AI-Powered Prevention Performance Business networks are now dominated by highly dynamic AI and API traffic, creating new security and performance challenges that demand an AI-powered Next-Generation Firewall. Palo Alto Networks wants to show how enabling security services on the firewall improves ability to handle AI Traffic without degrading the performance. The PA-500 Series represents the next-generation security standard. The PA-560 and PA-520 are purpose-built and performance-optimized for the most demanding modern AI workloads—including large language model (LLM) traffic, high-volume streaming APIs, and intelligent agents. They focus on high throughput, high stability decryption, and strong concurrent session handling, with complete security enabled by default. This testing provides an independent, objective report that gives customers clear, credible insights into performance under real-world network conditions.
Key Findings
Decisive AI Security Performance Advantage: Across all AI-driven replay tests (Perplexity, Grok, DeepSeek AI, OpenAI Playground), the PA-560 delivered 2× to over 8× the throughput of the FG-201G, and the PA-520 outperformed the FG-71G in every scenario, demonstrating Palo Alto Networks AI readiness at each tier.
Encrypted AI Traffic and Stability: With more than 70% of enterprise traffic encrypted, Palo Alto Networks platforms sustained consistently higher TLS 1.2 and TLS 1.3 decryption throughput than equivalent Fortinet models while remaining stable under load. The FG-201G repeatedly entered memory-related conserve mode and failed DeepSeek AI, maximum CPS and maximum concurrent connection tests due to memory exhaustion before CPU saturation. The PA-560 remained stable under identical conditions.
Superior Application Traffic Scalability: Across an expanded application mix (SIP, MSSQL, FIX, RDP, SMBv2, FTP), Palo Alto Networks platforms maintained throughputs for all flows. Fortinet devices experienced severe throughput drops or failed to process critical protocols such as FIX, highlighting their inability to scale in realistic enterprise environments.
Read more about how Palo Alto Networks Cloud NGFW earned the Miercom Performance Verified Award and review the testing results featured in the Miercom Palo Alto Networks Next-Generation Firewall (NGFW) AI-Powered Prevention Performance.
