Navigating Firewall Migrations: Finest Practices and Palo Alto to Cisco Subsequent-Gen Firewall Specifics

Migrating firewalls generally is a complicated enterprise, usually involving intricate insurance policies, essential functions, and the necessity for seamless transition. This publish distills key insights from skilled architects on greatest practices for any firewall migration, after which dives into the distinctive issues when shifting from Palo Alto Networks to Cisco Subsequent-Era Firewalls.

Part 0: The Background

Buyer management has determined emigrate from PAN to Cisco.  This was a enterprise determination primarily based on elevated costs by PAN.  Not like many firewall migration initiatives CX helps, this engagement had the next complicating components:

1. Lack of current-state documentation.
2. Lack of know-how of present id resolution. Extra particularly, we recognized (with effort) that there was a must make Cisco & PAN co-exist due to many situations of identity-based firewall enforcement.
3. Lack of know-how of firewall historical past (i.e. WHY is there a firewall right here/what community segments want isolation).
4. Lack of know-how/documentation of applications-and how/the place the firewall coverage helps the functions.
5. 24/7 atmosphere: There is no such thing as a ‘after-hours’ so each migration effort required vital planning.

Part 1: Basic Firewall Migration Finest Practices

A profitable firewall migration hinges on meticulous planning, thorough execution, and diligent post-migration actions.  There is no such thing as a instrument that may change good practices and this part’s intent is to arrange an engineer with abilities required to avoid wasting one’s sanity:

1. Complete Prep Work:

• Pre-migration Cleanup & Optimization: Earlier than you even take into consideration shifting, clear up your present firewall. This contains analyzing rule and NAT hit-counts to determine unused or redundant insurance policies, and performing object de-duplication to streamline configurations.  Would you progress homes with out first decluttering and throwing away trash?  If not, why would you progress stale or irrelevant firewall coverage?  A superb greatest apply is to make this one thing the client is accountable for.  Like shifting, you may’t declutter indefinitely, so guarantee there’s a timeline to which the client is held accountable to.
• Change Administration: Ideally, implement a configuration freeze on the supply firewall. If not doable, set up sturdy change monitoring to copy any new guidelines or modifications throughout each the outdated and new firewalls.
• Stakeholder Engagement: Determine all mission-critical functions and their key stakeholders. Their enter is essential for understanding site visitors flows and validating post-migration performance.
• Documentation is King:
  • Develop an in depth Technique of Process (MOP): Define each step, together with whether or not you’ll carry out a ‘onerous’ cutover or an incremental/phased migration. Embody clear time goals.
  • Conduct Peer Opinions: Have a number of eyes in your MOP and configurations.
  • Create a Thorough Take a look at Plan: This isn’t nearly testing functions; it’s about testing your take a look at plan itself. Guarantee it covers all essential functionalities and edge circumstances.
  • Design a Rollback Plan: At all times have a transparent technique to revert to the earlier state if points come up.

2. Flawless Migration Execution:

• Conduct a ‘Dry-Run’: If doable, simulate the migration in a take a look at atmosphere to determine potential points earlier than the precise cutover.
• Validate ARP Tables: Test ARP tables each earlier than and after the migration to make sure correct community connectivity.
• Optimize Vital Site visitors: Develop pre-filters or ‘fastpath’ guidelines for essential functions to make sure their efficiency isn’t impacted.
• Pre-stage Monitoring Instruments: Put together customized searches and packet captures prematurely to shortly diagnose points throughout the migration.
• On-Name Assist: Have utility testers and house owners available or on a devoted name throughout the migration window.  Necessary word: These MAY NOT be the identical individuals.  Usually, we got testers, who lacked any understanding of how the applying labored.  Guarantee it’s effectively documented the place this expertise lives.  Supply/vacation spot IPs & L4 ports-who is aware of these low-level particulars?

3. Publish-Migration Actions for Stability & Optimization:

• Evaluation Publish-Migration Reviews: Completely analyze any reviews generated by migration instruments to determine and handle lingering points.
• Replace Documentation: Guarantee all community diagrams, coverage paperwork, and operational procedures are up to date to replicate the brand new firewall configuration.
• Steady Monitoring: Implement sturdy monitoring to trace efficiency, safety occasions, and potential anomalies.
• Coaching and Assist: Educate your operations group on the brand new platform and its administration.
• Ongoing Optimization: Firewall insurance policies usually are not static. Often evaluate and optimize guidelines to keep up effectivity and safety posture.

Finish-to-Finish Migration Process (Basic Steps):

1. Obtain and launch the migration instrument.
2. Export the supply firewall’s configuration file.
3. Evaluation the pre-migration report.
4. Map interfaces, safety zones, and interface teams.
5. Map configurations with functions.
6. Specify vacation spot parameters and choose options for migration.
7. Optimize, evaluate, and validate the migrated configuration.
8. Push the migrated configuration to the brand new firewall’s administration middle (e.g., FMC).
9. Deploy the configuration to the firewall.
10. Obtain and evaluate the post-migration report.
11. Configure any further handbook objects.

Part 2: Key Variations and Migration Methods from Palo Alto to Cisco Subsequent-Era Firewalls

Migrating from Palo Alto Networks to Cisco Safe Firewall brings its personal set of nuances, significantly regarding id integration, coverage conversion, and platform-specific capabilities.

1. Id Coexistence Throughout Migration:

A big problem is guaranteeing consumer id mappings (e.g., “Lisa is 10.14.10.7”) are constant throughout each Palo Alto and Cisco firewalls throughout the interim migration interval.

• The Downside: Cisco wants to pay attention to user-to-IP mappings that Palo Alto’s Consumer-ID brokers or VPN gateways already know. With out this, site visitors from recognized customers is perhaps denied by the Cisco firewall as a result of it lacks the required context.
• Options Explored:
  • Devoted ISE-PIC Deployment: Whereas tried, utilizing an present ISE deployment for this objective may be problematic, particularly since PassiveID is incompatible with 802.1x Machine Authentication. Word: ISE-PIC has reached Finish-of-Life.
  • Syslog Forwarding: A viable technique includes configuring the Palo Alto VPN firewall to ahead Syslog messages containing user-to-IP mappings to Cisco ISE.
  • Lively Listing Brokers: Deploying brokers on Lively Listing servers or terminal servers may help each platforms collect id data.

By together with a mixture of syslog forwarding on the PAN VPN firewall and new Cisco brokers on the client AD servers, we had been in a position to migrate a downstream PAN firewall to Cisco.

Ought to customers be coming from on-premise (passive authentication) or through remote-access VPN, the Cisco firewall can have a user->IP mapping to ensure the suitable firewall coverage is being matched.

As of Firewall Administration Heart 7.6, the passive ID performance is obtainable instantly with out the necessity for ISE-PIC (which went EOL on 5/5/2025).

2. Coverage Conversion with the Safe Firewall Migration Software:

The Cisco Safe Firewall migration instrument is designed to help with this transition, however understanding its capabilities and limitations is vital.

• • Extraction & Mixture: The instrument can extract and mix Palo Alto configurations, figuring out components like Entry Management guidelines, Community/Port objects, Interfaces, Routes, and Purposes.
  • Characteristic Choice: You may choose which parts of the configuration (e.g., Interfaces, Routes, Entry Management) emigrate.
  • Software Mapping: It’s essential to resolve any clean or invalid utility mappings. In some circumstances, you may want so as to add port-based equivalents if a direct utility mapping isn’t out there. Sources like Cisco AppID and Palo Alto’s Applipedia may help.
  • Bulk Actions & Optimization: The instrument facilitates bulk actions and permits for ACL optimization, however keep in mind to pre-stage File and IPS insurance policies within the Cisco Firepower Administration Heart (FMC).

3. Palo Alto Configuration Limitations for Migration:

• • PAN-OS Model: The supply Palo Alto firewall have to be operating PAN-OS software program model 8.0 or greater for the migration instrument to operate appropriately.
  • VSYS Migration: The instrument helps migration of both single or multi-vsys configurations, that are usually merged with VRFs to attain segmentation in Cisco FTD.
  • System Configuration: Vital system configurations, reminiscent of Platform Insurance policies (e.g., NTP, SSH entry) in FTD, are usually not migrated by the instrument and require handbook setup.

4. Particular Challenges and Handbook Configurations:

A number of components require handbook consideration or have totally different implementations between the 2 platforms:

• NAT IP and Port Oversubscription: Palo Alto can deal with greater ranges of NAT oversubscription (e.g., 1x, 2x, 4x, 8x reuse of identical handle/port). When migrating to Cisco, you usually want to extend the PAT pool measurement to accommodate this.
• URL Wildcards: Palo Alto makes use of characters like * or ^ for URL wildcards, whereas Cisco usually helps substring matching (e.g., cisco.com as an alternative of *.cisco.com). These want adjustment.
• Nested Object Teams: Community and port object teams nested deeper than 10 ranges usually are not supported in Cisco FMC and can want flattening.
• Id Realm/Lively Listing Integration: Whereas newer variations of the migration instrument (FMT 7.7+) help AD/Realm integration, you’ll usually must manually add id to relevant guidelines and pre-stage the Realm and AD configurations within the FMC.
• NAT Supply Substitute: Manually change NAT supply in Entry Management Coverage (ACP) guidelines with the NAT vacation spot (i.e., swap the translated handle with the unique vacation spot).
• Unmigrated Gadgets Requiring Handbook Configuration:
  • Time-based entry management guidelines.  Cisco doesn’t at present help time-based entry management guidelines.
  • Id-based entry management guidelines: You’ll must explicitly affiliate id teams or particular person identities.
  • FQDN objects: Particularly these beginning with or containing particular characters. Wildcard FQDNs usually want substitute or updates.
  • URL Filtering Insurance policies: Add the respective classes as insurance policies utilizing URL filtering may not translate instantly.
  • Software Mapping: If a rule in Palo Alto used “utility default” for service, it’s going to doubtless be migrated as “any” service in Cisco, requiring handbook refinement.  In some case we added port-based equivalents.

• • Negate Guidelines: Palo Alto’s “enable X however exclude Y” logic must be translated into express “deny” guidelines in FTD.  Cisco doesn’t at present help negate guidelines.  This was achieved by merely implementing a ‘deny’ rule in FTD.
  • Dynamic Routing: Requires handbook configuration.  This is not going to be ported through the migration instrument.
  • Route Reflector: Add FTD as an eBGP peer manually.  Extra particularly, cisco doesn’t at present (as of this weblog posting) help iBGP route reflector configuration.  This was overcome by manually configuring a brand new eBGP autonomous quantity for the firewall.  This additionally required the extra configuration of ‘allow-as in’ as there have been situations the place route propagation hair pinned the firewall.

5. Partially Supported, Ignored, or Disabled Gadgets:

Remember that sure configurations usually are not totally supported or are ignored throughout migration:

• Administration Settings (like NTP, SSH entry).
• Syslog Dynamic Routing.
• Service Insurance policies (these usually translate to FlexConfig in FTD).
• Distant-Entry VPN reserved IP addresses (require workarounds through ISE or AD).
• Gadget-Particular Website-to-Website VPN configurations.
• Connection log settings.

By adhering to normal greatest practices and understanding these particular variations when migrating from Palo Alto to Cisco Subsequent-Era Firewalls, organizations can obtain a smoother, safer, and environment friendly transition.