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.

• Anti virus
• Vulnerability protection
• Anti spyware

Incentivized

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

• Sometimes I struggle to find the deny or specific traffic log for file blocking profile under Unified logs.
• Reporting around Threat Prevention suite could be much better.
• Possibly a specific threat prevention search function that spans across of threat features.

Incentivized

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

It is comparable but not as robust as other stand alone IPS/IDS.

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.

• We have various compliance standards we have to meet and the Palo Alto with its Networks Threat Protection suite has checked off pretty much all the boxes we needed and at a price point that couldn't be easily beat for comparable features, throughput, etc.
• IT/Network staff has saved a A LOT of time using this platform for protection (coming from an ASA)

Incentivized

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