Palo Alto Networks was founded in 2005 and shipped its first product in 2007. To date, they have more than 7,750 enterprise, government, and service provider customers worldwide, including many Fortune 500 companies.The management team and board of directors consist of key figures in the most important networking and security companies and related technologies, including the invention of stateful inspection, hardware-based security, and intrusion prevention. Palo Alto Networks' engineering team brings a track record of delivering quality networking and security solutions for Check Point, Cisco, NetScreen, McAfee, Juniper Networks, and others.
 

Palo Alto Networks has pioneered the next generation of network security with our innovative platform that allows you to secure your network and safely enable the increasingly complex and rapidly growing number of applications running on your networks. At the core of their platform is a Next-Generation Firewall which delivers visibility and control over application, users, and content within the firewall using a highly optimized hardware and software architecture. This platform uniquely offers you the ability to identify, control, and safely enable applications while at the same time inspecting all content for all threats all the time.

Unique capabilities available with Palo Alto Networks' Next Generation Firewall Include:
 

• Classify traffic based on the identification of the application, not just port/protocol information.
• Identify, control and inspect SSL encrypted traffic and applications.
• Real-time (line-rate, low latency) content scanning to protect against viruses, spyware, data leakage and application vulnerabilities based on a stream-based threat prevention engine.
• Provide graphical visualization of applications on the network with detailed user, group and network-level data categorized by sessions, bytes, ports, threats and time.
• Line-rate, low-latency performance for all services, even under load.
• Capable of delivering a logical perimeter for mobile users;
• Identify unknown malicious files, often used in targeted attacks, by directly and automatically executing them in a virtual cloud-based environment.