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High performance, rock solid firewall solution for Medium to Large businesses.
March 08, 2017

High performance, rock solid firewall solution for Medium to Large businesses.

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

PA-3000 Series

Overall Satisfaction with Palo Alto Networks PA-3000 Series

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.
  • ROI could be measured in the first few attacks you prevent. IT leaders rarely include the cost of clean-up and preventative scanning of computers and networks in the ROI of a product purchase.
  • Many IT departments do not understand what the financial impact to a business outage would be, but it's one of the most if not THE most critical ROI that should be calculated. In our company, we have too many users, services, applications, and partners who need 24x7 access to our network and to the Internet to compromise with less technology.
I have used Cisco & Sonicwall primarily in most of my 23+ years of network security experience. Over the years all of these platforms have matured, but Palo Alto beats them all in terms of user interface.

The ability to run reports, get access to data immediately, and have the data be extremely accurate and granular is what sets Palo Alto apart from the others. Deployment of the VPN client(s) on multiple platforms is simple to manage and doesn't break other applications like many other VPN client software does. The performance of the firewall from a throughput and monitoring standpoint is second to none.
The firewalls we purchased are excellent. They are very fast as well. This is really important as we want to collect as much data as possible without the end user being impacted by the performance. We are using a 100Mbps fiber connection to the Internet, so we want to get all the speed we can push through these devices. Having the fault tolerance option in the lower-end models would be a nice feature to add.