Making the Next Generation Firewall Smarter for the Enterprise

 (Editor’s Note: This article refers to a video interview shot in San Jose as part of TMCnet’s “On the Road” video series. To view the entire library of videos from Road Shows and other industry shows, as well as product demos and interviews in our in-house studio, visit the TMCnet Videos home page.)

Traditionally, firewalls have been designed to be cornerstone of network security. But, in reality legacy firewalls are no longer an effective security solution to manage the risks and rewards of today’s Internet applications in the enterprise. In reality, with increasing number of applications, the threats riding on the back of these applications have also mushroomed. Industry’s response has been to sell more stuff, such as intrusion prevention, URL filtering device, proxy and more. As a result, network firewall is getting more and more complicated while doing less and less, according to Chris King, director of product marketing at Palo Alto Networks.

In presenting his company’s response to the network security issue, King talked about the next generation firewall to TMCnet’s CEO Rich Tehrani (News - Alert). In that video interview, King stated that Palo Alto Networks’ has fixed the problem by making the firewall smarter.

“Palo Alto Networks has fixed the firewall by solving the root security problem: the ability to identify and control applications, users and content,” said King. By using our next generation Firewall, enterprises can accurately identify applications, scan content to stop threats, and prevent data leakage – all with a single network device, asserted King. Consequently, by reducing the number of security devices in their networks, companies can save both capital expenditures and operational costs, added King.

According to King, the next generation firewall is based on an innovative single pass parallel processing architecture that simplifies management, streamlines processing, and maximizes performance. In this scheme, continued King, the single pass software performs traffic analysis only once across each functional area, including networking, application classification, user classification and threat prevention. As per King’s explanation, “the software is tied directly to a parallel processing hardware platform that uses separate processors for each of these functions to maximize throughput and minimize latency.”

When asked about what’s next from Palo Alto (News - Alert) Networks, King was quick to point in the direction of GlobalProtect, a recently announced solution aimed at securing remote endpoints. GlobalProtect extends the same visibility and control of applications, users, and content that the company customers typically enjoy inside the enterprise network to endpoints outside the network, King said.

For detailed interview, check out the video below:

http://www.tmcnet.com/tmc/videos/default.aspx?vid=2869&title=Chris+King+of+Palo+Alto+Networks