Your enterprise’s most valuable assets reside in your data center, including proprietary source code, intellectual property, and sensitive company and customer data. Your customers and employees trust you to maintain the confidentiality and integrity of their data and expect that data to be always available, so it’s important to implement a data center best practice security policy that safeguards your data and prevents successful attacks. It’s not enough to harden the network perimeter because attacks can originate from inside the network, attacks can come from partners and contractors whose credentials have been compromised, and because if an attacker gains a foothold in your network, the attacker can attack from the inside of the network by moving laterally from device to device.

If you are familiar with Palo Alto Networks platform, you can save time by using this streamlined checklist to step through pre-deployment planning, deployment activities, and post-deployment maintenance to implement and sustain data center security policy best practices. Each section includes links to detailed information in the full Data Center Best Practice Security Policy document or in the PAN-OS Administrator's Guide, including how to configure policy rules, security profiles, DoS attack prevention, and user authentication, how to segment your network, and more.