The Future is Cloud-Fabric!

If you remember earlier this week, I promised to give you an update around my trip to Santa Clara, California. I would like to stick to my promise and sharing a summary of all the wonderful things I've experienced this week at our headquarters.

Let me start with one sentence from the beginning, because I'm so deeply impressed on my own: "Palo Alto Networks simply rocks the Cybersecurity space and is clearly ahead on the market!". It's no surprise at all that Palo Alto Networks left the competition so far behind. This company has a very mature and solid Next-Generation-Firewall background - with a unique approach to drive the single plane of control - and the company grew over the years into the first and only Security-Cloud-Fabric by adding more and more capabilities to the platform.

What is this Cloud-Fabric thing? Well, did you know that you can now connect to your closest Palo Alto Networks Security-Service-POP over the Internet? We have hundreds of POPs all over the world. This helps to avoid expensive leased lines, backhauling traffic and worst case creating a lot of bad user experience, while trying to stick to old-fashioned DC-centric paradigms. As a customer you can now connect your sites and mobile users to your preferred POP and start enjoying full protection and all the great security capabilities and high cloud-fabric performance! No matter the choice of your current cloud provider (whether this is Azure, AWS, GCP or other Cloud Services), we protect the whole path to your apps and everything in between.

No matter whether you want to deploy a global Zero-Trust policy, applying Threat-Intelligence & Threat-Inspection to all of your traffic, uploading files to your Sandbox, leveraging Security Analytics, DNS Security, Web Control, Container & Serverless protection or just using the whole fabric as a global VPN hub, you get it everywhere for everyone/everything with a consistent security policy.

If you ever dreamed of a superior security stack while providing full compliance, the fastest path to your apps, increasing user experience and providing open interoperability at the same time? Here we go! Palo Alto Networks can provide it today, it's real and it works! You will even see a new Gartner Market around the whole solution.

Palo Alto Networks is ready today!

Before looking into more highlights, let me tell you that during the week we brought together 400+ people from all over the world! We had Sales people, Systems Engineers, inspiring Leaders & some of our brightest minds from SOC & Developer Teams and Product Management.

We had varied interactions around our Security Operating Platform and diving deeper into new design aspects, especially to cover the growing cloud-first mentality.

Truly reducing cyber risk requires having integrated, automated, and effective controls in place to detect and prevent threats, both known and unknown, at every stage of the attack lifecycle. The Palo Alto Networks Security Operating Platform is built from the ground up for prevention, offers full visibility of traffic–throughout the network, cloud and endpoints–enabling organizations across the globe to protect themselves against cyberattacks, based on how or where applications and data reside. The beauty of the solution is not only the maturity, the unified data lake, a single plane of control, but also the full dedication and passion of the whole company to make every new day more secure than the day before!

It was such a big pleasure, not only to dissect the topic with all the different teams, but also to hear the commit from first hands - many thanks to Nir Zuk, it was such an inspiring speech! I am really glad that he clearly sets out the rules of the game. No wonder it works so well with the new acquisitions, I have never seen such an execution before. Brilliant tech-companies are bought up whenever necessary and the code base is completely transferred to the existing Security Operating Platform. No fragmentation, no tinkering, Nir's message is very clear on this one:

"ONE AGENT, ONE CONSOLE, ONE DATA LAKE!"

Dear Nir, we cannot thank you enough for this and also for the rest of your message!

"While we are investing heavily into Cloud, we will continue to invest in our Network Security, to make sure our customers get the best Cybersecurity everywhere!"

Even though we are the No. 1 cybersecurity company in the world, we cannot just stand still and rest on it, we will continue to push and invest to create a safer future for our customers every day.

Finally we had so many highlights, it's really difficult to pick out the best of it, but I would like to highlight some of the technical sessions, where we had the chance to test some of our Cloud Security capabilities:

The picture above is showing one of our technical sessions, where we were playing the "Capture-The-Flag" game. We had to think into different cloud related problems and threats, while providing the proper output and resolution with help of our Cloud Security Platform.

We had to answer questions like: "The shipping container for a shop uses a proprietary protocol for communication with the message queue service XYZ. What port is being used currently for that communication?" The picture shows how we drilled down to the container level to answer the question. We had other challenges where we moved even down to the CMD-line level on a specific container or checking anomalies around serverless functions.

All-in-one, a great experience! I hope this gave you some insights and ideas of what is going on with Palo Alto Networks right now and in the future and maybe you are getting the same level of excitement like me!

Watch out for more news coming next week, as we are about to kick-off the SE Partner Summit in Las Vegas. While I'm writing the end of this article, I'm just sitting at the SFO airport, waiting for my flight to Vegas. And I was also thinking if I should change the headline to "The Future is Cloud-Fabric with Palo Alto Networks" ;-)

Wish you all a wonderful start of the new working week and thanks for reading!

Ciro Pizzo