Management features, application visibility, sandboxing and small branch office options are among its greatest strengths. Some complexity, but users praise the product’s rich features. Users report relatively easy implementation. Price is often the reason that potential buyers look elsewhere, Gartner reports, especially in distributed organizations. NSS Labs gave Palo Alto a $7 TCO per protected Mbps, in the middle of the pack. NSS Labs gave the PA-5220 a 98.7% security effectiveness rating in recent tests, fourth best among vendors it tested (the top four were all within a percentage point of each other), while the device’s 7,888 Mbps performance was tops among solutions tested. Combined with automated event aggregation and filtering and drill-down options, this makes it easier to understand application flows and related risks. The Application Command Center includes visibility of sanctioned and unsanctioned SaaS applications. It automatically disseminates updated protections globally in near-real time. WildFire identifies unknown malware, zero-day exploits, and advanced persistent threats (APTs) through static and dynamic analysis in a virtual environment.

Content-ID limits unauthorized data transfer and blocks threats. The firewalls combine policy enforcement and cyberthreat prevention via the company’s Content-ID and WildFire sandboxing features. Models range from the low-end PA-200 to the high-end PA-7000. The NGFWs classify all traffic, including encrypted traffic, based on application, application function, user and content. Its next-generation firewalls run on its PAN-OS. Gartner placed Palo Alto in the Leaders quadrant and gave it one of the highest ratings in its enterprise firewall Magic Quadrant. It serves more than 42,500 customers in 150+ countries. It has been in the enterprise firewall business for a more than a decade. Palo Alto Networks is a security vendor based in Santa Clara, Calif., with more than 4,000 employees and annual revenues of more than $1.4 billion. The company’s next-generation firewalls offer strong security with best-in-class performance, and solid core features often make it an enterprise shortlist candidate – where it frequently winds up with the highest overall evaluation score. If you’ve got the budget, Palo Alto’s got game. See our complete list of top next-generation firewall vendors.

Pan firewall