Palo Alto PCNSA Course Content & Benefits

In the article given below we are going to discuss about PCNSA certification. Details about its course content along with the benefits of doing this certification, you will learn Palo Alto certification paths, about firewall, firewall vendors, firewall leaders, types of firewalls, why Palo alto, etc.

The main objective of Palo Alto is to provide the opportunity to the deserving candidates to prove their skills is protecting the data from cyber threats.

If you are currently looking for getting Palo Alto certificate, you should know it is not easy to get certification or a job without proper guidance. It is very crucial thing to select an option for you which will help you in making your career. You all might have lot of questions in your brain which course to go for, which profile to choose or if you have some knowledge or experience related to firewall this blog will surely help you related to Palo Alto Firewall and many more.

Introduction

Coming on to Palo Alto certification path, there are three main certifications i.e. PCCSA, PCNSA and PCNSE.

PCCSA is mainly for cybersecurity students or for industry new comers; PCNSA is for security admins responsible for deploying, operating and managing NGFWs and PCNSE is for NGFW security engineers and gurus.

Basically PCNSA i.e. Palo Alto Networks certified Security Administrator is for the security engineers to prove themselves or to show that they have the capability of protecting Next generation firewall from cyber threats. It is solely for the candidates who are interested in network security or security administrator.

Benefits of doing Palo Alto

It validates candidate capability to configure the central feature of Palo Alto firewall. Moreover it acknowledges aspirants capability to effectively deploy the firewalls to enable the network traffic all while ensuring security (content-ID).

● Market leader

● Next Generation firewall Features

● Can be managed with/without central Management devices (Panorama)

● SP3 (Single Pass Parallel Processing) Architecture

● Dedicated CPU for Management and Data plane

● Can be used in OnPrem and known public cloud vendor

● Central log collection

Firewall types

There are two types of firewall which are explained below:

Host based

● Installed on single computer

● Ex: Window Firewall (Also known as Application Firewall), Antivirus Firewall, iptables in Linux

Network Based

● Can be deployed as Hardware/Virtual Server/Public Cloud

● Packet Filter Firewall (Layer-3)

● Stateful Packet Filter Firewall (Layer-3&4)

● Application aware Firewall (Layer 2 to 7)

● Web Application Firewall (Layer 7) e.g. F5 ASM, Mod Security, Imperva WAF

Firewall protection

The main threats from which the firewall protects us from are given below:

● Mitigate unauthorized access

● Traffic allowed on the network authorized

● Remote login

● Spam

● E-Mail bomb

● IP spoofing (MTM)

● DoS/DDoS attack

● Session hijacking/spoofing

● Networking and OS Vulnerability, Etc.

Palo Alto exam Overview

Course Content

Moving on to course content, the exam covers the following topics:

● Next-Generation Security Platform and Architecture

● Firewall Configuration

● Security and NAT Policies

● App-ID

● Content-ID

● User-ID

● URL Filtering

● Monitoring and Reporting

● Security Best Practices

If you are looking for basic exam topic for PCNSA so they will validate you on the following exam topics:

● Cybersecurity Landscape

● Cyberthreats and the Cyberattack Lifecycle

● Cyberattack Techniques and Types

● Wireless Threats and Advanced Threats

● Cloud Security and Data Center Security

● Network Security Technology

● Packet Encapsulation and Lifecycle

● Malware Analysis