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

Setting up Panorama

Before you get started, you will first need to decide how you want to deploy Panorama as there are many options available that can influence your choices. Panorama can be deployed as a physical appliance or a VM image, both locally and in the cloud. All of these options have their advantages over the others. A physical appliance can either be deployed as a Panorama instance or as a log collector, which can be bundled and spread out to make it more resilient and bandwidth-efficient, while keeping physical control over logs. VMs are very easy to deploy and run on nearly all common hypervisors that are likely already available, so no hardware is needed to deploy them. Cloud-based Panorama allows the admin optimal access from any location for management and firewall access.

The first step is to configure Panorama so that it can manage firewalls.

Initial Panorama configuration

Panorama can be deployed in a number of virtual environments, including KVM, NSX,...