Strata Cloud Manager (SCM)offers acloud-based unified managementplane for both NGFWs and Prisma Access, enabling consistent policy enforcement, simplified management, and AI-driven operational insights.
"Strata Cloud Manager provides a single interface for unified management of NGFWs and Prisma Access, leveraging AI to optimize security operations and streamline workflows." (Source: Strata Cloud Manager Overview) Unlike Panorama, which is an on-premises management solution, SCM delivers cloud-based, AI-driven capabilities for centralized oversight.

Heartbeat pollingis a core HA function to monitor connectivity between HA peers, leveraging ICMP pings to determine link health and availability.
"Heartbeat Polling uses ICMP pings to verify the connectivity and health of the HA peers. If heartbeat polling fails, the firewall considers the peer to be down and may initiate failover." (Source: HA Link and Path Monitoring) If ICMP pings fail, checking heartbeat polling logs helps identify if link or path monitoring triggers the failover.

InPalo Alto Networks' Single-Pass Parallel Processing (SP3)architecture, SSL/TLS decryption occurs only during theslow pathwhen the firewall first encounters a new session.
"SSL/TLS decryption, which requires CPU-intensive cryptographic operations, is performed during the slow path when establishing new sessions. Once decrypted, traffic is processed in the fast path for subsequent packets." (Source: Packet Flow and SP3 Architecture) After the initial decryption in the slow path, decrypted traffic is handled by fast path for efficiency.

Virtual systems providelogical separationin a single physical firewall, allowing different customers (or tenants) to have isolatedcontrolandsecurity policies.
"Virtual systems enable service providers to offer logically separated, independent environments on a single firewall. Each virtual system can have its own security policies, interfaces, and administrators." (Source: Virtual Systems) This ensures secure, tenant-specific segmentation within multi-tenant environments.

A security profile group named"default"is automatically applied to all new security rules unless a specific profile group is explicitly configured.
"If a security profile group named 'default' exists, it will be automatically applied to any newly created security policy rules to ensure consistent protection." (Source: Security Profile Groups) This behavior ensures that newly created policies are always protected by default security profiles, minimizing human error.