Dear Palo Alto Networks: There is no way I would have watched that video if you hadn't demanded it be taken down. Now having watched it I can see why you want to hide it.
I'll say this again, I said it elsewhere. And to clarify, I own no stock in PANW, I don't work for them, though I have years of experience managing PAN firewalls in a large deployment (and some experience with their competitors). My coworkers don't know my HN name so I'm saying this from the heart, not for kudos from meatspace.
As part of a team choosing a new technology for something, you really need to take a lot of things into consideration. This would be one thing your legal department would need to consider, undoubtedly. However, if you are trying to choose such a critical technology as your infosec stack, and you completely remove a company from a bakeoff because of a negative review (which this essentially is), then you are not running your bakeoff properly.
PA firewalls and systems are pretty freaking good. I haven't worked with Checkpoint for a long time, but hear they got good a few years back when PA started eating their lunch. FirePOWER is the devil, as is Cisco.
I must agree, and I have been a PAN evangelist for a couple years. That said, my only other NGFW experience is with Firepower and I always feel gross after working with those. The only good thing I can say about Firepower is that my billable time gets padded to the stratosphere due to how long it takes to do anything in there.
If I burned a vendor every time they sent someone a mean letter, I would probably have nobody left to do business with.
The CTO and I agreed we value honesty and integrity in the companies we work with. On top of that, this is not behavior we want go support. If they pull BS on others, they may pull BS on us one day. It does not give good expectations for how they would handle disclosure surrounding some embarrassing security incident, for one thing.
"Business is business" may have different connotation for different people.
Business is business. I don't like PA's behavior here either, but you aren't going to get better behavior from Cisco or others. Good luck spinning up some OpenBSD servers for your security stack, if ideological purity is a higher priority than your network's security.
The question isn't "how likely is it that PA is going to sue us", but "how bad do your products have to be that you resort to legal threats to prevent people from doing benchmarks"?
