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Users have praised Palo Alto Firewall for its advanced features, such as content filtering and application filtering, which effectively …
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What is Palo Alto Networks Next-Generation Firewalls - PA Series?
Palo Alto next-generation firewalls classify all traffic, including encrypted and internal traffic, based on application, application function, user and content. Users can create security policies to enable only authorized users to run sanctioned applications.
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Popular Features
- Policy-based Controls (21)10.0100%
- Content Inspection (21)9.999%
- Identification Technologies (21)9.999%
- Visualization Tools (21)9.090%
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What is Palo Alto Networks Next-Generation Firewalls - PA Series?
Palo Alto next-generation firewalls classify all traffic, including encrypted and internal traffic, based on application, application function, user and content. Users can create security policies to enable only authorized users to run sanctioned applications.
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What is Cisco Firepower 9300 Series?
The Cisco Firepower 9300 series is presented by the vendor as a carrier-grade next-generation firewall (NGFW) ideal for data centers and high-performance settings that require low latency and high throughput. With it, the vendor providdes, users can deliver scalable, consistent security to…
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What is Palo Alto Networks Next-Generation Firewalls - PA Series?
Palo Alto Network’s Next-Generation Firewalls is a firewall option integrated with other Palo Alto security products. NGFWs classify and monitor all traffic, including encrypted and internal traffic, based on application, function, user, and content. Palo Alto emphasizes the Zero Trust policy, through which users can create security policies to enable only authorized users to run sanctioned applications, reducing the surface area of cyber attacks across the organization. Palo Alto’s NGFW provides in-firewall encryption and decryption, as well as data and application segmentation. It integrates with PA’s WildFire malware prevention service and supports easy adoption with an open-source tool for firewall migration. It encompasses on-premises and cloud environments for full-system security. |
Palo Alto Networks Next-Generation Firewalls - PA Series Competitors
- CheckPoint
- Cisco
- Barracuda
Palo Alto Networks Next-Generation Firewalls - PA Series Technical Details
| Operating Systems | Unspecified |
|---|---|
| Mobile Application | No |
Frequently Asked Questions
Palo Alto next-generation firewalls classify all traffic, including encrypted and internal traffic, based on application, application function, user and content. Users can create security policies to enable only authorized users to run sanctioned applications.
CheckPoint are common alternatives for Palo Alto Networks Next-Generation Firewalls - PA Series.
Reviewers rate Policy-based Controls and Firewall Management Console and High Availability highest, with a score of 10.
The most common users of Palo Alto Networks Next-Generation Firewalls - PA Series are from Enterprises (1,001+ employees).
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Community Insights
TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!
- Business Problems Solved
- Pros
- Cons
Users have praised Palo Alto Firewall for its advanced features, such as content filtering and application filtering, which effectively prevent malicious traffic and unauthorized access. The IDS/IPS and advanced malware protection features have been commended for their deep scanning capabilities and sandboxing functionality. Palo Alto Firewall is chosen by customers with large organizations that prioritize deep security investments. It is commonly used to protect perimeter networks, provide VPN connectivity, and mitigate potential misuse of the internet and attacks from shady websites. Users have successfully achieved network security, URL filtering, application control, and prevention of known and zero-day attacks with Palo Alto NGFW. The firewall serves as a reliable perimeter defense product, providing threat assessment, web proxy, and SSL inspection. It effectively addresses the problem of external intrusions and offers both basic and advanced firewall features, including protection against application-level threats, VPN management, and dynamic block lists. Palo Alto Firewall has proven itself in securing data center resources while providing enhanced security and control. The Next-Generation Firewalls are also used to secure the organization's perimeter by providing application visibility and threat intelligence to mitigate risk. Users have reported that Palo Alto Next-Generation Firewalls and WildFire have played a crucial role in quickly identifying and isolating new security threats like WannaCry.
Intuitive User Interface: Users have consistently found the user interface of Palo Alto Networks Next-Generation Firewalls - PA Series to be intuitive, making it easy to configure the firewall and perform tasks quickly. Several reviewers have mentioned this as a standout feature.
Advanced Security Features: Many users have praised the advanced features of the firewall, such as application filtering, content filtering, and deep packet inspection. These features provide enhanced security and contribute to the effectiveness of the product in protecting against malware and ransomware.
Seamless Integration with Third-Party Tools: Reviewers have appreciated the seamless integration of Palo Alto Networks Next-Generation Firewalls - PA Series with third-party tools and systems. Specifically, they mention ClearPass from HPE Aruba for user authentication and syslog integration. This integration enhances overall functionality and allows for a more streamlined experience when working with multiple tools simultaneously.
Complicated Implementation: Implementing the product into an existing network has proven to be a challenge for many users. Several reviewers have mentioned that they found it complicated and time-consuming to integrate the product with their current network infrastructure.
Difficult Packet Flow Understanding: Beginners have struggled with understanding the packet flow in Palo Alto's product. Some users have expressed frustration at the complexity of the packet flow, finding it difficult to grasp how data is processed within the system.
Expensive Compared to Competitors: The cost of Palo Alto's product is a common concern among users. Many reviewers feel that the price is high compared to other available solutions in the market. Some users believe that similar features can be obtained from competitors at a lower cost.
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Reviews
(26-37 of 37)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
Palo Alto Networks firewalls are replacing legacy port and protocol based firewalls to assist in implementing a security stack that includes layer7 application identification controls, user-based access, threat prevention, as well as zone based segmentation of networks and systems. We are also leveraging Palo Alto Globalprotect for remote-access VPN and testing the new web-based VPN features.
- Palo Alto Networks is a leader in zone-based firewall deployments.
- Palo Alto Networks domain integration makes them a leader in restricting access based on source user/AD group.
- Palo Alto is continuously developing their Application catalog to help restrict traffic on layer 7 apps not just ports/services.
- Palo Alto threat signatures and application signatures are not available to most customers, the black box method makes it hard to determine the root cause of issues in some cases.
- Some updates - especially for new OS releases are buggy and needs to be fully tested before deployment.
December 08, 2018
Palo is about as good as it gets.
We have PA firewalls throughout the City, sizing and capabilities based on the needs of the department.
- Having two engines:
- Routing Engine—The Routing Engine provides three main functions:
- Creates the packet forwarding switch fabric for the Services Router, providing route lookup, filtering, and switching on incoming data packets, then directing outbound packets to the appropriate interface for transmission to the network.
- Maintains the routing tables used by the router and controls the routing protocols that run on the router.
- Provides control and monitoring functions for the router, including controlling power and monitoring system status.
- Packet Forwarding Engine—Processes packets; applies filters, routing policies, and other features; and forwards packets to the next hop along the route to their final destination.
- The search functions of the appliances and the OS is pretty good. Better than most firewalls.
- Engaging support was quicker, which can really make or break your day\week when it comes to an outage.
- Building an OSPF tunnel with another vendor is proving difficult. Support cant seem to fix it even in their sandbox environment.
- The Firewall is extremely granular, sometimes searching can prove tedious and frustrating if you're new to the OS.
November 21, 2018
Great Enterprise Level Networks Next-Generation Firewalls
We use Palo Alto Networks Next-Generation Firewalls as our primary firewall and our VPN solution for the company. It is very easy to set up and the firewall itself proves to be very effective in managing traffic. They are an industry leader for Enterprise NGFW appliances with numerous security features to protect companies and their networks.
- Very good security features including hardware-level antivirus and intrusion prevention.
- Customizable firewall rules and NAT policies that will match any network's needs.
- Great management interface.
- Different size of appliances for different purposes/environments.
- We have seen that occasionally the reporting feature can be buggy and that certain options might be missing from the menu in the report section. This seems to be a known bug and we have been working with PAN support to apply a hotfix patch to address the issue.
October 12, 2018
PANTASTIC
It's used across the organization, for threat prevention and continuity of operation .
- Visibility into traffic
- Risk reduction
- High performance without cutting corners on security
- The endpoint protection price is not competitive
- The Ldap integration and user mapping could be more intuitive
- The client-less VPN can use native RDP client
January 30, 2018
Palo Alto will stop the bad guys for you!
We utilize Palo Alto Next Generation Firewalls to protect our perimeter network and provide VPN connectivity for site-to-site and endpoint access. The firewall helps to mitigate potential misuse of the internet as well as stopping attacks from shady websites.
- AppID is able to see what the actual internet traffic is. For instance instead of port 443 just being "Internet traffic" we can define access to Facebook-base or all the other facets of facebook.
- UserID allows us to define policies based on group or user access and integrates with our Active Directory. This helps to configure a least access privilege and if we find misuse of the network we can tighten specific users to a stricter policy.
- GlobalProtect VPN connection helps our employee's connect from home remotely. This provides a very secure connection with minimal configuration.
- Wildfire provides very up-to-date information regarding global attack mitigations and stopping techniques.
- Our specific model is a bit slow and outdated and takes up to 10 minutes to commit a configuration change.
- Nested security rules would be helpful instead of a linear approach. But rule creation in general is very simple.
- Documentation gives a very straight forward answer to some items but is very vague in others.
- Support could be a little better. An issue we had a tech was insistent it was the "other guy" and it ended up being the very latest PAN OS upgrade.
October 17, 2017
Not Beginner-friendly, but Powerful and Comprehensive
We used our Palo Alto firewalls to analyze and filter all traffic coming into and leaving our network, including the DMZ.
- Web Filtering - Analysis is fast and comprehensive, with all the options one should expect from a professional Web filter. Admins can set options to audit, warn, click-through, password-protect, or block sites based on numerous criteria. Changing site categories is easy and Palo Alto do a good job of being pretty up-to-date on their site catalog.
- Packet Identification - This is an area where Palo Alto excels. Want to allow your users to use Facebook, but block IM and/or file transfers? Easy. Have an inbound file that says it's a jpeg but is really an Excel spreadsheet? Busted.
- WildFire - I hated it at first, but it's come a long way. Unknown files can be sent to WildFire for them to sandbox and analyze. The result is fairly fast return times and a process that contributes to the improvement of your firewall's function.
- Updates - They happen often and are quick to install, but new definitions with a threat level of critical should be blocked by default, not set to audit-only.
- SSL Proxy - This works great if you have very little traffic on your PA. If you turn this on, expect to cut the firewall's performance in half. Even then, no SSL Proxy is perfect, so some sites just won't work.
PA's NGFW is being used to secure our internal network, servers and a wide variety of devices from external and in conjunction with the implemented software, internal threats. It is being used across the entire organization including the provision of protective services to several remote areas via VPN & VSAT. It has been implemented to help the company recover from a dearth of support previously provided (or not) by an outside vendor.
- It seamlessly performs simultaneous scanning at all levels of the packet, looking for irregularities and/or evidence potential threat activity. This is a most helpful tool, in that it looks to prevent known and/or suspicious packets from entering uninspected into the environment.
- Additionally, it provides blocking services for known hostile URLs, which helps cut down dramatically on the potential for phishing and other types of intrusions.
- Finally, PA's NGFW and associated software takes identified suspicious items and "sandboxes" them - sends them for examination /evaluation. The feedback & other support we get from PAN and its local partner is just far above expectation.
- The only thing I can suggest is a little more information on available dashboards and how to use them. It could be that I haven't looked in the right place, but at my level, I don't often have the time go surfing through sites to find things. Perhaps a CIO/CSO dashboard with immediate access to other dashboards and high level information.
We use the PA-3000 firewalls to secure our perimeter at our data centers. Our entire organization uses these devices to secure all Internet traffic. We use these firewalls for multiple purposes, including anti-virus, threat detection, DMZ, routing, URL filtering, and malware protection, in both layer 3 active/standby mode as well as vwire mode.
- Performs a lot of security functionality all in one device - this is important because especially in today's world, there are a lot of point products out there and it can be difficult for a small or medium-sized business to manage all of them. Having one product saves time, money, and complexity.
- High availability performance is very good, failover is seamless, which is important for business continuity.
- GUI is excellent, which makes it very easy for administrators to manage the firewall and see exactly what is happening.
- The CLI is a bit confusing, and it's difficult to find what you're looking for. Takes a lot of practice. Definitely not as good as the Cisco CLI.
- Updating the firmware is often a very dangerous process, especially when jumping minor or major releases. More QA should be done to validate and ensure no issues during upgrades. I'll admit it's gotten better over time, but there is still room for improvement.
March 17, 2017
Palo Alto Review
Palo Alto is used as our primary firewalls. It addresses the problem of outside intrusions and are configured with both basic and advanced firewall features. We are able to protect against application-level threats and it is also used to manage our VPN and MPLS networks. Many features such as dynamic block lists, DLP, web content filtering, advanced threat protection, wildfire, and DDoS protection are available and are in use with our company.
- Protects against common threats such as unauthorized vulnerability scans
- Protects against malware applications and ransomware such as Cryptowall
- Allows very secure VPN connections for external users
- The web content filtering is good, but could be improved
- Wildfire can take a long time to analyze files
- Alerts and logs could contain a little more information or intelligence to help narrow down a threat.
We needed a solution that would detect threats before they were detected by endpoint software and eliminate the threats of exploits and viruses to our end users, including ransomware attacks.
- Monitoring and detecting unwanted application access by our users, such as streaming and torrent download sites.
- Preventing exploits and malware from hitting our network and infecting all end-user PCs and servers.
- Excellent secure VPN access for our outside staff and partners. The VPN software client is available for PC & Mac as well as mobile client options on Android and Apple stores.
- The products are a bit pricey, but feature filled. Their annual services can really add up quickly.
- The models of devices are somewhat confusing. For instance, we wanted a firewall that had the ability to use Active & Passive fault tolerance, and only the very advanced models (more expensive) do this. It might bring smaller customers in by adding more advanced features to lower-priced models.
October 14, 2016
Firewall and Wildfire? Great!
PA-500 is being used across our entire organization. We currently use it to filter web traffic with geoblocking, implement our VPN, and for general logging of network activity.
- The VPN (GlobalProtect) is easy to use.
- Logging is done well and in an easy to use situation.
- The GeoBlocking is exceptional.
- The web interface to look at real time events is very slow and clunky.
- The searching feature is hard to figure out what parameters you use.
- The GlobalProtect VPN client has a few strange features that have increased support hours. It's easy to work around but caused a few unnecessary tickets.
June 29, 2016
Palo Alto PA-3000 series - a valuable and reliable resource for protecting your network
We are using the Palo Alto Networks PA-3020 to control internet access for the entire organization. The business problems being addressed are:
1. availability of services and information, e.g. protecting against malicious activity that would attempt to destroy or otherwise prevent access to services and information.
2. confidentiality of data and resources
3. integrity of data and resources
1. availability of services and information, e.g. protecting against malicious activity that would attempt to destroy or otherwise prevent access to services and information.
2. confidentiality of data and resources
3. integrity of data and resources
- It manages software updates particularly well as well as the ability to downgrade software versions. This is a strength because of the need to stay current with patches to fix discovered vulnerabilities and also assurance that if an update causes a serious problem, it is relatively easy to roll it back.
- Reliability is good. We have not had any unscheduled downtime from the device since we've put it into production.
- It does a good job identifying threats and potential threats based on vulnerabilities and blocking suspect connections automatically.
- I would like to see some guidance on suggested action to take on an identified threat or potential threat beyond just blocking the access.
- In the Monitor tab/threat, I would like to be able to copy an item in the listing (ip address, url, etc.) directly rather than having to click on the item which automatically puts it into the filter where I can then mark and copy the item. Also, if I want to copy the URL and I click on it, it puts it into the filter as an IP address which I may not necessarily want to copy.