An outpost enables you to have security scans performed on infrastructure in a cloud account owned by you.
An outpost is a dedicated set of infrastructure resources that extends the reach of Cortex Cloud into your environment. It serves as a secure, localized point for scanning assets across cloud providers and on-premises workloads.
By establishing a trusted relationship between Palo Alto Networks and your environment, the outpost allows for deep security analysis—such as identifying vulnerabilities or classifying sensitive data—while ensuring that your live workloads remain unaffected. This architecture helps you maintain strict data residency and compliance by performing scans locally within a demarcated area of your network.
Important
Outpost scan is an alternative to the recommended standard cloud scan. Cloud scan is recommended because it is fully managed by Palo Alto Networks and incurs no compute costs for your organization. Outpost scan is an advanced deployment model reserved for specific data residency or architectural requirements.