Palo Alto Networks was founded 20 years ago by Israeli network security expert Nir Zuk, the firm’s current CTO and one of the technological architects of Check Point – a company with which Palo Alto continues to compete today, in addition to competitors such as Cisco Systems, Fortinet, Juniper, SonicWall, Barracuda, Sophos and F5.
During the last two decades, the evolution of Palo Alto has been exponential. In its fiscal year ended July 31, 2024, Palo Alto reported total revenue in excess of $9.1 billion, representing year-over-year growth of 13%. In February, it raised its fiscal year 2025 revenue forecast to between $9.14 billion and $9.19 billion. The company has grown organically, with a strong focus and resources (25% investment) on R&D, but also through multiple acquisitions: In the last 10 years alone it has acquired 19 companies.
Spaniard Jordi Botifoll has led Palo Alto’s business in southern Europe and the emerging countries where the firm operates – 87 countries in total – since December 2023. Botifoll has years of management experience in companies such as NetApp, Cisco, AUNA Group and IBM, among others.
In an interview with Computerworld Spain for its CSO supplement, Botifoll talks about Palo Alto’s current strategy, based on a commitment to what the vendor calls “platformization,” or in other words, providing customers with a unified security platform that simplifies the increasingly complex management of network, cloud environments, and security operations centers (SOC).
Focus on simplifying corporate cybersecurity management
“Everything is moving very fast in the cybersecurity world,” Botifoll says when asked about Palo Alto’s journey over its two decades of life. “The company’s growth in these years has been enormous… and all the metrics we currently manage are very positive. The evolution has been very great, not only in terms of development and innovation, but also in the business model itself,” he explains.
Botifoll stresses that the main objective governing the company’s activity is “to provide cybersecurity solutions to current and potential clients, with a strategy to reach the market based on ‘platformization’ and focused on three main areas: network security, cloud security, and security in central operation services, i.e. in SOCs.”
Palo Alto has boosted this effort in recent years with the integration of precision artificial intelligence that includes machine learning and deep learning techniques, in addition to generative AI tools.
“Our strategy is to ensure that the time to detect an attack and the time to resolve it (if it has occurred) are zero; currently, the average we manage, which is a great advantage over our competitors, is 10 seconds to detect the attack and one minute to resolve it,” Botifoll says.
A global database to deal with threats
For Botifoll, one of the great differentials of Palo Alto is the large amount of data it handles, thanks, he stresses, to the activity it carries out with more than 85,000 clients (including 85 of the Fortune 100 companies) and the work of its emergency unit (Unit 42) “which also responds to calls from organizations that are not our clients but request our services in situations of relevant security breaches.”
“Our telemetry is able to analyze and understand polymorphic attacks. This continuous database we have is also very important for our artificial intelligence to be even more effective so that we can prevent an attack before it appears,” he adds.
The precision AI with which the firm works, Botifoll says, “allows us to act in real time and with automated processes that reduce errors, because it is a reality that humans make more mistakes than machines. In this era of massive attacks [Palo Alto detects 2.3 million net new attacks a day, up from 1.6 million last year], if an organization doesn’t have automated incident management, it has a problem.” In addition, he says, “cybercriminals are also using AI to generate malicious attacks, so you have to be well prepared.”
Although many cybersecurity companies are already adopting a platform strategy, in response to their customers’ demands to simplify the difficult management of multiple cybersecurity tools, Botifoll stresses that Palo Alto was a “pioneer” in this approach and is the “only one” that covers the entire cybersecurity lifecycle.
“It is true that today the platform strategy has become a market standard, but this was not the case a few months ago. In addition, many competitors talk about this strategy even though they are not ready and do not operate in all the areas where we operate. I would say that at the level of integrated security platform strategy, we have no competition,” Botifoll says.
“At the level of integrated security platform strategy, we have no competition.” –Jordi Botifoll
Asked whether or not it is advisable for customers to go for cybersecurity solutions from countries such as China or Russia (since the war in Ukraine, Palo Alto has no commercial relationship with Russia), Botifoll stresses: “You can’t play with cybersecurity. We are not talking about selling consumer products but for the corporate world, and this requires specialization, development, customization… Cybersecurity, moreover, goes far beyond politics, it is a basic need.
Regarding the current geopolitical landscape changing after the election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States, Botifoll says “not to contemplate big changes”.
Botifoll also was asked about the incident involving the defective update of the cybersecurity solution of Crowstrike, one of Palo Alto’s rivals, which led to an unprecedented worldwide IT outage last summer. Botifoll says he prefers not to make specific comments, although he says: “At Palo Alto we do not launch updates or new versions of our products without them first having passed through the relevant evaluation and quality filters; we will never perform a ‘beta test’ with our customers, unless this is done by mutual agreement”.
Spain a key support center for Palo Alto services
Of the 87 countries that Botifoll leads, Spain is “the hub,” he says, and Palo Alto plans to strengthen it even more. There’s a forthcoming expansion of the office, which already houses 250 people of the more than 15,000 employees that the company has. The aim is to locate in Spain specialized support centers in different areas that provide service at international level – at present, some professionals from the global areas of support and customer success already work in the country.
With regard to the Spanish business in particular, Botifoll highlights the company’s focus and good results in the banking, public administration (with presence at central, regional and local level), utilities and industry sectors. “We cannot break down figures by country, but I will say that Palo Alto’s business in Spain is growing at a high double-digit rate,” says Botifoll, who believes that the country’s organizations “are increasingly aware of the effects of cybersecurity incidents and the business destruction they entail.”
This story originally appeared on Computerworld Spain.
Source:: Network World