"The discovery feature is the most valuable. After you integrate your cloud environment, maybe an Azure or AWS, or a private environment hosted on VMware, it automatically starts discovering the number of servers that are running on that cloud and the number of services that you have done. It is a beautiful feature because, from a security standpoint, it is difficult to identify which VM is compliant or not when you keep on provisioning a number of VMs in the cloud. It also checks for compliance. It checks whether a system is compliant and whether antivirus is installed on a VM. If an antivirus is installed, it checks whether the antivirus is updated to the latest signature package or not. All these things are beautifully done by McAfee Cloud Workload Security. For communicating with the McAfee server, you need to install an agent on the VM. McAfee Cloud Workload Security gives you a direct opportunity to install an agent on a Windows machine. If you have a Windows cloud, you can directly push that agent onto the VM through your McAfee portal. It provides you a single dashboard view of all servers present in the cloud. It shows the servers on which the antivirus is already installed as well as the servers for which the antivirus installation is still pending. This dashboard view is a much-needed thing. It also has a centralized management, which makes it easy to use."
"As a pure-play CSPM, it is pretty good. From the data exposure perspective, Prisma Cloud does a fairly good job. Purely from the perspective of reading the conflicts, it is able to highlight any data exposures that I might be having."
"You can also integrate with Amazon Managed Services. You can also get a snapshot in time, whether that's over a 24-hour period, seven days, or a month, to determine what the estate might look like at a certain point in time and generate reports from that for vulnerability management forums."
"Prisma Cloud also provides the visibility and control you need, regardless of how complex or distributed your cloud environments become. It helps to simplify that complexity. Now we know what the best practices are, and if something is missing we know."
"The CVEs are valuable because we used to have a tool to scan CVEs, at the language level, for the dependencies that our developers had. What is good about Prisma Cloud is that the CVEs are not only from the software layer, but from all layers: the language, the base image, and you also have CVEs from the host. It covers the full base of security."
"The Twistlock vulnerability scanning tool is its most valuable feature. It provides us insight into security vulnerabilities, running inside both on-premise and public cloud-based container platforms. It is filling a gap that we have with traditional vulnerability scanning tools, where we don't have the ability to scan inside containers."
"Prisma Cloud has enabled us to take a very strong preventive approach to cloud security. One of the hardest things with cloud is getting visibility into workloads. With Prisma Cloud, you can go in and get that visibility, then set up policies to alert on risky behavior, e.g., if there are security groups or firewall ports open up. So, it is very helpful in preventing configuration errors in the cloud by having visibility. If there are issues, then you can find them and fix them."
"I've been really pleasantly surprised with how Prisma Cloud is, over time, covering more and more of the topics I care about, and listening to customer feedback and growing the product in the right directions."
"The application visibility is amazing. For example, sometimes we don't know what a particular custom port is for and what is running on it. The visibility enables us to identify applications, what the protocol is, and what service is behind it. Within Azure, it is doing a great job of providing visibility. We know exactly what is passing through our network. If there is an issue of any sort we are able to quickly detect it and fix the problem."
"Its vulnerability assessment is not the best. We cannot identify the vulnerabilities that are related to the operating system by using McAfee Cloud Workload Security. I wish McAfee would add a vulnerability assessment tool that will not only identify the vulnerability but will also be able to generate a report so that the required patching can be done for the servers. Currently, McAfee Cloud Workload Security only integrates with AWS and Azure. If it can also integrate with GCP, Alibaba, and other cloud services available in the market, it would be good because not all people are using Azure and AWS."
"Getting new guys trained on using the solution requires some thought. If someone is already trained on Palo Alto then he's able to adapt quickly. But, if someone is coming from another platform such as Fortinet, or maybe he's from the system side, that is where we need some help. We need to find out if there is an online track or training that they can go to."
"Currently, custom reports are available, but I feel that those reports are targeting just the L1 or L2 engineers because they are very verbose. So, for every alert, there is a proper description, but as a security posture management portal, Prisma Cloud should give me a dashboard that I can present to my stakeholders, such as CSO, CRO, or CTO. It should be at a little bit higher level. They should definitely put effort into reporting because the reporting does not reflect the requirements of a dashboard for your stakeholders. There are a couple of things that are present on the portal, but we don't have the option to customize dashboards or widgets. There are a limited set of widgets, and those widgets don't add value from the perspective of a security team or any professional who is above L1 or L2 level. Because of this, the reach of Prisma Cloud in an organization or the access to Prisma Cloud will be limited only to L1 and L2 engineers. This is something that their development team should look into."
"In terms of improvement, there are some small things like hardening and making sure the Linux resources are deployed well but that's more at an operational level."
"Some of the usability within the Compute functionality needs improvement. I think when Palo Alto added on the Twistlock functionality, they added a Compute tab on the left side of the navigation. Some of the navigation is just a little dense. There is a lot of navigation where there is a tab and dropdowns. So, just improving some of the navigation where there is just a very dense amount of buttons and drop-down menus, that is probably the only thing, which comes from having a lot of features. Because there are a lot of buttons, just navigating around the platform can be a little challenging for new users."
"Based on my experience, the customization—especially the interface and some of the product identification components—is not as customizable as it could be. But it makes up for that with the fact that we can access the API and then build our own systems to read the data and then process and parse it and hand it to our teams."
"The challenge that Palo Alto and Prisma have is that, at times, the instructions in an event are a little bit dated and they're not usable. That doesn't apply to all the instructions, but there are times where, for example, the Microsoft or the Amazon side has made some changes and Palo Alto or Prisma was not aware of them. So as we try to remediate an alert in such a case, the instructions absolutely do not work. Then we open up a ticket and they'll reply, "Oh yeah, the API for so-and-so vendor changed and we'll have to work with them on that." That area could be done a little better."
"When it comes to protecting the full cloud-native stack, it has the right breadth. They're covering all the topics I would care about, like container, cloud configuration, and serverless. There's one gap. There could be a better set of features around identity management—native AWS—IAM roles, and service account management. The depth in each of those areas varies a little bit. While they may have the breadth, I think there's still work to do in flushing out each of those feature sets."
"The feedback that we have given to the Palo Alto team is that the UI can be improved. When you press the "back" button on your browser from the Investigate tab, the query that you're working on just disappears. It won't keep the query on the "back" button."
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McAfee Cloud Workload Security is ranked 12th in Cloud Workload Security with 1 review while Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks is ranked 1st in Cloud Workload Security with 18 reviews. McAfee Cloud Workload Security is rated 9.0, while Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of McAfee Cloud Workload Security writes "Automatically discovers the number of servers and checks for compliance". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks writes "Gives me a holistic view of cloud security across multiple clouds or multiple cloud workloads within one cloud provider". McAfee Cloud Workload Security is most compared with Trend Micro Cloud One Workload Security, Microsoft Defender for Cloud and Symantec Storage Protection, whereas Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks is most compared with Microsoft Defender for Cloud, Aqua Security, Check Point CloudGuard Posture Management, Snyk and Lacework.
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