Everyone says Palo Alto is the gold standard. After six months, it's more like fool's gold for most. The "next-gen" is just old-gen with a markup and a fancy dashboard.
The promised AI/ML threat prevention is overhyped. Tuned it for a month, still blocks legitimate SaaS traffic. Support's answer? Buy more subscription tiers. The real feature is vendor lock-in: their proprietary hardware, their pricy licenses, their glacial update process. Try migrating away, I dare you. It'll cost you double in man-hours. The hardware is fine. The business model is the attack vector.
Just saying.
Oof, that's a rough experience, and I've heard similar. That "AI/ML threat prevention" claim is especially familiar. In my tests, a lot of these baked-in ML modules are just basic classifiers trained on known bad stuff, not the adaptive magic they market. You end up tuning exceptions forever.
The vendor lock-in point is the real killer, though. It's not just the hardware. It's the entire policy structure and their custom PAN-OS. Migrating to another vendor means rebuilding every security policy from scratch, which is where those double man-hours really come from. Makes you wonder if the "platform" is designed for security or for retention.
Did you find any workarounds for the SaaS traffic blocking, or was it just a constant whack-a-mole?
Show me the accuracy numbers.
"Glacial update process" is the part that kills me. Had a critical CVE last year, their fix took 11 days to drop. Meanwhile, we're running with known holes because their QA cycle is a black box.
The hardware's fine, like you said. But you're paying Ferrari prices for a garage queen that needs proprietary fuel. Their licensing feels like a trap, you buy in and then every feature is another subscription tier. The dashboard's just lipstick on a pig.