Need for physical firewalls in Branch Office

[Jim.wolfowitz]

Trying to wrap the concept around my head. Once you have subscribed to prisma access and connected all branch office by VPN networks, why do we still need hardware firewalls at each site? Why not have have all branch office and datacenter only traverse through Prisma Access? 

I am new and may be missing some key elements here. 

[PavelK]

Hello @Jim.wolfowitz

thanks for the post.

From my Prisma Access PoC, I learned that Palo Alto still recommends to keep on prem firewall for most of the customers. If you are sending all the traffic to Prisma Access where it will break out to internet, I do not think you need to keep on prem firewall, however if your SD-WAN appliance is breaking out some traffic locally instead of through Prisma, then a firewall is still useful for visibility/policy enforcement. Most of the SD-WAN vendors have limited support of IPS features/logging security events, so this is where firewall comes in.

Kind Regards

Pavel

[Jim.wolfowitz]

Thanks. What if we use Palo's prisma SD-WAN appliance? 

[PavelK · Accepted solution]

Thank you for reply @Jim.wolfowitz

The Prisma SD-WAN is re-branded CloudGenix appliance. The overall concept is the same. If you send all the traffic through SD-WAN to Prisma Access where it will break out to internet, then you will not need on prem firewall. Regarding local internet breakout directly through local internet attached to SD-WAN box instead of Prisma Access, while this is easy to setup in Prisma SD-WAN portal, it still can't match all the security features of Palo Alto firewall. You can do simple ACL, but options beyond this for advanced policies/IPS/logging are limited. Both Prisma SD-WAN and Prisma Access can integrate with each other smoothly, both portals are relatively easy to use. Unless you have complicated design/requirements, these 2 solutions should be enough.

Kind Regards

Pavel

[nikoolayy1]

As @PavelK mentioned ION devices have some security access list rules and you can review this under:

https://docs.paloaltonetworks.com/prisma/prisma-sd-wan/prisma-sd-wan-admin/prisma-sd-wan-stacked-sec...