Palo Alto Networks
More info
- Creator
- Nir Zuk
- Released
- 2005
- Type
- Security company
The company that taught firewalls to ask which application the traffic belongs to, rather than which port it happens to use.
Founded in 2005 by Nir Zuk, a veteran of Check Point and NetScreen. The premise was simple: once everything from Skype to BitTorrent tunnels over ports 80 and 443, the port number tells you nothing. Its first box, the PA-4000 of 2007, identified applications with an engine called App-ID and let admins write rules like "allow Facebook, but not Facebook chat". Rivals promptly rebadged their own gear as next-generation firewalls, Gartner's label for exactly this.
The company went public in 2012 and has since bought its way into nearly every adjacent category: cloud security under the Prisma brand, endpoint and SOC automation under Cortex, and SASE once the office moved home. The firewalls still run PAN-OS.