The best NGFW won’t protect your business if your team doesn’t know how to use it. Determine your buying committee’s level of expertise and study reviews to find firewalls with easy-to-use interfaces.
ML-powered NGFWs stop patient zero with industry-first real-time protection against unknown files and web-based threats. New ML innovations also automate policy recommendations to save time and reduce human error.
Scalability
Protect your network with a next-generation firewall that combines sophisticated tools with automation and integration. NGFWs can load threat intelligence automatically, reconfigure rules based on that information, and inspect SSL traffic to help detect advanced attacks.
ML-powered NGFWs use machine learning to predict how IoT devices and other applications will behave, reducing human error while keeping up with changes. This helps security administrators avoid creating permissive policies that open the network to unknown threats and reduce the time from visibility to prevention.
With a single-pass architecture, NGFWs process traffic faster than traditional firewalls and can block known and unknown threats quickly and accurately. This improves network performance and enables security teams to prioritize business-critical applications.
Palo Alto Networks NGFWs deliver best-in-class security features with unparalleled ease of use. Cloud NGFW for AWS aligns with Zero Trust and enables secure application access, inspects all traffic, and helps enforce least-privileged access – all while detecting and preventing advanced threats. The solution is a managed service on AWS that handles deployment, scalability, resiliency, and software updates.
Flexibility
There are many different advantages to using FortiGate NGFW vs Palo Alto. In addition to advanced threat detection capabilities such as App-ID, URL filtering, and deep packet inspection, the Palo Alto firewall can also learn about threats across the internet dynamically. This information is communicated to the firewall in real-time, enabling it to block attacks before they hit the network.
This flexibility allows security teams to focus on their mission rather than the burden of managing security rules and tags. It also helps reduce human error and enables security teams to deploy a consistent security posture across the network, including remote locations and IoT devices.
For example, the VM-Series software NGFW is offered with the industry’s most flexible credit-based consumption model. Customers can use a Customer Support Portal to keep track of used and remaining Flex Credits. They can also quickly reallocate credits to meet changing needs.
Similarly, the PA-415-5G offers integrated 5G connectivity for primary or backup connections and is an excellent solution for distributed enterprises with limited budgets. It delivers 2.5X Layer 7 App-ID performance and 50% higher session capacity than its predecessor and provides the highest threat prevention performance in a compact 2 RU design.
Security
An NGFW with built-in next-generation IPS and IDS detects stealthy attacks that may surpass other front-line security measures. It can identify and stop these attacks before they cause damage to your business. It can also help you comply with industry regulations like PCI DSS.
In addition, NGFW can protect against threats at the application layer, such as SQL injection, XSS, and DDoS attacks, common in many business applications. Unlike traditional firewalls, which only detect the packet content, NGFWs can identify the malicious code, thus enabling them to prevent these attacks.
The NGFW can prevent new, unknown, and advanced threats using inline machine learning models. This enables the device to analyze data like humans rather than relying on structured information like signatures. It can also block evasive threats with zero-delay protection, stopping them in less than 10 seconds.
NGFW can also integrate with Smart SOAR to automate threat blocking and streamline security rules and tag management. This improves your security posture and minimizes misconfiguration, which can increase your risk of attack.
Performance
When evaluating NGFWs for your enterprise, it is essential to familiarize yourself with the vendor products and models available. It is also helpful to understand your organization’s needs and growth expectations. This will help you select the best model to protect your business from advanced threats and other risks.
NGFWs protect multiple layers (OSI 3-4 and 7). This helps them detect attacks such as SQL injection, XSS, DDoS, and others on the OWASP Top 10. Additionally, they can inspect HTTP traffic to prevent web-based threats and meet compliance requirements.
An ML-powered NGFW rearchitects how signatures are delivered, enabling them to detect and block new malware variants in seconds, not minutes. This is due to inline ML that analyzes and detects new threats without waiting for a scheduled signature update.
ML-powered NGFWs offer industry-first prevention of mysterious threats, including DNS attacks. They also deliver better performance than traditional firewalls. This performance is demonstrated in independent third-party testing, such as performance reports for distributed enterprise, campus, and data center use cases.
Deployment
ML-powered NGFWs use ML to detect and prevent new malware variants faster, reducing the time from visibility to prevention to single-digit seconds. This is critical to stopping sophisticated attacks that use evasion techniques.
Advanced ML technologies rearchitect how signatures are delivered, allowing the firewall to look for patterns and behaviors that indicate potential threats. This is more effective than traditional signatures that rely on rules and heuristics to recognize new malware.
Inline deep learning enables the firewall to stop unknown zero-day threats that evade signature-based detection. This industry-first capability moves beyond structured data analysis to analyze data more like humans, accelerating protection and eliminating signature latency.
The Palo Alto NGFW helps security teams automate threat blocking and streamlines security rules and tag management. This reduces the risk of misconfiguration and improves incident response workflows.