewalls.
• Using templates to manage regional requirements is helpful for rolling out changes in the networking side, from user managemnet globally to SEIM/Syslog collection regionally, being able to stack templates helps deliver the necessary changes across multiple firewalls.
• Panorama's Dashboard and ACC provides useful information that can be set to see All firewalls, or just certain groups of firewalls. Since each group of firewalls has different applications running through them, being able to isolate one group at a time helps identify if there are errant devices causing unexpected traffic, and what type of traffic it is.

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• More granular documentation - A flexible tool is great, but with flexibility comes gaps in documentation. Nothing serious, but I have found myself asking questions to support on more than one occasion because I couldn't independently find the solution in the default documentation. "How can I generate a query that uses this argument rather than this one..." kinda stuff.
• More granular ability to "whitelist" specific rules - If security teams had perfect security, the business wouldn't be allowed to operate. That being the case there will always be compromises. Although I may care about a specific control as far as my environment is concerned, I will find myself with a laundry list of rules that will take an extended effort to clean up, or there is no good way around. Being able to acknowledge these and then circle back to them at regular intervals for review would be good - as opposed to having to make sure I filter those specific rules out of larger exports that I may dump into a ticket for remediation.

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• It needs improvement for the threats categorized as "high" severity. There are lot of false positives. Therefore finding real ones is hard in "high" category.
• The threat/traffic view needs improvement. It needs at least a feature to sort based on columns. Downloading and parsing using Excel takes a lot of time.

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• We are managing larger number of client's security devices using FireMon and it reduced our backlog for routine changes.
• By using FireMon's well-designed UI and great features like traffic analysis, removable rules report and compliance auditing etc, we are able to archive our goals in one central console, it saved manpower and reduced human errors.

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• At a previous company, I deployed Palo Alto firewalls to a data center, and 12 branch locations. This allowed us to replace MPLS links with IPSec tunnels between the sites. This resulted in significantly more throughput and soft savings of increased productivity. However, the estimated net of $220,000 in hard savings over five years is what is most impressive. I could not have effectively managed all those devices without Palo Alto Panorama.

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