GlobalProtect is a new VPN-like solution from Palo Alto Networks for managing network access on enterprise laptops. Unlike a traditional VPN client, GlobalProtect locates and connects through an organization’s geographically closest firewall.
For instance, someone from your Cincinnati office working from a hotel in Seattle could route traffic through a secure tunnel to the San Francisco office’s firewall – without changing any configuration settings. This would reduce latency for the end-user and the network load of individual firewalls while still maintaining enterprise security policies.
As we wrote earlier this month, Palo Alto Networks offers firewalls that protect from threats at the application level rather than the port or protocol level. The company’s firewalls are able to detect over 1,000 specific apps regardless of what port they use, even if they’re tunneling through SSL, and assign permissions at the user or group level.
According to Chris King, Palo Alto Networks director of product marketing, the company doesn’t have plans at this time to offer a hosted firewall solution.
