Network Security Engineering with Palo Alto

Firewall environments rarely break because of exotic attacks. They break when rules overshadow each other, NAT is misconfigured, decryption is applied inconsistently, or a cloud-authored config doesn’t behave as expected. This course gives network and security teams a shared, repeatable method for building, troubleshooting, and scaling Palo Alto NGFW deployments.

Role fit: Built for IT Practitioners with networking fundamentals who are moving into operational security roles. It is intermediate level. Team Leads can assign it to engineers who will own day-to-day firewall operations.

Time investment: About 17 hours across 17 skills, most around an hour each. That makes it practical to schedule one skill per week without pulling engineers off production work.

Risk and operations: Topics include:

• Security policy evaluation and hit counts
• App-ID and User-ID
• SSL forward proxy and inbound inspection
• Security profiles and content updates
• HA, certificates, and backups

These are the controls that support audit readiness and reduce outage risk.

Change management: The course moves from local firewall management into cloud-based policy authoring. It uses folders, variables, and region-specific configuration details to help teams keep policy structure consistent across environments. Teams planning cloud-managed firewall operations get a common playbook before rollout.

Skills include troubleshooting scenarios built on a shared checklist: routing, address translation, and permissions. The course is best fit for teams that need practical Palo Alto NGFW operations training, with a foundation for deeper firewall engineering work afterward.

IT teams use this training to turn Palo Alto firewalls from a source of escalations into a predictable, well-governed control point, both on the local firewall and at scale through Strata Cloud Manager (SCM).

The course is built around realistic troubleshooting and validation scenarios. Engineers work through traffic that fails to reach expected destinations, destination NAT issues, decryption policies that need validation, security profiles blocking risky activity, and Zero Trust policies that must be tested against user and group context. Instructor Keith Barker reinforces a repeatable method, RAP: check routing, then address translation, then permissions. That gives every engineer the same starting point when traffic stops flowing.

• Faster, more consistent troubleshooting: Your team will use hit counts, logs, session data, and the RAP method to isolate routing, NAT, or security policy issues instead of guessing.
• Tighter, auditable access control: Practitioners move from broad allow rules to validated security policy rules, tested user and group access, and profile-backed controls that enforce intended behavior.
• Decryption and threat protection that hold up: Teams configure SSL Forward Proxy with exceptions such as financial services, configure inbound inspection for public-facing apps, and attach security profiles backed by cloud-delivered security services.
• Scalable, resilient operations: Engineers validate high availability, manage backups and updates, and use SCM folders, snippets, and variables to push consistent policy to five firewalls or 500 with fewer configuration drift errors.

Knowledge

• How Palo Alto NGFWs forward traffic, including longest-match routing, security policy rule evaluation order, and how shadowed rules are never hit
• The RAP troubleshooting model: check Layer 3 routing, then address translation (NAT/PAT), then permissions in the security policy
• How App-ID, User-ID, and Content-ID work together to identify applications, map users and groups to IP addresses, and inspect traffic with security profiles
• How SSL decryption supports traffic inspection, including policy behavior and certificate considerations
• How Strata Cloud Manager (SCM) uses folders, snippets, variables, and inheritance, and why consistent object and zone names matter for multi-firewall deployments
• The operational basics of high availability, certificates, backups, PAN-OS software updates, and content updates delivered through cloud-delivered security services (CDSS)

Ability

• Factory reset a firewall and rebuild it with a working baseline, including interfaces, trunked subinterfaces, and routing
• Configure source NAT/PAT and destination NAT with port forwarding, then verify each with hit counts, logs, and session data
• Use Policy Optimizer and App-ID data to move from broad rules to granular, application-specific rules
• Troubleshoot User-ID group mapping and decryption policy problems using CLI output and certificate checks
• Onboard firewalls to SCM and push security and decryption policies at scale, then spot-check the results on individual devices
• Build security policy rules that limit access by user group, application, source, and destination, with threat and antivirus profiles attached