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

Migrating firewalls generally is a complicated enterprise, typically 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 concerns when transferring 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.  In contrast to many firewall migration initiatives CX helps, this engagement had the next complicating elements:

1. Lack of current-state documentation.
2. Lack of know-how of present identification resolution. Extra particularly, we recognized (with effort) that there was a must make Cisco & PAN co-exist due to many cases 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: Common Firewall Migration Greatest Practices

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

1. Complete Prep Work:

• Pre-migration Cleanup & Optimization: Earlier than you even take into consideration transferring, clear up your current firewall. This contains analyzing rule and NAT hit-counts to establish 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 great greatest follow is to make this one thing the shopper is liable for.  Like transferring, you possibly can’t declutter indefinitely, so guarantee there’s a timeline to which the shopper is held accountable to.
• Change Administration: Ideally, implement a configuration freeze on the supply firewall. If not doable, set up sturdy change monitoring to duplicate 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 visitors flows and validating post-migration performance.
• Documentation is King:
  • Develop an in depth Methodology of Process (MOP): Define each step, together with whether or not you’ll carry out a ‘laborious’ cutover or an incremental/phased migration. Embrace clear time goals.
  • Conduct Peer Critiques: Have a number of eyes in your MOP and configurations.
  • Create a Thorough Check Plan: This isn’t nearly testing functions; it’s about testing your check plan itself. Guarantee it covers all essential functionalities and edge circumstances.
  • Design a Rollback Plan: All the time 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 check atmosphere to establish potential points earlier than the precise cutover.
• Validate ARP Tables: Verify ARP tables each earlier than and after the migration to make sure correct community connectivity.
• Optimize Crucial 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 upfront to rapidly diagnose points through the migration.
• On-Name Assist: Have software testers and house owners available or on a devoted name through the migration window.  Essential be aware: These MAY NOT be the identical folks.  Usually, we got testers, who lacked any understanding of how the appliance labored.  Guarantee it’s properly documented the place this expertise lives.  Supply/vacation spot IPs & L4 ports-who is aware of these low-level particulars?

3. Put up-Migration Actions for Stability & Optimization:

• Evaluation Put up-Migration Stories: Totally analyze any reviews generated by migration instruments to establish and tackle 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 will not be static. Often evaluation and optimize guidelines to keep up effectivity and safety posture.

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

1. Obtain and launch the migration device.
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, evaluation, 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 evaluation the post-migration report.
11. Configure any further guide gadgets.

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 identification integration, coverage conversion, and platform-specific capabilities.

1. Id Coexistence Throughout Migration:

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

• The Downside: Cisco wants to concentrate on user-to-IP mappings that Palo Alto’s Person-ID brokers or VPN gateways already know. With out this, visitors from recognized customers is likely to be denied by the Cisco firewall as a result of it lacks the required context.
• Options Explored:
  • Devoted ISE-PIC Deployment: Whereas tried, utilizing an current ISE deployment for this function may be problematic, particularly since PassiveID is incompatible with 802.1x Machine Authentication. Be aware: ISE-PIC has reached Finish-of-Life.
  • Syslog Forwarding: A viable technique entails 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 might help each platforms collect identification info.

By together with a mixture of syslog forwarding on the PAN VPN firewall and new Cisco brokers on the shopper 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 by way of 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 Middle 7.6, the passive ID performance is on the market 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 device is designed to help with this transition, however understanding its capabilities and limitations is vital.

• • Extraction & Mixture: The device can extract and mix Palo Alto configurations, figuring out parts like Entry Management guidelines, Community/Port objects, Interfaces, Routes, and Purposes.
  • Characteristic Choice: You possibly can choose which elements of the configuration (e.g., Interfaces, Routes, Entry Management) emigrate.
  • Software Mapping: It’s essential to resolve any clean or invalid software mappings. In some circumstances, you may want so as to add port-based equivalents if a direct software mapping isn’t obtainable. Sources like Cisco AppID and Palo Alto’s Applipedia might help.
  • Bulk Actions & Optimization: The device facilitates bulk actions and permits for ACL optimization, however bear in mind to pre-stage File and IPS insurance policies within the Cisco Firepower Administration Middle (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 increased for the migration device to perform accurately.
  • VSYS Migration: The device helps migration of both single or multi-vsys configurations, that are sometimes merged with VRFs to realize segmentation in Cisco FTD.
  • System Configuration: Crucial system configurations, corresponding to Platform Insurance policies (e.g., NTP, SSH entry) in FTD, are typically not migrated by the device and require guide setup.

4. Particular Challenges and Guide Configurations:

A number of parts require guide consideration or have totally different implementations between the 2 platforms:

• NAT IP and Port Oversubscription: Palo Alto can deal with increased ranges of NAT oversubscription (e.g., 1x, 2x, 4x, 8x reuse of identical tackle/port). When migrating to Cisco, you typically want to extend the PAT pool dimension to accommodate this.
• URL Wildcards: Palo Alto makes use of characters like * or ^ for URL wildcards, whereas Cisco sometimes 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 will not be supported in Cisco FMC and can want flattening.
• Id Realm/Lively Listing Integration: Whereas newer variations of the migration device (FMT 7.7+) assist AD/Realm integration, you’ll typically must manually add identification to relevant guidelines and pre-stage the Realm and AD configurations within the FMC.
• NAT Supply Alternative: Manually substitute NAT supply in Entry Management Coverage (ACP) guidelines with the NAT vacation spot (i.e., swap the translated tackle with the unique vacation spot).
• Unmigrated Objects Requiring Guide Configuration:
  • Time-based entry management guidelines.  Cisco doesn’t at the moment assist time-based entry management guidelines.
  • Id-based entry management guidelines: You’ll must explicitly affiliate identification teams or particular person identities.
  • FQDN objects: Particularly these beginning with or containing particular characters. Wildcard FQDNs typically want alternative 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 “software default” for service, it can seemingly be migrated as “any” service in Cisco, requiring guide refinement.  In some case we added port-based equivalents.

• • Negate Guidelines: Palo Alto’s “enable X however exclude Y” logic must be translated into specific “deny” guidelines in FTD.  Cisco doesn’t at the moment assist negate guidelines.  This was completed by merely implementing a ‘deny’ rule in FTD.
  • Dynamic Routing: Requires guide configuration.  This won’t be ported by way of the migration device.
  • Route Reflector: Add FTD as an eBGP peer manually.  Extra particularly, cisco doesn’t at the moment (as of this weblog posting) assist 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 cases the place route propagation hair pinned the firewall.

5. Partially Supported, Ignored, or Disabled Objects:

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

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

By adhering to basic 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.