Amigopod
|Technical Note
Palo Alto Networks User-ID Services
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About Palo Alto Networks User-ID Services
Overview
Palo Alto Networks have developed a range of Next Generation firewalls that redefine the
best practice for controlling and securing today’s networks. Leveraging their core
strengths of Application, User and Content Identification, Palo Alto Networks provides a
unique approach to addressing the challenges surrounding Web 2.0 applications and peer
to peer communications which dominate the concerns of IT Administrators.
Palo Alto Networks define their User-ID technology as offering the following benefits in a
traditional enterprise environment:
User-ID seamlessly integrates Palo Alto Networks firewalls with Microsoft Active
Directory (AD), enabling administrators to tie network activity to users and groups –
not just IP addresses. When used in conjunction with App-ID and Content-ID
technologies, IT organizations can leverage user and group information for visibility,
policy creation, forensic investigation and reporting on application, threat, web
surfing and data transfer activity.
User-ID helps address the challenge of using IP addresses to monitor and control
the activity of specific network users – something that was once a fairly simple task,
but has become difficult as enterprises moved to an Internet and web-centric model.
Compounding the visibility problem is an increasingly mobile enterprise, where
employees access the network from virtually anywhere around the world, internal
wireless networks re-assign IP addresses as users move from zone to zone, and
network users are not always company employees. The result is that the IP address
is now an inadequate mechanism for monitoring and controlling user activity.
Amigopod, with the introduction of the Palo Alto Networks User-ID Services plugin, can
now extend this visibility to include non-corporate users typically associated with
Enterprise Guest Access deployments, Hotels, Conference venues, Airports and other
Hotspot style deployments.