TECHNOLOGY DESCRIPTION:

The digital world has transformed modern business. The growing use of the Internet has placed more demands than ever on the corporate data center. Organizations today rely more on their IT infrastructure to enable growth, agility, and productivity. But where there is opportunity, there is also risk. Enterprises must protect their end users and they must also protect the intellectual property and mission-critical applications that reside in their data centers.

While perimeter devices are expected to protect end users and a wide range of end user applications, data center security devices are deployed to protect servers and applications hosted in the data center. Data center security gateways (DCSGs) converge data center firewall (DCFW) and data center IPS (DCIPS) technologies, and as such, play a vital role in today’s security infrastructure. The goal of the DCSG is to provide access control in the data center and deep packet inspection in order to protect servers and applications from remote attacks.

PRODUCT EVALUATED:

NSS Labs performed an independent test of the Palo Alto Networks PA-5250 PAN-OS 8.0.3-h4. The product was subjected to thorough testing at the NSS facility in Austin, Texas, based on the Data Center Network Security Test Methodology v1.0. This test was conducted free of charge and NSS did not receive any compensation in return for Palo Alto Network’s participation.

PRODUCT TESTED IN THE FOLLOWING AREAS:

• Security Effectiveness: Capable of enforcing a specified security policy effectively
• Performance: Measures the performance of a solution both for IPv4 and IPv6 using various traffic conditions that provide metrics for real-world performance
• Stability and Reliability: Ability of a solution to maintain security effectiveness while under normal and excessive utilization and while managing malicious traffic
• Total Cost of Ownership (TCO): Costs associated with overall cost of deployment, maintenance, and upkeep

As with all NSS Labs group tests, there was no fee for participation. In addition, the test methodology applied is in the public domain to provide transparency and to help enterprises understand the results.