Item: Palo Alto Networks WildFire
Rating: 10
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are using Wildfire to protect our network at several layers, we're using it on our edge networks to protect from threats on the internet as well as protecting our internal client networks from threats that may exist in our shared services environment or each other in the case of a few specific clients who are allowed to talk to each other. Additionally we use it to protect our corporate presence from the internet as well as our remote hosting environment. Wildfire has proven to be a lifesaver through several zero-day events including wanna-cry.

Pros and Cons

Detecting malware
Zero-day threat prevention
Keeping you up to date with the latest threats

Cost
I would personally like to see more JSON support in the API rather than XML, but that's being very nitpicky

Return on Investment

Protected us and our clients from Wanna-Cry!
Made for a more secure network.
Allows us to provide multiple clients with shared services while protecting us and all of our clients from the latest threats.

Alternatives Considered

Cisco ASA and Juniper SRX

Palo Alto and Wildfire are kind of unique, they give you much deeper inspection then was previously available with ASAs or really any sort of traditional firewall. Once they introduced the application aware firewalls that are capable of utilizing Wildfire it was a game changer and has made us able to react to new threats quicker than ever before by catching them before they make it into the network rather than after they've made it into the network and infected a host.

Other Software Used

Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure, Cisco ASA, Cisco Nexus, Juniper SRX, Palo Alto Networks Next-Generation Firewalls - PA Series, Palo Alto Panorama, Palo Alto Networks Virtualized Next-Generation Firewalls - VM Series, Palo Alto Networks URL Filtering PAN-DB, Ansible, F5 BIG-IP

Likelihood to Recommend

Palo Alto Networks Wildfire is well suited for pretty much anywhere that you need the latest and greatest network security. It is extremely good at protecting you from the latest malware threats that might pose a potential problem for your network/endpoints. We've been very please since we installed it and I would say cost of the Palo Altos is the only drawback. If money were no object I'd go with a Palo Alto with Wildfire every time. But unfortunately in some smaller branches it just doesn't make financial sense.

Users and Roles

40 - Our network & security engineers are the ones that are responsible for using Palo Alto Networks Wildfire. We're using it to address the high security requirements and concerns of our customers and to ensure that their remote hosted systems are kept safe and secure. Which can and has been challenging in the past, but Wildfire helps make this much simpler and is constantly updating.

Support Headcount Required

40 - We have a rather large team of network and security engineers supporting our Palo Alto Network devices that have Wildfire enabled. Their job is not solely maintaining WildFire and the Palo Altos though so I wouldn't let the number of engineers that we have scare you away from using Wildfire.

Business Processes Supported

Malware detection
Zero Day Protection
Automated Threat Prevention

Innovative Uses

None really, it's been pretty easy to use/setup out of the box and does what it's intended to do.

Future Planned Uses

We're looking at implementing Palo Altos in place of ASAs between our clients and our datacenters. This should give us higher layer visibility & malware detection between us and our clients.

Likelihood to Renew

It works very well and takes care of protecting us from threats new and well-known. It's been a game changer in terms of threat detection & prevention.

Products Replaced

Yes - We've begun using Palo Alto Firewalls in place of older ASAs and they work amazingly well. The logging and tools in the Palo Alto ecosystem are incredibly useful. More specifically Palo Alto Expedition made the migration painless.

Key Differentiators

Product Features
Product Usability
Product Reputation
Vendor Reputation

Palo Alto has some rather unique capabilities when compared to the competition.

Evaluation Lessons Learned

Might have started with larger firewalls and implemented them in more places to capitalize on the savings from buying in bulk.

Support Rating

For the most part they're pretty responsive and the problem gets resolved in a few hours. We've had a few issues with having to replace an unusually high number of power supplies in our Palo Alto devices, but those tickets are normally resolved pretty quickly and other than that we really haven't had many issues. There has been maybe one or two incidents where it took a couple days to get to the root cause, but none of them have been production impacting as we've deployed our Palos in redundant pairs and the failover worked well for us.

Palo Alto Networks WildFire Customer Support Pros and Cons

Pros	Cons
Quick Resolution Good followup Knowledgeable team Problems get solved Kept well informed No escalation required Immediate help available Support understands my problem Support cares about my success	Slow Initial Response

Pros	Cons
Like to use Relatively simple Easy to use Technical support not required Well integrated Consistent Quick to learn Convenient Feel confident using	None

Easy Tasks

Dynamic Updates
Traffic inspection for malware detection & threat prevention.

Difficult Tasks

Haven't really found any, the Palo Alto ecosystem in general is pretty easy to use and very well documented.

Working in Healthcare this has been a literal lifesaver.

Overall Satisfaction with Palo Alto Networks WildFire