Palo Alto Networks VM-Series Reviews

We primarily use the solution for cloud firewalling, SASE, ZTNA, and CASB compared to the hardware-based NGFW or cloud firewalls.

The product is easy to use and deploy, and it enhances the overall security posture while deploying the application in the cloud. The most effective features of the solution for threat prevention are Layer 7 inspection, SSL decryption, IPS, and the web filtering profile. You can use the solution to easily protect your data from cyber criminals, including insider or outside-based attacks.

The solution is easy to deploy, easy to manage, and easy to create policies. An organization's overall security posture can be improved by deploying Palo Alto Networks VM-Series firewall.

The DLP functionality or data classification can be improved in the solution's basic firewalling.

I have been using Palo Alto Networks VM-Series for two to three years.

Palo Alto Networks VM-Series is a stable solution.

I rate the solution a nine out of ten for stability.

Compared to Checkpoint Maestro Firewall, the solution's scalability is not up to the mark. We'll need to upgrade the firewall for any tech refresh, throughput requirement, or hardware-based incremental. We have more than 100 customers for Palo Alto Networks VM-Series.

The solution’s technical support is great.

The solution’s initial setup is straightforward.

The solution's deployment time depends on the business application or business requirement. Based on that, the solution is easy to deploy and use.

Based on the customer budget, they can choose from 12-month, 36-month, or 60-month licensing models. The solution is quite expensive compared to Fortinet, Check Point, or Cisco. Customers can go for the solution's premium version, which I wouldn't say is expensive because it secures important data.

We cannot say that we have achieved 100% security by deploying the solution, but we have added one more security layer to protect us from security threats or attackers. For deployment, we have more than 400 engineers handling our SOC, including the MSS part, the security of business center implementation, and manageability.

Deploying the solution does not provide a 100% data safeguard, but it adds another security layer. The solution provides single-pass parallel processing (SP3) architecture, which is more effective than other firewall vendors. From the hardware and architecture perspective, the solution is good compared to Check Point or Fortinet firewalls.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

Ours is an enterprise environment and some of the services are hosted in our private data centers and some of the servers are hosted on Azure. We have the IPSec tunnels from the firewalls to our own data centers and from the firewall to the cloud as well. It depends on the type of application being hosted.

We are using Panorama for centralized management of all our firewalls around the world, as well as for centralized management of security policies and network settings. We have not completely migrated to the cloud. We are in transit.

Palo Alto has many features for troubleshooting real-time scenarios. The troubleshooting, compared to other firewalls has been optimized in a way that saves a lot of time.

I like the UI. Most things are accessible from the user interface and it is quite user-friendly. With respect to both VM-based firewalls and physical firewalls, it's easy to create updates.

They have a centralized Palo Alto Customer Support Portal and if we require any licenses, such as a next-generation firewall license, we can easily download and integrate them with this solution. We can also schedule periodic updates. That is quite user-friendly.

In terms of functionality, we are using IPSec tunneling and Palo Alto's WildFire feature. We use the security policies, Panorama, and Prisma Cloud as well.

We use Panorama to manage our security policy model across on-prem and public cloud environments. It plays a key role with respect to centralized management, for physical enterprise firewalls and cloud-based firewalls. It gives you centralized control over all the infrastructure. Unified policies can be pushed from that centralized place with templates.

When you deploy VM-Series Firewalls, they are quite flexible. You just have to select the instances, storage, security policies, and firewall rules. Within minutes, you can deploy the firewalls.

We are also able to adjust firewall sizing on the fly, which is important. Initially, we decided on a firewall based on the throughput assumptions. But in peak hours or during a peak month for traffic, we need to scale the firewalls. That should be automatically done. AWS and Azure provide very good features and, by using them, within a second it automatically scales, based on the incoming traffic.

Palo Alto has launched different products, such as physical firewalls as well as cloud and VM-based firewalls. Recently, they introduced their Prisma Cloud solution. Compared to the previous technologies, like Panorama, which is used for centralized firewall management, or even individual firewalls, it's a bit challenging to integrate the traditional firewall policies into Prisma Cloud. And the Prisma Cloud interface isn't very user-friendly. 

Our organization has been using Palo Alto Networks VM-Series for more than five years, and I have worked on this solution for two years.

The solution is certainly stable. I have worked with many vendors' firewalls and Palo Alto's are definitely stable.

Obviously, it is scalable as long as you have the licenses and support with Palo Alto. You can implement the firewalls in high-availability mode or use the cloud functionality as well. For scalability, Palo Alto is optimized.

We have 30-plus sites around the world with more than 4,000 users.

Palo Alto has very good support. When you have a valid license, they can replace a device with a new one. They have the CSP portal and you can log in and see all the firewalls listed. You can raise TAC cases with a priority of low, medium, or high, and, based on the priority, they will send an email to you. They have live support as well. In case of an issue, you can call them directly and they will provide the required support.

Positive

Earlier, we were using many vendors' firewalls, per their suitability for our clients. Apart from Palo Alto, we were using Cisco ASA, Check Point, and Juniper. The network grew over the years and each site had its own set of firewalls. The issue was that we had to standardize things across the network. There was also a gradual change in the technology and features available. Our security team thought we needed a better implementation, for optimization and troubleshooting, and something that was friendly for daily operations.

We have both private cloud and hybrid. Some of the services are on the cloud and some are on-prem in our data center. Setting up Palo Alto firewalls is quite easy compared to other vendors.

Migrating our old infrastructure to Palo Alto took four to six months. 

We did some pilot project testing with Palo Alto. If, for example, we want to migrate from XYZ vendor to Palo Alto, the very first thing we had to do was capture all the existing security and NAC policies and all the NGFW functionality. Palo Alto has specific features. For example, you can capture the logs in an inline environment, such as what traffic is going to the network, what security policies are there, et cetera. We deployed the Palo Alto firewalls in that way to only capture the traffic. We then analyzed the traffic, and we worked with Palo Alto TAC to understand the security policies and the exact throughput to determine the hardware we were going to use. We monitored all of that for a few months and then we started the migration from other vendors to Palo Alto.

We had 10 engineers involved in the deployment, but each on-site location had its own team as well. Three were senior network architects and the other seven were staff network engineers.

If you want to keep up to date in the network, it requires quite a bit of patching. It has many features, like Unified Threat Management and antivirus that can be auto-updated by scheduling an update for them. But the major patching has to be done manually. In our organization, we do it quarterly.

It is worth the cost.

Palo Alto Networks VM-Series is notably cheaper than other firewall vendors, except Fortigate. Fortigate is number one in terms of pricing.

Our security team tested various firewalls and it came down to FortiGate and Palo Alto and they found Palo Alto was quite suitable for the network.

Everything is moving to the cloud and we need a solution that can support all the multi-vendor platforms and the new technologies as well. That is quite important for any enterprise organization or service provider nowadays. If we talk about moving existing loads from our own data centers or enterprise sites to the cloud, we need a solution that can take care of everything, such as security compliance, and that is easy to use. Palo Alto is good in those terms.

With the introduction of Prisma Cloud, Palo Alto is encouraging clients to migrate their infrastructure, such as VPN and security solutions to Prisma Cloud. It has been highly optimized compared to Panorama. Palo Alto is promoting it and asking their clients to use Prisma Cloud to improve their security infrastructure.

I would advise, when you deploy a new site, to manage it from the centralized Panorama solution. With Panorama, you have a local login, so even if the internet is down you have access to the firewall management.

We had a situation, when performing patching, where the firewall lost the remote connection via the internet and it had not been onboarded to Panorama. That mean we lost connectivity and we had to involve the onsite technicians. To avoid that scenario, all firewalls should be centrally managed by Panorama.

And for troubleshooting, each firewall should have syslog profiles activated.

We use the solution for network protection. Previously, I worked for a physical organization, but last year we moved to a Proof of Concept. Following the POC, we had to deploy the solution in three different geographical locations. We deployed all of the Palo Alto solutions in the hub environment and connected them to another node.

VM-Series allows us to maintain consistent next-generation firewall protection across virtual, private, and public cloud infrastructures using a unified policy model. We can use the provided templates to generate policies based on both global and local rules.

Panorama plays a vital role in allowing us to maintain a consistent security policy model across on-premises and various public cloud environments. Presently, we utilize Panorama exclusively in the cloud, spanning three different geographical locations: East Asia, Eastern U.S., and Western Europe.

Once we were able to configure Panorama's centralized management system we were able to have uninterrupted connections with no security issues.

Using Panorama helped us streamline our security policies in a cloud-based environment, saving us time. With Panorama, we no longer need to log in and manually adjust the template before transferring data, which increased our comfort level.

Palo Alto Networks VM-Series' security features are all good.

Centralized management is valuable because it allows us to configure settings in one location and apply them across all three locations.

The migration of workloads to the cloud is difficult because the cloud provider and Palo Alto Networks are different platforms. We had to research many articles online and after our research and development were completed we were able to deploy. The migration of data to the cloud can be more user-friendly and has room for improvement.

The utilization monitoring and GUI have room for improvement.

Sometimes we encounter licensing issues where our licenses are not activated, and as a result, we are required to redeploy. This problem could be related to VM-Series or the template image and how they are integrated with Azure Marketplace.

I have been using the solution for one year.

The solution is stable.

The technical support is good.

Positive

Previously, we utilized Azure Firewall, but we found it to be less mature compared to Palo Alto, prompting us to switch to the latter.

The initial setup is straightforward but the deployment portion is complex. We require 15 minutes for one VM deployment.

I give the solution a nine out of ten.

The main concern is VPN. If you're using Azure Firewall, you still need a VPN gateway to terminate your VPN connection. Azure Firewall doesn't remove the need for another VPN gateway, especially for point-to-site VPN. So you have to use another VPN appliance. With Palo Alto and FortiGate, for example, you can have an all-in-one solution. The VPN gateway and all the other features are available.

Palo Alto Networks VM-Series has everything centralized. You have the VPN solution, firewall, routing, UDR, flexibility, updates, and full visibility of your traffic. You can also perform log debugging. It provides all the things that Azure's firewall doesn't offer. Plus, you have full ownership of your device.

Firstly, Palo Alto should update their documentation to make it more readable and provide easier-to-follow instructions through videos. This would help people learn and deploy the product more easily. Even if the product itself is excellent, lacking proper documentation and troubleshooting guidance renders it less useful. It won't be helpful even if it's rock solid but lacks sufficient information and tutorials.

I've been using Palo Alto as a VM for about three months. I use the latest version.

It is a stable solution. I would rate the stability a ten out of ten.

It is a scalable solution. We have more than 20 entities using this solution. 

Customer service and support are great. The response time is good. My experience with them was very good. 

I used Azure Firewall for a while, but then I removed it and installed Palo Alto.

The setup requires professional people to work on it. It's not straightforward. Knowledge is needed to adapt it to your platform. 

So, it's not an entry-level solution; it requires professional and expert-level skills.

I deployed the solution myself. The deployment process took about three to four days. It depends on your production environment because I had to migrate production.

Only one person is required for deployment and maintenance. 

I can't make a suggestion because it depends on the specific needs they have. They can consider using the entry-level version or opt for the expert lab, depending on their workload.

Overall, I would rate the solution a nine out of ten. 

I've mainly worked with the VM-Series, and a few features have been really effective for threat prevention in our networks, like McAfee training, Accountant ID, and apps ID. These features integrate well with our existing environments and tools, such as Panorama. 

 The VM-Series scalability is fast and easy to implement, improving our security posture as our Azure network grows. The only minor issue we've faced is with the apps ID configuration, which requires specific matching for application filtering. Tools like Loopback help us identify open or denied flows between two firewalls and manage the servers effectively. The Palo Alto system easily identifies rules and objects within roles, making maintenance straightforward.

No other major concerns, just the specific issue with Apps ID configuration. Otherwise, overall stability, VPN, IPSec, VRF, and flow management with the VM-Series have been very stable and reliable.

I have been using Palo Alto Networks VM-Series for 2 years.

I've had a positive experience with Palo Alto's support. They usually respond within a few hours, which is satisfactory

Positive

In my experience, Palo Alto and Fortinet offer similar quality and high-level security compared to other vendors like Cisco and Forcepoint. They stand out in terms of reliability and security features. Other vendors may not match their level of performance and security.

It is easy to maintain because we have various tools to manage and monitor the system. 

The pricing for Palo Alto is quite high compared to FortiGate, which is more affordable. I don't have the exact figures as my manager handles that, but from my research, Palo Alto's licensing costs are significantly higher.

I would rate Palo Alto Networks VM-Series as an eight overall. My recommendation for others considering this tool would be to ensure they have the budget for it, as it can be expensive compared to alternatives like FortiGate. Also, they should be prepared to understand and document their application metrics thoroughly to implement the firewall correctly. 

We use the solution for inter-VPC traffic segmentation and inspection. I also use it for external interfaces.

The product gives us the ability to do malware detection and file inspection.

The tool provides ease of use for GUI management and deployment. The product provides more visibility into our traffic. It also helps with troubleshooting a bit of high-level next-generation platforms. The auto-update feature of App-ID is valuable. Traffic monitoring, threat monitoring, and dashboards are the most impactful for our network security.

Having visibility and alerts and being able to react to them is valuable. The integration of VM-Series with cloud services has helped us a lot to streamline our security operations. The solution has ease of use. The web interface and the traffic monitoring are more centralized.

The cost must be improved. The tool is very costly.

I have been using the solution for more than five years.

I rate the tool’s stability a nine or ten out of ten.

I rate the tool’s scalability an eight or nine out of ten.

The technical support is really good. I rate the technical support a nine or ten out of ten.

We deploy AWS VPC as a virtual appliance, as a security VPC. The initial deployment was moderately easy. It is not complex, though.

I have used Juniper. Palo Alto’s next-generation features are better than Juniper’s.

The cloud service providers are also coming up with similar features. It can get really competitive for Palo Alto. People who want to use the solution must engage the system engineer for the deployment, vetting process, and initial implementation. Overall, I rate the product a nine to ten out of ten.

We use this product to secure our entire network, for ZTNA structure, and for VPN purposes, allowing access to our servers behind the firewall.

Using this product has increased our security and has given us much better results in terms of security scans.

Palo Alto embeds machine learning into the core of the firewall to provide online real-time attack prevention, and I would rate that capability an 8 out of 10. It's definitely effective in terms of securing our network against threats that are able to evolve and morph rapidly.

This solution provides a unified platform that natively integrates all of the security capabilities, although we are not using parts of it. For example, we don't use the configuration tools like Panorama.

The most valuable feature is the CLI.

We have the firewall configured for zero-day signatures, which is very important to us. We must be HIPAA and PCI compliant, which means that we need those signatures immediately.

There is no noticeable trade-off between security and network performance. In fact, so far, we've not seen any negative network performance with it. We're very impressed in that regard.

The web interface, especially when committing changes, remains a bit slower than I would like, but it has improved over the years. Reboots for the VM series do take longer than I would have expected. 

I have been working with the Palo Alto Networks VM-Series for almost 5 years.

This product is very stable. We have had zero problems with stability.

The scalability is fantastic. We're using the lowest-end product right now, and I don't foresee when we'll have to upgrade. We have a long way where we can continue to scale up.

We currently have multiple people that use it for VPN purposes, to access our servers behind the firewall. It is not used nearly as extensively as it should be. However, in the future we will start flowing all of our internet traffic through it.

We're all working remotely, and we're going to be connecting through the firewall. This means that our traffic is going to greatly increase, meaning that our usage will also increase. We'll also be using many more of the features.

The technical support from Palo Alto is good, overall. However, their response times could be a little quicker.

We have not really had any big complaints with the technical support and I would rate them a seven out of ten.

Neutral

Prior to using Palo Alto, we were using an on-premises solution by Juniper. When we switched from onsite to the cloud, we changed products.

We made the switch because Juniper became unbearable regarding complexity and performance. It was getting very bad; we couldn't manage it well, and the performance was quite poor. 

The initial setup can be quite complex. There is a steep learning curve and we failed at it a few times before we were able to put a production machine into place.

Our final deployment took between three and four hours.

Our in-house team was responsible for the deployment.

We have absolutely seen a return on our investment. We are definitely more secure. With the features that are in Palo Alto, we do not have to worry about people busting into our network. Even just out of the box, with the base features, it's very solid. The default configurations are quite secure.

Our return on investment comes from the fact that no longer need to spend hours monitoring our network the way we did before. We've saved man hours and we've saved stress. I am unable put a monetary value to that, but that would be the return.

This is not the cheapest firewall but it's not the most expensive of the options on the market.

The new licensing structure is a little difficult to understand at first, but with the right thought put into it, would like save some money. 

Beyond Palo Alto, we evaluated two or three other products. Two of them that I can recall are Fortinet and the Microsoft Azure Firewall.

We did some extensive reviews and some extensive testing and what we found is that for the price, Palo Alto gave us the best options. It had the best set of security features. It wasn't the cheapest product but it was the best solution that fit our requirements.

We have not yet implemented the DNS security features but we will in the future. 

If one of my colleagues at another company were to say that they were just looking for the cheapest and fastest firewall, I would suggest that they be careful. Palo Alto has a great balance. It's not super expensive compared to other options on the market, and it's quite quick when it comes to throughput and performance.

In summary, this is a good product but I do suggest that people shop around a little bit.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

The primary use case involves using next-generation firewalls, hardware, VM-Series, Prisma Access for SASE solutions, Prisma Cloud for cloud security posture management, and Cloud Workload Protection. It's used primarily for securing customers' virtualized data center environments as well as public cloud environments.

The additional visibility, which was lacking with cloud-native tools, has improved the organization's cloud security posture. Advanced enforcement and granular security controls help manage potential threats.

The most effective feature for threat prevention is the threat prevention model in the VM-Series. This is bundled with advanced URL filtering, decryption, and wildfire sandboxing.

If additional web application firewall capabilities could be integrated into the existing firewall, it would negate the need for additional products.

I've been working with Palo Alto VM-Series for at least five to six years now.

We haven't had challenges with failovers yet.

We've controlled the scalability via VMSS in Azure, using auto-scale groups in AWS. It's quite seamless, though there's room for improvement in cost management, especially during traffic spikes.

The technical support is great. We've had no challenges and there are established channels for customer success and professional services.

Positive

In the past, I used to work with Check Point, but haven't worked with them lately. Given the support from Palo Alto, there hasn't been a necessity to explore others.

The integration process involved using a Panorama setup for centralized firewall administration, transitioning from cloud-native firewalls to VM-Series.

We are primarily a consulting firm and reseller, so we've had significant involvement in the process.

The solution tends to add to costs especially when scaling, although measures like using large compute instances minimize the need for scaling.

Potential competitors mentioned are Check Point and Cisco but haven't been evaluated recently.

For straightforward firewall inspection and basic IPS, IDS requirements, native firewalls might suffice. For more advanced needs, using VM-Series or Palo Alto Firewalls is recommended.

I would rate it an eight out of ten.