Palo Alto Networks Advanced Threat Prevention vs. SonicWall Capture Advanced Threat Protection (ATP)

Palo Alto NTP is an appropriate suite of protection for any enterprise environment or anyone that truly needs some serious perimeter protection in a one-stop, all-in-one unit. There are no modules or add-ons or clunky interfaces to deal with it; everything works out of one management plane, licensing, implementation, monitoring. updating, etc. As a network admin, that is immensely valuable to me. Additionally, I get real-time reporting on all the stuff NTP is catching, and it is nothing to shirk at. The real value in NTP comes in only after you begin doing SSL-decryption, however, to truly inspect the traffic. Short of that, you are just seeing a bunch of encrypted data and the NTP suite of tools isn't going to avail you. NTP plus decryption, though, is invaluable!

Incentivized

Our customer base is SMB so I can not speak about a larger customer base or organization. I have customers with 3 end points behind the SW and customers with 200 end points behind the SW. The biggest confusion on selection is the WAN / LAN throughput. Once you understand the limitations and select the correct product I have been happy with the product on a wide range of customers. It is a bit pricey for a small operation but if they are handling sensitive data it is very cost effective.

• The threat engine has constant updates for important threats.
• Wildfire helps supplement the Threat engine to help protect against 0 day threats.
• The way the threat engine can be added at different levels to different zones and policies helps to ensure business essential traffic can have policies that are tuned to ensure traffic will flow.

Incentivized

• Filters and prevents phishing attacks
• Filters and prevents malicious attachments
• Provides quantitative reporting

• Cost is high, but it is a premium product
• Endpoints are still vulnerable.
• TAC engineers aren't always equipped with ATP knowledge

Incentivized

• Sorry, I am very satisfied with the product, nothing I need to change

The reason to give ATP this rating is it specialises in detecting command control traffic whose primary role is to identify unusual outbound traffic patterns which blocks the command control communication and notifies to different security team to take necessary actions. ATP Global protect holds the responsibility of inspecting all the inbound and outbound traffic going to and from corporate system regardless of the network they are on. ATP plays a major role to identify the threats that blocks threats that could lead to data breach also it identifies any malicious file enter the system will be blocked proactively

Incentivized

Having used Palo Alto Firewalls for years, implementing threat protection was the next step in perimeter security. Works much better than the few competitors I have personally used. Frequent content updates occur which may impact some policy rules, but that is normal across most vendors.

Incentivized

Support from SW is superior. End of discussion. Fortinet support was lacking in product knowledge and was noting but reading from a script. SW, if the T1 can not answer I get to T2 immediately. Never an issue to get a resolution in minutes, not hours or days. The staff knows their limits and escalates without question.

• After adding PA Threat Protection, we are now getting our network traffic completely inspected.
• We are now applying security checks and scans like AV scan and Anti Spyware checks.
• This is also giving visibility into threat and attack vectors that are using vulnerabilities and exploits to enter our environment.

Incentivized

• I trust the product to protect my customer base.
• They do not differentiate themselves very well. It is a difficult sell cycle.