For most investors, how much a stock's price changes over time is important. This factor can impact your investment portfolio as well as help you compare investment results across sectors and industries.

The fear of missing out, or FOMO, also plays a factor in investing, especially with particular tech giants, as well as popular consumer-facing stocks.

What if you'd invested in Palo Alto Networks (PANW) ten years ago? It may not have been easy to hold on to PANW for all that time, but if you did, how much would your investment be worth today?

Palo Alto Networks' Business In-Depth

With that in mind, let's take a look at Palo Alto Networks' main business drivers.

Santa Clara, CA-based Palo Alto Networks, Inc. offers network security solutions to enterprises, service providers and government entities worldwide.

The company's next generation firewall products deliver natively integrated application, user, and content visibility and control through its operating system, hardware and software architecture. It serves the enterprise network security market, which includes Firewall, Unified Threat Management (UTM), Web Gateway, Intrusion Detection and Prevention, and Virtual Private Network technologies.

Through its products and subscription services, Palo Alto provides integrated protection against dynamic security threats while simplifying the IT security infrastructure. Its solutions incorporate application-specific integrated circuits, hardware architecture, operating system, and associated security and networking functions.

The company’s network security gateways protect customer data, reduce security complexities and lower total cost of ownership. Customers can implement their security policies on traffic between internal networks and the Internet, as well as between internal and private networks shared with partners.

The company has a single operating segment. However, the company announces its revenues from products and services separately. For fiscal 2024, the company reported total revenues of $8.03 billion, which grew 16.5% year over year.

Palo Alto’s fiscal 2024 revenues from its products increased 1.6% year over year to $1.6 billion. Revenues from subscriptions and support grew 20.9% to $6.42 billion.

Further, Palo Alto operates across different geographic regions, including the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) and the Asia-Pacific and Japan (APAC).

The company faces competition from large companies like Cisco and Juniper, independent security vendors such as Symantec, Check Point, Fortinet, FireEye and several other small companies.