Palo Alto Networks Expands Breach Prevention Capabilities, Operational Efficiency

PRESS RELEASE

Santa Clara, Calif., June 9, 2015 – Palo Alto Networks (NYSE: PANW), the leader in enterprise security, today announced enhancements to its industry-leading security platform designed to safely enable applications and prevent cyber breaches.  The advancements announced today, which are included in the PAN-OS 7.0 release, expand the prevention capabilities of the platform through enhanced analysis, automation and operational efficiencies – all designed to help customers block threats from compromising their networks, endpoints and cloud-enabled data centers.

As the threat landscape grows increasingly complex, many IT security teams struggle to keep pace with advanced threats because they’re overwhelmed by the volume of alerts generated by legacy, point security and threat detection products. There is little analysis or automation that helps quickly identify and automatically prevent threats at the earliest stages of the attack lifecycle.

The Palo Alto Networks security platform and the new features introduced today help security professionals overcome the inertia caused by the overwhelming volume of alerts and manual processes associated with operating many discrete security products, and, instead, expand breach prevention capabilities and boost operational efficiency.

Key new advancements include:

·         A new Automated Correlation Engine that identifies and prevents compromised hosts in an organization’s network by correlating patterns to pinpoint malicious activity.

·         WildFire threat intelligence enhancements that enable automated analysis of files against multiple versions of applications to identify malware specifically targeting legacy versions; the enhancements also classify malware by threat level, so teams can better prioritize their threat response for quick preventative action when needed.

·         A new high-capacity Network Processing Card for the PA-7050 that provides prevention at scale for data center environments with higher 10G port density and new 40G ports.

·         Advanced policy management capabilities within Panorama that make it even easier to create security policies and device configurations that can be easily and appropriately applied to many next-generation firewall instances, physical or virtual, reducing the chances for human error and gaps in the policy or configuration.

QUOTES

·         "Most important among many new capabilities featured in the new PAN-OS 7.0 is the ability to quickly identify and take preventative action against threats of all kinds in various stages of the attack lifecycle and across any network segment.” 

- Scott Gainey, vice president of product marketing at Palo Alto Networks

·         “Before we had Palo Alto Networks, our security team was getting overwhelmed by the mountains of data that provided little direction for taking quick action to prevent cyber threats. The Palo Alto Networks approach and latest PAN-OS version has put an end to this madness by helping us identify the ‘needles in the haystack’ so that we can better protect our network.”  
- Dallan M. Wagner, information security engineer, Academy Mortgage Corporation

·         “As organizations grow and adopt new technologies like virtualized datacenters amidst an evolving and complex threat landscape, security teams are implementing more security devices and policies. Streamlined management capabilities like those introduced in Palo Alto Networks PAN-OS 7.0 can extend prevention capabilities and dramatically reduce the likelihood of human error that often causes a significant amount of network downtime.” 
- Jeff Wilson, research director, cybersecurity technology, Infonetics

In addition to the more than 70 feature enhancements in PAN-OS 7.0, Palo Alto Networks is introducing today a new Panorama M-500 management appliance that is ideally suited for data centers and the largest enterprise deployments. Additionally, VM-series is now available directly from Amazon’s AWS marketplace supporting usage-based pricing on a per-hour or per-year basis. Application Command Center enhancementsalso enrich the visualization of network traffic and shorten response time to threats, thanks to a highly interactive and customizable dashboard that provides easily understood, actionable information.

For more information about these updates and new features in PAN-OS 7.0, please visit: http://go.paloaltonetworks.com/panos7

Availability

PAN-OS 7.0 is now available to Palo Alto Networks customers with a current support contract. The M-500 management appliance and Network Processing Card are expected to be available by the end of June.

To learn more about the Palo Alto Networks Security Platform, visit: https://www.paloaltonetworks.com/products/platforms.html.

About Palo Alto Networks

Palo Alto Networks is leading a new era in cybersecurity by protecting thousands of enterprise, government, and service provider networks from cyber threats. Unlike fragmented legacy products, our security platform safely enables business operations and delivers protection based on what matters most in today's dynamic computing environments: applications, users, and content. Find out more at www.paloaltonetworks.com.

Palo Alto Networks, the Palo Alto Networks Logo and PAN-OS are trademarks of Palo Alto Networks, Inc. in the United States and in jurisdictions throughout the world. All other trademarks, trade names or service marks used or mentioned herein belong to their respective owners.