Prosimo and Palo Alto Networks join forces to improve cloud infrastructure security

Prosimo announced an integration with Palo Alto Networks for a powerful new approach to security that protects applications and workloads in multi cloud environments.

With Prosimo’s Full Stack Cloud Transit platform, customers can seamlessly integrate with Palo Alto Networks VM-Series Virtual Next-Generation Firewall (NGFW), allowing enterprises to deploy security as close as possible to the workloads they protect. This architecture greatly reduces the time and effort required to secure application access across multi cloud environments for users and workloads.

“Together with Palo Alto Networks VM-Series virtual firewalls, we’re providing organizations with a Zero Trust framework so they can be confident their application workloads are secure while ensuring fast and reliable connectivity to and across cloud providers,” said Prosimo VP of Product Mani Ganesan. “This integration allows enterprises to improve observability, increase operational efficiency, and safely gives them more control of their cloud environment.”

Most integrations today focus on orchestrating firewalls and inserting them in the path of cloud network traffic, where they rely on IP addresses/port numbers to redirect traffic. Prosimo instead provides service insertion policies that allow users to define sophisticated rules that determine which traffic will be routed for advanced inspection to the firewall.

Prosimo simplifies deployment for two flexible architectures for Palo Alto Networks VM-Series virtual firewalls:

• Centralized: VM-Series virtual firewall is deployed into a centralized VPC for east-west (VPC-to-VPC) or north-south (Internet egress and ingress, cloud to on-premises) traffic. This is the most common Prosimo model and provides security control and ongoing manageability.
• Distributed: VM-Series virtual firewalls are deployed in each virtual private cloud. This method is typically used in cases where VPCs need to be isolated and require local ingress or egress.

“Speed is critical in the cloud, so the speed of operations in configuring software firewalls, like the VM-Series virtual firewall, needs to match the speed of cloud deployments,” said Vitaliy Sivetskiy, senior product manager of Palo Alto Networks.

“Integrating Prosimo’s Full Stack Cloud Transit and Palo Alto Networks VM-Series virtual firewall makes network security teams’ lives easier. Our single intuitive operating model for connectivity and virtual firewall insertion means customers have more time to focus on application business innovation versus managing network and security infrastructure. This enables organizations to help protect all clouds, the right way, with agility,” added Sivetskiy.

Providing multi-layer security to navigate cloud firewall complexity

While a well-constructed multi cloud networking architecture can enhance security, scaling of firewalls can be complex. Common challenges include ensuring the virtual firewall can handle the required elasticity associated with growing cloud resources, managing complex network configurations for auto scaling, and implementing ongoing route updates to direct traffic through the next-generation firewall while maintaining segmentation and isolation.

Integrating Prosimo with Palo Alto Networks VM-Series virtual firewalls ensures enhanced security and scalability across the network and application layer. Palo Alto Networks Next-Generation Firewalls offer comprehensive Layer 7 inspection, while Prosimo stands out as a leading provider in the MCNS market capable of delivering network segmentation spanning Layer 3 to Layer 7.

With native integration, customers can provision new virtual firewalls in a few clicks. From a single dashboard, users can manage the lifecycle of those firewalls, quickly scaling up or down while segmenting the necessary subnets and corresponding cloud-native elements.

Customers can see immediate benefits from the integration through:

• Migrating to Palo Alto Networks software next-generation firewalls faster, eliminating blind spots for both network and security teams.
• Right-sizing software firewalls to optimize cloud costs.
• Using the existing firewall investment to segment east-west and north-south data movement within clouds.