Today’s CISOs must secure high-volume data centers and dynamic cloud environments where traffic spikes are unpredictable. Traditionally, securing these workloads required a costly trade-off: organizations had to over-provision hardware for worst-case scenarios, resulting in expensive capacity sometimes sitting idle a majority of the time. Palo Alto Networks addresses these financial and operational hurdles now with the Hyperscale Security Fabric (HSF) within the Prisma AIRS platform.
Instead of over-provisioning expensive, proprietary hardware that sits idle, HSF enables you to leverage your existing compute infrastructure to deliver enterprise-grade protection that fluctuates with your real-world traffic. This software-defined approach eliminates the bottleneck risk of traditional firewalls; your security environment automatically expands to support rapid business growth and contracts during low-demand periods to optimize costs. By integrating intelligent load-balancing directly into a NGFW fabric, HSF ensures your critical applications remain "always-on," effectively future-proofing your data center with the same elasticity and performance found in the public cloud.
By replacing static hardware with an elastic software cluster, HSF drives strong business value across three specific areas of TCO savings: capital efficiency, revenue protection, and operational agility.
1. Eliminate Wasted CapEx
Legacy security models create significant "ghost costs" through over-provisioning. To prevent latency or dropped packets during peak events like product launches, teams historically purchased firewall hardware sized for theoretical maximums. This is a critical inefficiency given that an estimated 21% of enterprise cloud infrastructure spend—approximately $44.5 billion in 2025—is wasted on underutilized resources (Harness, 2025). HSF decouples capacity from hardware limitations through elastic scaling, which automatically expands security resources to meet any demand—including AI workloads—and scales back in when traffic subsides. This ensures you only pay for the capacity you actually use.
2. Protect Revenue Streams
Unexpected traffic surges that exceed static capacity often overwhelm traditional appliances, turning security into a performance bottleneck that degrades user experience or causes outages. For high-traffic sectors, the stakes are extreme: financial services firms lose an average of $152 million annually due to downtime (Splunk/Resolve Pay, 2025). HSF removes these bottlenecks using active health monitoring to continuously track instance health and resilience. By maintaining high availability through automated scaling, you protect revenue streams and prevent the reputational damage associated with service disruptions during critical business spikes.
3. Optimize Engineering Resources
Operational complexity remains a hidden tax on the security budget; manually adding capacity is slow, error-prone, and often requires disruptive maintenance windows. This burden can be significant, as 73% of IT leaders report that structured automation can save their teams up to 50% of their time (VegamAI, 2025). HSF eliminates manual intervention by employing intelligent load balancing to distribute traffic efficiently across the dynamic cluster. This automation optimizes resource utilization and frees your senior engineering talent from infrastructure maintenance to focus on strategic priorities.
Realize Measurable ROI
Our Hyperscale Security Fabric can transform security from a static cost center into a dynamic business enabler. As a core capability of Prisma AIRS, Palo Alto Networks' flagship AI and multicloud security solution, HSF allows you to scale and protect your most critical, high-volume workloads with robust Layer 7 security. By aligning infrastructure costs directly with actual traffic demand across your environment, you can achieve a level of financial predictability and security efficacy that traditional firewall models cannot match.
Maximize Your Security Investment
Transitioning to a dynamic security model is simpler and more cost-effective than ever. Use our credits estimator to see how you can switch to HSF and elastic security using our flexible credits, allowing you to reallocate resources in real-time and maximize more dollars of your security budget.