Show 160 – Palo Alto Networks and Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Next-Gen Firewalls – Sponsored

Palo Alto Networks are big fans of the show and they are excited to geek out about next-generation firewalls in this podcast. What you’ll hear about on this show is the unique technologies that help you deliver visibility, control and safe application enablement of applications in your network. This show was specifically planned to have zero security FUD (like normally happens) but instead  focus on real security services that network engineers are expected to deliver. You know, instead of picking locks and hacking Android phones for 3rd time this week, we are talking about configuring firewalls to provide deeper and more effective security for your infrastructure and services.

Show Topics

• Accurate traffic classification – how we apply multiple classification techniques to determine the exact identity of applications in the network regardless of ports, protocol, evasive tactic or encryption.
• Directory user/group identities in policies – how we tie user identity into security policies to allow you to have visibility and auditability into who is using which application or is responsible for content and threat traffic in your network.
• Protection from known and unknown threats – you’ll hear about our complete threat prevention framework, tackles known and unknown threats. We remove the methods that threats use to hide from security, and address known threats with our integrated threat prevention capabilities (IPS, anti-malware, URL filtering, file/content block). Finally, to tackle the unknown targeted attacks and APTs, we provide sandbox analysis of suspicious files and create a signature to address any modern malware we find.
• Performance – we’ll discuss the architecture that enables us to meet performance requirements even when all threat prevention features are enabled.
• One unified policy – the above is implemented with a single policy rule base, not via multiple tabs.
• Management, management, management – Finally, we’ll talk about the various integrated visibility, reporting and logging tools available to you, along with our options for management (device, centralized and CLI).

At the end of the podcast, we also present a very exclusive offer just for Packet Pushers listeners – an opportunity to gain visibility into the traffic in your network via our Application Visibility and Risk Report.  We will place our firewalls in your network and after a week, provide summary data of the applications and threats that we see.  The first five completed AVR will receive their very own PA-200 to keep. Listen to the podcast , and check out www.paloaltonetworks.com/packetpushers for more information.

You can follow @PaloAltoNtwks on the twitter too.

Danelle Au (@DanelleAu) and Nick Campagna – Palo Alto Networks