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Firewall and Wildfire? Great!
October 14, 2016

Firewall and Wildfire? Great!

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

PA-5000 Series

Overall Satisfaction with Palo Alto Networks PA-500

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.
  • Less time for users to connect to the VPN (globalprotect can be set to be "always on")
These are cheaper (or at least were) than the Meraki firewalls and they allow you to integrate with Palo Alto Wildfire, which is valuable. This allows for a more real time analysis of packets (though we may have to upgrade to a larger firewall to use this). The PA-500 VPN is also a nice, easy to use feature.
Palo Alto is an excellent product when you are running small to medium networks and are not trying to do real-time analysis of the traffic. I think a large network or an especially active network (for instance hosting web servers) would require something more robust. If you need something to protect your network, it's a great place to start.