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…
$9,500
Zscaler Internet Access
Score 8.8 out of 10
N/A
Zscaler Internet Access™ (ZIA) is a secure web gateway (SWG), delivering cloud native cyberthreat protection and zero trust access to the internet and SaaS apps.
Panorama is single pane of glass for both firewall logging and management in compare to Fortinet which requires two different tools to manage firewalls : FortiAnalyzer for logging and FortiManager for firewall management.
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.
It's best suited for a distributed remote workforce, securing internet access for users from anywhere. Suitable for highly regulated industries, such as banking and Healthcare. Not a good fit for an organisation where most of its legacy is in an on-premises environment. Bandwidth-intensive industries like media/entertainment firms.
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.
Single Pane of Glass Management - Everything is very easy to access and monitor the entire environment from an internet security perspective.
Install Flexibility - We can and do install Zscaler Internet Access on both our client devices as well as our SD-WAN appliances and servers. This allows us to control internet security even on devices without an agent in our networks.
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.
While Zscaler Internet Access (ZIA) delivers critical value in cloud security and RBI compliance, I rate renewal likelihood 7/10 due to evolving needs versus platform limitations. Below is my rationale:
It is a solid product, it allows me to connect multiple devices and to manage my cloud, on prem and vmware firewalling devices. I can assign roles with the required visibility depending on the users. I can also consolidate all my logs into it to have a single pane of visibility.
The application is easy to install and configure on all Windows devices. To troubleshoot any internet issue, we can easily collect all the relevant logs from Zscaler and check the exact issue. The only problem is with the uninstall, as a dedicated crew needs to provide the password.
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.
Zscaler's ZIA support is quick and knowledgable. They respond within 1-2 hours of you submitting your ticket. They are very thorough and are typically ready to jump on a live troubleshooting session. Our ZIA platform and how we use is it unique so at times tickets can be open for weeks but we alway get quality support compared to other unrelated product support in our enterprise
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.
Zscaler Intenet Access outperformed the competition due to its lightning-fast policy delivery and cross-compatibility. It is easy to track employee usage and block unnecessary websites, reducing company internet usage. Zscalar installed on every system increases cloud-based software bandwidth, decreasing user turnaround time and increasing efficiency.
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.
Has allowed us to remove other products that were suboptimal
Saved us money overall by stacking it with other Zscaler products
Created a more secure work environment for our users through intelligent internet policies that are not needlessly restrictive while still maintaining security best practices
