Palo Alto Networks, the network security company, has extended its technology and market leadership with new next-generation firewall software and a major customer milestone. With its PAN-OS 3.1 software, Palo Alto Networks enables finer-grained control over business and Web 2.0 applications for enterprises and distributed computing environments. The company has surpassed the 1,000 enterprise customer milestone, which includes Fortune 500 organizations such as Constellation Energy, DTE Energy, Qualcomm and Western &Southern Financial Group.

"Palo Alto Networks is at an inflection point in terms of market penetration and growth, as more enterprise companies conclude that they need next-generation firewalls in their network security infrastructure," said Rene Bonvanie, vice president of worldwide marketing at Palo Alto Networks.

"Since we offer the industry's only next-gen firewall to classify and control applications within the firewall, instead of using clumsy bolt-on functionality, Palo Alto Networks is the clear choice for companies that want to enforce complete network security with the best available price performance."

Control Enterprise 2.0 Risks with PAN-OS 3.1

With or without their company's acknowledgement, workers increasingly rely upon Enterprise 2.0 applications such as Facebook, SharePoint, Twitter, and other social networking and collaborative applications to help them do their jobs. Despite their benefits, these applications also carry inordinate risk, including data leaks, compliance issues, viruses, exploits, and many more security threats. IT managers can neither block these applications, nor can they blindly allow them to run across their network. IT professionals must safely enable applications by enforcing appropriate usage policies tailored for their workforce.

•  App-ID has a new function-based hierarchy (versus a flat structure) for better control over application enablement. This means organizations can easily enable an application and disable certain functions – like enabling Facebook while disabling Facebook apps. This new hierarchical structure in PAN-OS 3.1 allows more powerful, finer-grained policies that are easier to manage.
•  User-ID now offers pervasive coverage with support for LDAP directories such as eDirectory and OpenLDAP, in addition to Microsoft Active Directory, so IT managers can link application traffic to specific users and groups – not just IP addresses. User-ID also now features an API for integration with other repositories.  User-ID is unique in the firewall market in its ability to provide enterprises with both visibility and policy control of users and groups.
•  Content-ID offers even better protection with daily threat signature releases as well as the ability to customize threat signatures for specific applications and vulnerabilities. Additionally, because threat developers continue to exploit the Web 2.0 movement, Palo Alto Networks has added protections against JavaScript and HTML viruses to Content-ID in PAN-OS 3.1. As a result, Content-ID is a more powerful, real-time threat prevention engine that detects and blocks a wide range of threats, limits unauthorized transfer of files and data, and controls non-work related Web surfing.