Security policy determines what traffic you allow on your network and how to treat that traffic. Security policy best practices limit the traffic you allow to only sanctioned traffic required for your business and tolerated traffic for your employees. This reduces the attack surface and helps safeguard your network and your business assets. The viewpoint of this document is what to do for best network security whether your business is security-first or mission-critical availability first.

Security policy best practices follow the principle of least privilege, which means that only people who need access to specific applications, data, and infrastructure are granted access, and that traffic is decrypted, inspected, and logged appropriately to protect assets, intellectual property, and other things that are critical to your business. All other access increases risk without achieving business goals.

This book contains streamlined, step-by-step best practices for how to:

Steps that require configuration or for which there is in-depth conceptual information include links to the appropriate documentation for details. Learn about features, capabilities, and operation of Palo Alto Networks products in product administrator’s guides, release notes, upgrade guides, interconnect guides, etc., which are available on technical documentation home page:

Refer to the Palo Alto Networks series of best practices books for best practices advice on subjects such as decryption, DoS and Zone Protection (including Packet Buffer Protection), and much more.