I’m studying for the Palo Alto Networks Certified Network Security Administrator (PCNSA) certification. In the last few months I’ve been getting more familiar with the next-generation firewalls (NGFW) and I’m also a partner over at Packet6 where we resell the solution.
There are three principal groups that come together to build the Palo Alto Networks cybersecurity portfolio. They are Strata, Prisma, and Cortex.
Strata is the Enterprise Security portion of the portfolio. It contains the Next-Generation Firewalls which you may have heard of such as the PA-200, 800, 3200 and 5200 series appliances. There are also VM-Series for your virtual firewall needs, and the CN-Series for Container Native.
Strata Enterprise Security also includes Security Subscriptions. There many types of subscriptions such as Threat Prevention, URL Filtering, WildFire, DNS Security, IoT, Data Loss Prevention, GlobalProtect, SD-WAN, and Panorama.
Then there’s Prisma: Cloud Security. This includes Prisma Cloud containing Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) and Cloud Workload Protection Platform (CWPP), Prisma Access (their SASE or Secure Access Service Edge), and Prisma SaaS.
Within Cortex is their Security Operations solutions which includes Cortex XDR to give you visibility of network traffic, user behavior, and endpoint activity, Cortex XSOAR for security orchestration, automation, and response or SOAR, Cortex Data Lake for collecting large volumes of log data – Palo Alto Networks’ own log infrastructure and log automation, and then there’s AutoFocus which is a single source for threat intelligence providing event context from Unit 42 and contains community-based threat data.
Those are the three main components of the Palo Alto Networks Cybersecurity Portfolio. Identifying the basics of which does what in the line of products is important for the PCNSA exam, objective 1.1 – Identifying the components of the Palo Alto Networks Cybersecurity Portfolio.
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