Supercharge Your Web Security: Announcing PA-5450 Support for Web Proxy

[vekrishnan]

This blog was written by Sharol Pereira

In today's dynamic threat landscape, securing web traffic is one of the biggest challenges organizations face. Traditional web proxies often fail to provide comprehensive protection, leaving you vulnerable to advanced threats and data loss.

That's why we're excited to highlight the powerful native web proxy capabilities introduced in our PAN-OS 12.1.2 (Orion) release and announce its full support on the industry-leading PA-5450 ML-Powered Next-Generation Firewall.

This combination allows you to consolidate your security stack and deploy a high-performance, scalable web security solution directly on your NGFW.

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The Problem with Traditional Proxies

For years, organizations have relied on standalone web proxies, but these legacy solutions are struggling to keep up. They often create security gaps, including:

• Inability to Scale: ​​Traditional hub and spoke architecture with disparate security offerings increases the  complexity and risk of cloud adoption
• Security Gaps: Inconsistent security products, capabilities and policies depending on a user’s physical location increases the risk of data breach
• Bad User Experience: Backhauling traffic to a data center for security policy enforcement creates latency for end users

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A Modern Solution: The PA-5450 as a Web Proxy

Instead of relying on a separate, less secure solution, you can now leverage the full power of our Next-Generation Firewalls as your web proxy. By unifying web proxying with our core security platform, you get a single, simplified solution that delivers:

• Advanced Threat Prevention: Go beyond basic filtering. Apply our full suite of security services, including Threat Emulation (WildFire sandboxing), Antivirus, Anti-Spyware, and Vulnerability Protection.
• Advanced URL Filtering: Implement granular policies to control web access based on user, group, and time, and enforce Safe Search.
• Integrated Data Loss Prevention (DLP): Identify and prevent the unauthorized transfer of sensitive data, like credit card numbers or intellectual property, through web channels.
• Application and User Identification: Our patented App-ID and User-ID technologies allow you to build policies based on the application and user, not just ports and IP addresses.

Why the PA-5450 Hardware is a Game-Changer

Running all these services, especially SSL decryption, requires immense processing power. This is where the PA-5450 shines.

The PA-5450 is a high-performance, industry-first modular platform designed for hyperscale data centers and large campus internet edge deployments with ground-breaking performance numbers especially for proxy. It delivers incredible throughput, providing more than enough power to run full threat inspection and decryption for all your web traffic without creating a bottleneck.

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See It in Action

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Flexible Deployment to Fit Your Network

The web proxy feature supports the two primary deployment models, giving you the flexibility to secure your traffic with minimal disruption:

1. Explicit Proxy: In this mode, client browsers are explicitly configured (often via a PAC file) to send web traffic to the firewall. This is ideal for organizations with existing proxy configurations.
2. Transparent Proxy: Traffic is transparently redirected to the firewall for inspection without requiring any configuration on the client devices. This is seamless for end-users.

To identify users, the proxy supports robust authentication mechanisms including SAML, Kerberos, and a 'no-auth' option for guest or managed-device scenarios. 

 

Get Started Today

By combining the robust web proxy features of the PAN-OS 12.1.2 (Orion) release with the powerhouse performance of the PA-5450, you can finally consolidate your security, eliminate blind spots, and simplify your operations.

Ready to dive deeper? For detailed configuration steps, check out the technical documentation:

Configure a Web Proxy on PAN-OS

Live Community for Web Proxy

PA-5450 Datasheet