ManageEngine offers Firewall Analyzer, a firewall security and policy management option supporting change and compliance of network security devices.
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Palo Alto Panorama
Score 8.6 out of 10
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According to the information provided by the vendor, Palo
Alto Panorama is a network security management solution that intends to
simplify and enhance cybersecurity processes for businesses. The product's
primary objective is to offer various features, including unified policy
management, centralized visibility, automated threat response, simplified
configuration, unrivaled scalability, and rapid security adoption. It claims to
assist organizations in efficiently managing their firewalls and…
Offering enhanced network security, performance, and connectivity, it is well as used in a business setting. Features including application control, web content filtering, firewall, IP address, application control, VPN, and good advanced threat protection. With enhanced features and advanced threat protection you get an awesome performance cost effective firewall device.
I think Palo Alto Panorama is suited for administrators of all levels because certain things can be locked down to certain permission levels. But there are executive dashboards all the way down to the weeds for the highest of administrators. This truly is a single pane of glass tool because you never have to go into the individual firewalls for anything.
If you need to push a setting or config to multiple firewalls Panorama can do that flawlessly.
Panorama has its logging centralized and this makes it easy to locate and reviews logs compared to having to get logs from each device.
I love how the interface matches the interface on the firewall. This makes the learning curve less steep.
Adding new firewalls to Panorama is super easy and not complex. Panorama can push a lot of the config and settings so you don't have to manually do it.
Extra Functionality: There are a few features we don't use, either because of the size of our enterprise, or the way we have our firewalls configured. But all the elements to monitor and report on these features are still there, oftentimes meaning it takes longer to get to something we actually do use in the interface.
Setup Time: The initial setup was very simple, mostly just adding IPs and a syslog server. But for many of the more advanced features, like the NOC view, it can take a lot of tweaking to get right.
Intuitiveness: The reporting, while detailed and better than reading a raw syslog, can be unintuitive at times. Drilling down can sometimes get one stuck in a weird rabbit hole that isn't entirely relevant, and it's hard to get back to somewhere useful without just starting over.
The ability to push out OS updates could be improved in Panorama. It has the abilities, but the use is not intuitive, to the point that we generally connect directly to the firewalls to download the OS updates directly.
Scheduling. It would be nice to be able to schedule jobs to run at certain times. Pushing out updates, like OS updates mentioned above, can require significant bandwidth. So being able to schedule that work for hours that would not directly affect the users would be a welcome addition.
The list of devices in the Templates tabs should be sorted the same way that he devices are grouped in the Device Group tab, rather than just alphabetical. If there was a way to chose the order of the devices, maybe by tag, that would work as well.
Panorama has given us much more than we expected and the support for the product, by Palo Alto Networks has been great. We would like to see some improvements that I mentioned in another review, like scheduling changes, but overall Panorama has provided a very capable product and we are very happy with it.
You can do anything via the GUI without going to the CLI. High real time security as every five minutes, it updates the list of phishing websites. High protection as the firewall communicates with the cloud, a machine running artificial intelligence helps to detect malware or other threats.
Palo Alto has a very nice customer support. People are very nice and were quick to reply, whenever we had an issue with the subscription or the blacklist tool. There is also a great deal of information on their website that covers each and every detail about the uses and the threat signatures. The community keeps on updating their information very frequently. Small issues are easily solved from the documentation, and for other issues, the customer support service is always present. However, on Fridays it becomes a little delayed as per my observation.
ManageEngine was chosen over the use of AlgoSec as it slotted nicely with other Manage engine services we use for services such as active directory management. Other benefits include how lightweight and easy to install and set up it is. You can install it inside your network and start testing within 20 minutes.
Palo Alto Panorama and Junos Space Security Director have many similar features but Palo Alto Panorama excels in almost all of them. The monitoring tools in Palo Alto Panorama are easy to use and give more in-depth insight into what is going on in your network. Palo Alto's security is ranked much higher and the Web Application Security is also superior to that of the Junos counterpart.
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.
