A firewall in a WildFire hybrid cloud deployment can forward certain samples to one of the Palo Alto Networks-hosted WildFire public clouds and other samples to a WildFire private cloud hosted by a WildFire appliance. A WildFire hybrid cloud deployment allows the flexibility to analyze private documents locally and inside your network, while the WildFire public cloud analyzes files from the Internet. For example, forward Payment Card Industry (PCI) and Protected Health Information (PHI) data exclusively to the WildFire private cloud for analysis, while forwarding Portable Executables (PEs) to the WildFire public cloud for analysis. In a WildFire hybrid cloud deployment, offloading files to the public cloud for analysis allows you benefit from a prompt verdict for files that have been previously processed in the WildFire public cloud, and also frees up the WildFire appliance capacity to process sensitive content. Additionally, you can forward certain file types to the WildFire public cloud that are not currently supported for WildFire appliance analysis, such as Android Application Package (APK) files.

In a WildFire hybrid cloud deployment, there might be some cases where a single file matches your criteria for both public cloud analysis and private cloud analysis; in these cases, the file is submitted only to the private cloud for analysis as a cautionary measure.

To set up hybrid cloud forwarding, see Forward Files For WildFire Appliance Analysis.