Not too long ago, I was invited to a unique experience: Security Field Day 2. This was a great experience in which I got to interact with different vendors as they explained their products and services. To learn more about this event, including links to the videos that were made, head on over to https://techfieldday.com/event/xfd2/.
In the afternoon of the first day, we were brought to Palo Alto Networks (PANW) – https://www.paloaltonetworks.com/. Up until that time, all I knew about this company was that they had application aware firewalls that were making inroads into the market; however, I really had no experience with their products. I have worked on many firewalls during my career: Cisco, Juniper, Watchguard, Checkpoint. They were all similar in that rules were created based on ports. For instance, a rule could allow packets if they are going to a particular IP address over TCP port 80 (HTTP). The one thing I did know about PANW firewalls is that they went further than this – their firewalls could determine the actual application that was running over that port. This was important as malicious parties could just change their attack to a known port like TCP 80 to get through a firewall. This type of firewall is called next generation firewall or NGFW. Of course, other companies have their own NGFW models so I never really saw their firewall as being a particular advantage.
Then came a session with Nir Zuk, a co-founder of PANW and current Chief Technology Officer. Being a founder and current C-level officer, I knew he would be highlighting why PANW is a great company albeit through his own views. When he started, he had no slide deck (there was even a question if the black screen behind him would be ok on camera) so I knew I had to strap in for an interesting ride. What I was not ready for was his passion on why PANW took off and why they are one of the major Cybersecurity companies today.
Zuk started PANW for a simple reason: to try to unscrew the network community. There was a viewpoint that packet inspection firewalls were not good enough. While this was back in 2005, it is really obvious in today’s networking that they were correct especially when cloud services are brought into the mix. He referred to PANW as a Cybersecurity vendor, not a firewall company. In fact, he claimed that PANW is the largest Cybersecurity vendor in the world. I cannot back that up myself and a quick Google search questions the use of the word “largest.” However, after hearing their product strategy, I can tell you that PANW is a company that understands the direction of security and I expect them to play an integral role in keeping companies safe.
For the next couple of hours, I got to hear and see details about Palo Alto Network’s products from other PANW employees. For instance, Varun Badhwar spoke on extending security from on-premises to cloud, which is an extremely important concept in my opinion. He introduced us to Prisma, which is a security service from PANW. Today’s large cloud providers (AWS, Azure, etc.) have some great offerings around services. Personally, I work with Azure a lot and I can tell you that their security offerings are good but not great. Take a listen as to why Prisma is a product to consider:
PANW is not just a firewall company. They helped change the security landscape and I expect they will continue to enhance security stances for companies. If you have not already done so, check out this company’s products. Their leadership has the right mindset and the products they are introducing could be instrumental in helping to secure companies as they transition to cloud services.
DISCLAIMER: Tech Field Day is run by Gestalt IT (https://gestaltit.com/). They paid for my flight, hotel room, most food, and the transportation. PANW paid them to get myself (and the rest of the delegates) to visit; however, I was not financially compensated by PANW to be there or for this this blog post. PANW did give me a t-shirt, some chocolate, homemade beef jerky (really good), and some water while I was onsite. This blog post was written because of PANW message – this post was my own opinion and no one asked me to write it.