NetScaler vs. Palo Alto Networks Virtualized Next-Generation Firewalls - VM Series

Citrix Netscaler can be a powerful network appliance for environments that are fully committed and open to utilizing a network appliance that isn't made by a traditional network vendor. Administrator user experience has improved over the years and will continue to improve with the flexibility of virtual and physical appliances available for medium and large enterprises.

Incentivized

PaloAlto VM-200 is a virtualized firewall with high processing power and network edge protection. The great advantage is being able to implement in a VMware environment without worrying about hardware, rack space, physical network connections and others. It can be easily managed via the web and remotely to create protection, access and reporting rules. The VM-200 firewall can be used by any company, small or large because it has several models available according to the real needs of each one.

Incentivized

• Flexibility. NetScaler assumes its admins know a bit about networking and in-depth details surrounding the applications they are configuring access for/to. This being so, the range of configuration options is very broad allowing various versions' combinations of protocol patterns, expressions, rules etc., all to the benefit of the admin.
• Granularity. Having such a broad range of configuration options available, while still allowing simple options to be configured simply. The GUI is well-stylized and navigation has a good flow.
• Ease of control. For load-balancing of simple services right out of the box, NetScaler makes it pretty easy, compared to the range of options available in the surrounding GUI and under the hood.

Incentivized

• Decrypt internet traffic
• daily reporting of top internet users
• classify internet traffic in real-time to allow us to understand the organization needs.
• Strong AI capabilities

Incentivized

• The documentation could use an overhaul with specific examples related to the command line as well as GUI. Explanations in the documentation would also be helpful.
• Being able to have more than just one routing table would allow the ability to leverage security.

Incentivized

• High Availability can be improved to allow active-active deployment
• All command line documentation to provide and support automation
• It will be nice to have link aggregation just like in the hardware firewall models.

Incentivized

I gave the NetScaler a 7 here because the system once configured and deployed is very easy to use. However, if you did not deploy the system and do not have the fundamental background knowledge then you will have trouble using the product in general. Overall it is a great product and service but does typically require professional services to be deployed.

Incentivized

It is very easy to use, even for those with little experience in this particular firewall. Some of the advanced content filtering and content-based policies are difficult to pick up; however, almost all required decoders are built in. Built-in logging and rule testing make rule definition easy, and labels/tags allow filtering, grouping, and categorisation of rules. Updates are easy, and high availability is also reliable.

Incentivized

Overall, our organization's experience with Citrix support is that support can be hit or miss. Oftentimes it takes multiple attempts and much longer than desirable to obtain a viable solution for issues experienced with their products. It would be great to see Citrix invest time, effort, and almighty dollars into improving their support and bug fix process across the board.

Incentivized

Palo Alto VM series are best selling and industry's top-selling security product which customers prefer while securing their public cloud environment

Incentivized

easy to use and setup and reliable. Once the configuration was setup and running this has been really useful and easy to maintain. The other solutions seemed overly complicated and difficult to configure and get up and running with the security that we required

Incentivized

palo alto firewalls are application-oriented systems. They can beat other product which are based on layer 3/4 inspection. Vm series are also quickly available and could be useful in urgent deployment needs . other vendors like Fortinet and cisco could take much more time to provide the VM and in some cases installation and license validation are complicated

Incentivized

• We had this set up before COVID and it saved us. We just added user licenses and scaled out our citrix farm and IT sat back and just monitored users from home.
• Scales up and out with ease
• Challenging to find NetScaler experts for advanced features you want to enable and use

Incentivized

• ROI has been achieved quickly through lack of security incidents.
• Inline filtering happens at line rate, unline Sourcefire from Cisco.
• Great incentives from PAN to switch made a difference in the choice to change.

Incentivized