VM-Series Virtual Firewalls Integrate With AWS Gateway Load Balancer

Security scalability, meet cloud simplicity. The just-announced general availability of the integration between VM-Series virtual firewalls and the new AWS Gateway Load Balancer (GWLB) introduces customers to massive security scaling and performance acceleration – while bypassing the awkward complexities traditionally associated with inserting virtual appliances in public cloud environments. GWLB makes it easy to deploy, scale and manage your third-party virtual appliances on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Security Needs to Be Cloud-Nimble

The ability to scale infrastructure in the cloud is one of the single biggest advantages of cloud computing. It’s why, for example, many organizations move their business-critical applications to the cloud: AWS seamlessly provides elastic scalability to accommodate spikes in application usage – while simultaneously ensuring that their customers only pay for what they use. 

Protecting this transformation is essential. As more business-critical applications and data move to AWS, the need to augment native public cloud network security with next-generation threat protection has increased significantly. Every day, thousands of businesses use VM-Series virtual Next-Generation Firewalls to protect their AWS environments. However, the complexities of inserting virtual appliances in the cloud can sometimes be challenging to navigate, limiting effective scaling of network security and threat protection – until now.

Three Capabilities Help Make Cloud Security More Effective

By taking advantage of this integration between firewall and GWLB, VM-Series customers can now use native AWS networking constructs to seamlessly scale their firewalls and boost performance. The benefits of this integration boil down to three main points:

• Simplified connectivity – Easily insert an auto-scaling VM-Series firewall stack in the outbound, east-west and inbound traffic paths of your applications. VM-Series and the GWLB keep your traffic packet headers and payload intact, providing complete visibility of the source’s identity to your applications.
• Performance at scale – Scale your traffic across multiple VM-Series firewalls using native AWS networking constructs to achieve higher throughputs – no more need for encrypted tunnels for east-west and outbound traffic inspection.
• Cost Effective - Reduce the number of firewalls needed to protect your AWS environment and consolidate your overall network security posture with centralized security management.

"Allowing customers to deploy enhanced security from our AWS Partners is of top priority to AWS,” said Mayumi Hiramatsu, vice president, Amazon EC2 Networking, Amazon Web Services, Inc. “We are delighted to have worked with Palo Alto Networks as we built AWS Gateway Load Balancer to drastically simplify the deployment of horizontally scalable stacks of security appliances, such as their VM-Series firewalls."

To learn more about the new VM-Series integration with the Gateway Load Balancer, check out our technical deep dive blog. 

And to get invaluable hands-on experience with this exciting integration, take VM-Series for a spin in your AWS environment with a trial from our AWS Marketplace listing.