Cloud NGFW is the industry’s only machine learning (ML)-powered NGFW delivered as a cloud-native service on Azure. With Cloud NGFW, you can run more apps securely at cloud speed and cloud-scale with an actual cloud-native experience. You get to experience the best of both worlds with natively integrated network security delivered as a service on Azure.

This document explains how to configure and integrate Cloud NGFW for Azure with Palo Alto Networks Panorama.

You can use a Panorama appliance to manage a shared set of security rules centrally on Cloud NGFW resources alongside your physical and virtual firewall appliances. You can also manage all aspects of shared objects and profiles configuration, push these rules, and generate reports on traffic patterns or security incidents of your Cloud NGFW resources, all from a single Panorama console.

Panorama provides a single location from which you can have centralized policy and firewall management across hardware firewalls, virtual firewalls and cloud firewalls which increases operational efficiency in managing and maintaining a hybrid network of firewalls.

When you create a Cloud NGFW resource using the Azure Portal, you have the option to use Palo Alto Networks Panorama to manage your security policies. You can then manage a shared set of security rules centrally on Cloud NGFW resources you create alongside your physical and virtual firewall appliances, and you can use logging, reporting and log analytics, all from a single Panorama console.

The following Palo Alto Networks components are used to integrate your Cloud NGFW resource with Panorama.

Palo Alto Networks Policy Management

is the primary and mandatory component of the solution. You must use a

Panorama

appliance to author and manage policies for your Cloud NGFW resources. The policy management component also helps to associate your authored policies and objects to multiple Cloud NGFW resources in different Azure regions.

Panorama Azure Plugin

is a mandatory component of this solution. The Panorama Azure plugin enables you to create Cloud Device Groups and Cloud Template stacks which help you manage policies and objects on NGFW resources linked with Panorama.

Cloud Device Groups (Cloud DG)

are special-purpose Panorama Device groups that allow you to author rules and objects for Cloud NGFW resources. You create Cloud DGs using the Panorama Azure Plugin UI by specifying the Cloud NGFW resource and Azure region information. Cloud DG manifests as a global rulestack in that region.

You can create multiple Cloud Device Groups using the Panorama Azure plugin.
You can use the native Panorama UI’s device-group page to manage policy and object configurations in Cloud Device Groups and their associated objects and security profiles.
You can also leverage your existing shared objects and profiles in your existing Panorama device groups by referring to them in the security rules you create in your Cloud Device groups.
Alternatively, you can add these Cloud DGs to the device-group hierarchy you manage in your Panorama to inherit the DG rules and objects. However, Cloud NGFWs currently cannot enforce all inherited rules by the Cloud Device Group, such as those using security zones or users.
You can associate the same Cloud DG with multiple regions of the Cloud NGFW resource. This Cloud DG will manifest as a dedicated global rulestack in each Azure region of your Cloud NGFW resource.

Cloud Template Stacks (Cloud TS)

are special-purpose Panorama Template stacks that allow your security rules in Cloud Device groups to refer to object settings that Panorama allows you to manage using templates. When creating a Cloud DG, the Panorama Azure plugin enables you to create or specify a Cloud Template Stack. The plugin automatically creates this Cloud TS and adds it to the Cloud device group as a reference template stack. From now on, you can use the native Panorama UI’s Template Stack page to configure your templates and add them to these Cloud template stacks.

Palo Alto Networks Cloud NGFW service manages most device and network configurations in your Cloud NGFW resources. Therefore Cloud NGFW will ignore infrastructure settings such as interfaces, zones, and routing protocols if you have configured them in templates added to the Cloud TS.
Cloud NGFW currently honors Certificate management and log settings in your templates as referenced by the Cloud DG configuration. It ignores all other settings.

There are a few steps to integrate Cloud NGFW with Panorama. You first prepare your Panorama virtual appliance for this integration by installing the Azure plugin. Once you have successfully linked Cloud NGFW, use Panorama to manage security objects and rules.

To integrate the Cloud NGFW service with your Panorama virtual appliance:

Verify Panorama meets the Panorama Integration Prerequisites.
Link Panorama to the Cloud NGFW.
Use Panorama for Cloud NGFW policy management.