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

Redirecting sessions over different paths using policy-based forwarding

Policy-Based Forwarding (PBF) allows you to set up rules that let certain sessions bypass routing entirely. In the first stage of packet processing, a session can be sent over a different interface than what the routing table would normally dictate. This could be handy if you want to send certain sessions over a secondary ISP link (or leased line) or if you need to ensure packets go out on a specific VLAN, tunnel, or SD-WAN interface.

Redirecting critical traffic

A common scenario is a small office with a cheap but unreliable DSL or cable uplink with high bandwidth for internet traffic and a reliable but expensive link for business-critical applications. While the default route in the virtual router directs all traffic out of the DSL or cable model, a PBF rule could redirect critical protocols, such as SAP, SQL, and so on, over your leased line:

  1. Go to Policies | Policy Based Forwarding to create...