[Q21-Q37] 2026 Updates For the Latest NetSec-Architect Free Exam Study Guide!

NR. 21 A global organization is modernizing its data center and private cloud infrastructure. The environment consists of:
– A Nutanix AHV cluster hosting critical east-west application workloads
– A VMware ESXi cluster with multi-socket hosts, supporting high-throughput workloads (>10 Gbps)
– A new pair of PA-5450 firewalls to secure the perimeter and handle encrypted traffic inspection at scale
– Strict performance service-level agreements (SLAs) for both north-south and east-west flows, with heavy reliance on TLS 1.3 and IPSec
– A Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) environment on KVM to provide high-performance security services to maximize packet throughput and minimize latency The chief architect is tasked with ensuring that the firewall design avoids hypervisor contention optimizes non-uniform memory access (NUMA) and uses hardware features for encrypted traffic.
VM-Series on Nutanix AHV – Resource Allocation
– Because the Nutanix cluster is already heavily used, the architect’s main concern is preventing performance degradation of the virtual firewall. Thin provisioning or ballooning could introduce latency and unpredictability which is unacceptable for a security-sensitive workload.
VM-Series on VMware ESXi – NUMA and vCPU Placement
– In the VMware ESXi environment, the architect is deploying VM-Series for workloads pushing >10 Gbps. Assigning vCPUs across NUMA nodes or oversubscribing cores would create latency due to cross-socket memory access and scheduling delays. Similarly, dedicating logical hypethreads does not provide the deterministic data plane performance required.
Operational Integration and High Availability
– With performance guaranteed by correct hypervisor and hardware provisioning, the architect also considers high availability (HA). VM-Series pairs are deployed in active/passive HA across Nutanix and VMware clusters, while PA-5450s form the data center’s north-south secure perimeter deployment. This ensures resilience without introducing unnecessary east-west inspection bottlenecks.
– The recommendation must be a scalable, high-performance firewall deployment aligned with enterprise SLAs and the CISO’s encrypted traffic concerns.
To optimize throughput and minimize latency, what is recommended to configure the vCPUs and NUMA for this deployment?

NR. 22 An IoT sensor should be deployed in the path between the IoT device and which infrastructure component for comprehensive profiling coverage?

NR. 23 A multinational organization has a large worldwide remote user base. This user base consists of several persona types with distinct requirements and concerns regarding the adoption of a Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) solution.
– Developers have a requirement to temporarily bypass security controls for business purposes, but the security team sees this as a potential risk. The developers commonly access development servers onsite in private data centers and public cloud. These development applications use web (HTTP/HTTPS), API, RPC, and SMB-based applications.
– Sales staff travel regularly and connect to the network via many different types of connections, but they are generally limited to SaaS-based web applications. They often complain about performance when any agent is installed and want the ability to temporarily disable these agents.
Data exfiltration and insider risk have been identified as the primary threats for this class of user.
– Executives have concerns about being high-value targets. Security must be consistent across the multiple endpoint types, including mobile and desktop devices. The executive team members have indicated that their primary objective is to ensure that the solution is responsive and easy to troubleshoot.
Which solution should be suggested to mitigate the security risk and meet the concerns of the sales team?

NR. 24 A firewall must block known vulnerabilities and exploits in real time. Which security profile is MOST relevant?

NR. 25 A company wants automated response to detected threats. What should they implement?

NR. 26 A global organization plans to implement a full Zero Trust network solution to evolve its security architecture and is deciding between SASE and traditional firewall edge solutions. The organization currently has a WAN solution with all traffic backhauled to a central set of data centers and requires that branch-to-branch traffic be permitted for all 721 branch locations. What is a crucial consideration as the solutions architect plans the end architecture for this organization?

NR. 27 An organization has a directive to adopt a Zero Trust framework focused on using identity and role-based access groups, device security and content inspection across all Security policies. To achieve this goal, an Enterprise License Agreement (ELA) was purchased, including Advanced Threat Prevention, IoT Security, and GlobalProtect.
The current security architecture uses Panorama to manage 60 NGFWs – a mix of PA-3240, PA-1410, and PA-440. Sites with PA-3240s host private application resources in the trust data center zone All sites have an untrust zone for internet access and a users zone for managed and unmanaged endpoint devices. A transit mesh zone exists to establish site-to-site connectivity through PAN-OS SD-WAN.
Privately hosted applications include web servers, SMB and NFS file servers and hosted Active Directory. The organization is in the process of adopting group mapping restrictions to these private applications, with daily additions of groups. It is also planning to build AI applications to assist the data teams with complex queries that will be hosted in the large offices containing data centers and is exploring hosting in the public cloud.
The organization uses on-premises Exchange, Dropbox, Zoom, and ChatGPT. There are a number of shadow SaaS applications that require further investigation. Users have been using Google Drive to upload confidential files within the organization by using their personal logins.
IoT devices on the network are associated on their own VLAN on the users zone. Using Device Security, all IoT devices have been categorized by asset profiles with medium or high confidence, policy sets imported into Panorama, and a default deny applied to the IoT networks.
The organization has rolled out SSL decryption and is using URL categorization for the majority of content filtering. Malicious categories, unknown and high-risk websites are blocked, with the remainder of sites set to alert.
Which deployment method should the architect suggest for enabling User-ID based rules, restricting or allowing access as close to the source as possible, while minimizing operational overhead?

NR. 28 A company requires segmentation between development, testing, and production environments.
What is the BEST design?

NR. 29 A technology company is deploying its own AI applications on a Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) cluster. The development team is concerned about protecting the complex, microservices- based AI stack from both internal and external threats: such as data poisoning and lateral movement between containerized components. Which solution should be proposed to address these concerns?

NR. 30 A global organization has fully adopted Prisma Access to provide security for its mobile workforce and remote offices, and user identity is managed in Okta. The security team wants to create consistent Security policies that grant access to specific SaaS applications based on a users’ departments, regardless of whether they work from home or a from branch office connected via an SD-WAN device. Which architecture ensures that consistent user-to-group mapping is available to Prisma Access for policy enforcement in this use case?

NR. 31 A company needs to securely enable SaaS application usage while preventing data exfiltration.
The solution must provide visibility into application traffic and enforce granular controls. What should be used?

NR. 32 A retail organization wants to sanction the use of a particular third-party SaaS-based AI application for inventory management. This application will need network layer data access to the organization’s internal supply chain database with confidential information highly secured in its own DMZ. The implementation is delayed because the CISO is concerned that the sanctioned third-party AI application could get compromised and then used to exfiltrate customer PH from the internal database. Which solution will address the CISO’s concern?

NR. 33 An enterprise needs to identify users accessing applications without relying on IP addresses.
Which feature should be used?

NR. 34 You need to decrypt SSL traffic for inspection while ensuring compliance with privacy regulations.
Was sollten Sie konfigurieren?

NR. 35 A global organization is modernizing its data center and private cloud infrastructure. The environment consists of:
– A Nutanix AHV cluster hosting critical east-west application workloads
– A VMware ESXi cluster with multi-socket hosts, supporting high-throughput workloads (>10 Gbps)
– A new pair of PA-5450 firewalls to secure the perimeter and handle encrypted traffic inspection at scale
– Strict performance service-level agreements (SLAs) for both north-south and east-west flows, with heavy reliance on TLS 1.3 and IPSec
– A Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) environment on KVM to provide high-performance security services to maximize packet throughput and minimize latency The chief architect is tasked with ensuring that the firewall design avoids hypervisor contention optimizes non-uniform memory access (NUMA) and uses hardware features for encrypted traffic.
VM-Series on Nutanix AHV – Resource Allocation
– Because the Nutanix cluster is already heavily used, the architect’s main concern is preventing performance degradation of the virtual firewall. Thin provisioning or ballooning could introduce latency and unpredictability which is unacceptable for a security-sensitive workload.
VM-Series on VMware ESXi – NUMA and vCPU Placement
– In the VMware ESXi environment, the architect is deploying VM-Series for workloads pushing >10 Gbps. Assigning vCPUs across NUMA nodes or oversubscribing cores would create latency due to cross-socket memory access and scheduling delays. Similarly, dedicating logical hypethreads does not provide the deterministic data plane performance required.
Operational Integration and High Availability
– With performance guaranteed by correct hypervisor and hardware provisioning, the architect also considers high availability (HA). VM-Series pairs are deployed in active/passive HA across Nutanix and VMware clusters, while PA-5450s form the data center’s north-south secure perimeter deployment. This ensures resilience without introducing unnecessary east-west inspection bottlenecks.
– The recommendation must be a scalable, high-performance firewall deployment aligned with enterprise SLAs and the CISO’s encrypted traffic concerns.
Which PAN-OS feature will meet the CISO’s need for north-south traffic inspection?

NR. 36 A global manufacturing organization has a strategic plan for rapid growth through mergers and acquisitions Several components the organization has purchased are deemed large deployments with existing IP address schemas and allocations that conflict with the parent organization. The manufacturing organization needs access to the resources before a re-IP initiative can be completed.
All of the deployments include a variety of IoT devices Leadership requires protection of vulnerable assets and identification of any known CVEs associated with the IoT devices. The governance, risk and compliance (GRC) team requires comprehensive non-repudiable logs to identify all IoT devices reporting “Critical (9 0+) CVE scores” for mandatory remediation.
Throughput needs to exceed the current 1 Gbps trending rate, and with expected growth will soon scale to 5 Gbps.
Segmentation is a mandatory requirement with enclaves based on region, device type, and function.
Which architectural component ensures the IoT storage, integrity, and non-repudiation of this granular risk data for auditing purposes?

NR. 37 A global organization is in the process of securing critical applications during a cloud-based migration while migrating to a cloud-first design, and it is currently performing a brownfield migration of its most critical applications – such as CRM and product intellectual property / design systems – into Azure Cloud. The organization already has an active/passive high availability (HA) NGFW deployed at its data center with multiple zones and has replicated that design into its existing Azure HA deployment.
The organization recognizes the need to modernize its security posture as critical workloads move out of the data center and users connect from anywhere. Its security model is defined by a traditional “hard shell, soft center” approach:
Zero Trust Gaps
– Current network segmentation is perimeter-based. The organization wants to expand Zero Trust principles across cloud and on-premises environments.
– The network relies heavily on VLANs and IP address-based Access Control Lists (ACLs) segmented primarily by office location and broad departmental groups.
– Once employees are on the corporate network (i.e., inside the “perimeter”), they have relatively wide access.
– If attackers compromise a single endpoint (e.g., via a phishing email), they can easily move laterally and scan for high-value targets.
Cloud Blind Spots
– The organization uses Azure for its production environments and hosts applications that contain sensitive customer data.
– Security controls in the cloud are often managed independently of the on-premises network.
Access is frequently granted with overly permissive identity and access management (IAM) roles and keys based on the resource rather than the user’s real-time context or application health.
Remote User Access
– Many remote users are still hairpinning into the corporate data center just to reach internet or SaaS resources, creating latency and inefficiency.
– Traditional VPN is used for remote employees.
– The VPN grants access to the entire internal network segment making the remote endpoint the new, weaker perimeter. There is no continuous check on the user’s device health after the initial connection.
Visibility and Logging
– Logs are primarily stored on-premises, then forwarded to a local Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) solution. As applications move to Azure, visibility into cloud traffic and user behavior becomes fragmented.
Data Security Concern
– Sensitive data, including product design files, will now live in SaaS and cloud environments. The organization needs data security to prevent leakage and enforce compliance.
Ingress Security
– Third-party partners and suppliers require access into the data center and cloud applications, introducing risk at ingress points.
The organization needs to ensure data security and prevent the leakage of sensitive product design files since it is migrating to SaaS and cloud environments.
How would implementing a Next-Generation CASB (CASB-X) capability address the concerns in the scenario?