Book Image

Mastering Palo Alto Networks

By : Tom Piens aka Piens aka 'reaper'
Book Image

Mastering Palo Alto Networks

By: Tom Piens aka Piens aka 'reaper'

Overview of this book

To safeguard against security threats, it is crucial to ensure that your organization is effectively secured across networks, mobile devices, and the cloud. Palo Alto Networks’ integrated platform makes it easy to manage network and cloud security along with endpoint protection and a wide range of security services. With this book, you'll understand Palo Alto Networks and learn how to implement essential techniques, right from deploying firewalls through to advanced troubleshooting. The book starts by showing you how to set up and configure the Palo Alto Networks firewall, helping you to understand the technology and appreciate the simple, yet powerful, PAN-OS platform. Once you've explored the web interface and command-line structure, you'll be able to predict expected behavior and troubleshoot anomalies with confidence. You'll learn why and how to create strong security policies and discover how the firewall protects against encrypted threats. In addition to this, you'll get to grips with identifying users and controlling access to your network with user IDs and even prioritize traffic using quality of service (QoS). The book will show you how to enable special modes on the firewall for shared environments and extend security capabilities to smaller locations. By the end of this network security book, you'll be well-versed with advanced troubleshooting techniques and best practices recommended by an experienced security engineer and Palo Alto Networks expert.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
1
Section 1: First Steps and Basic Configuration
4
Section 2: Advanced Configuration and Putting the Features to Work
10
Section 3: Maintenance and Troubleshooting

The upgrade process

When you start the upgrade process, quickly recheck each of the preceding eight steps and reach out to your stakeholders to let them know that the maintenance window is about to start and to wait for your signal to test whether all the applications and processes are running smoothly. Do this well in time so that they have time to shut down any processes that do not handle interruptions too well.

The first step is to upgrade Panorama.

Upgrading a single Panorama instance

While upgrading Panorama introduces the least risks in terms of network impact as it doesn't process sessions, a standalone Panorama instance does require an appropriate amount of precaution as a failed upgrade could introduce some difficulties with managing the firewalls. Be extra sure that an up-to-date configuration save is stored in a secure location, then follow these steps:

  1. If any configuration changes have not been committed, review and save them, then collect a running...