Palo Alto Next-Generation Network Firewalls have been the industry leader for the last 8 years. Even the market is overwhelmed and saturated of Firewalls, Unified Threat Gateways and all this kind of devices, Palo Alto has managed to get its market quota in the wild environment they develop their products. They gained the top position in the market by selling one of the most advanced and well-performing next-gen firewalls series.

Gartner quadrant acknowledges all this and has been placing Palo Alto devices on the top position along with Fortinet, Cisco and CheckPoint.

1

Using their renoun SP3 engine that shares the same signature format to process Data Filtering , Vulnerability Protection , Spyware and Anti-Virus , they manage to save tons of CPU and memory resources. Instead of passing every packet or connection sequentially trough all these engines like other vendors do, SP3 ( Single Pass Parallel Processing ), evaluates every packet at the same time with the signatures of all the three engines. This obviously avoids the firewall becoming the network bottleneck and removes any latency they could introduce in the packet flow.

2

Palo Alto offers their firewall products in both bare-metal hardware and virtual machine format, so their clients are not limited in the way the design, implement and configure their network protection.

3

Besides, within the bare-metal series, they have many segments including small, medium and large-sized enterprise appliances, having almost one model for each sizing requirement. We should not forget that they also have Service Provider platforms, so they cover every possible environment.

We should remark that for the small-sized appliances, such as PA-200 series, don’t offer virtualization capabilities. Meaning they don’t run Virtual Systems. VS are like Cisco ASA contexts or Fortinet vdoms , you can run multiple firewalls inside the same physical box.

In the virtual world, they offer VMs to protect multicloud environments on all flavors, single on-premises, private and public cloud or mixed environments. Needles to say they almost support every virtualization technology available, ranging from VMware to KVM, Hyper-V and Cisco ACI.

We can find a range of documentation, datasheets and many other resources in their website at https://www.paloaltonetworks.com

Start checking the firewall PA- series in all their ranges, that will help you on making a brief-picture of what we will be dealing with. In the end, the best of breed in Next Generation Network Firewalls.