Prisma Access by Palo Alto Networks Reviews

In this pandemic, users want to work remotely and that means we need centralized control of remote users, our branch offices, and the head office. Prisma Access collects everything together and provides us with centralized management, enabling us to manage all our locations and users globally.

It manages on-premises networks, but it has its own infra in the cloud.

The ability to manage networks reduces costs for our organization. Suppose I have four offices and all four have a firewall device. All of those firewalls will have separate licenses, and each office will have a separate internet connection. The Prisma Access solution means we only need one router at each office and all the internet connectivity will go through the solution. That definitely cuts our internet costs.

It is also very important that Prisma Access provides all its capabilities in a single, cloud-delivered platform. For mobile users, without Prisma Access, I would have to control their traffic through on-premises networks and give them on-premises internet. Suppose that one of those users does not connect through the on-premises VPN. That user would then have access to and control of whatever he wants. The system might be compromised through unauthorized access. That's why, from a security perspective, it is very important to control this type of situation. We could control the system without Prisma Access, but that would require additional solutions. We would have to add another security client to the user's system. With Prisma Access, instead of having two solutions, we have one solution.

Prisma Access gives us security from a single point. It controls mobile users and determines how secure their networks will be, including from where they will get internet access. We can optimize things and add security profiles centrally.

Another valuable feature for mobile users is the GP VPN access. It provides security and a firewall as a service, including threat and vulnerability protection. From a security perspective, it is very good.

I haven't seen any SD-WAN configuration capability. If Prisma Access would support SD-WAN, that would help. There are some trending technologies in networking with SD-WAN. SD-WAN is nothing more than optimizing your WAN. SD-WAN devices should be able to reach Prisma Access, and Palo Alto should support different, vendor-specific devices, not just Palo Alto devices, for SD-WAN configuration.

Also, Palo Alto only provides corporate licenses. If they would give a license to a non-corporate email ID, for testing and a pre-trial, that would be really great for users to practice with it. Everybody could explore it. Or, for people who are not working in a corporate environment and who want to explore this kind of setup, it would enable that type of test access on a personal email account.

I have been working in networking and security for eight-plus years. I work on various infra including routers, switches, firewalls, and different cloud services. I work on various vendors' solutions, such as Fortinet, SonicWall, Sophos, and for the last four years, on Palo Alto.

Prisma Access is a subset of Palo Alto Networks and is a product they recently introduced. We just recently heard that our organization was planning to use the Prisma Access solution.

I cannot evaluate the stability based on my limited experience, but I recently called a colleague in a different organization who has been running Prisma Access, and he said it is going well and that he has seen good stability.

We have more than 10,000 users and 40 Palo Alto firewalls, located in different regions. They were involved in the PoC. In the future, we are planning on having Prisma in production.

Palo Alto support is very responsive. They respond immediately and they are very kind and very knowledgeable. They work on cases by priority. In general, when we call them, we are able to talk with them without much delay and they provide solutions that have met our expectations. 

I would rate their support at eight out of 10. I deducted two points because sometimes they do have a very busy schedule and every engineer is busy. Once we reach them, everything works fine.

Positive

This is a new implementation for SASE in our organization.

The license activation process is very straightforward. When we purchased Prisma Access, they provided a link and, from there, we had to add the serial number of our existing Panorama. After that, everything happened automatically. Once that management setup was done, we were easily able to add a rule and do other configurations.

Our deployment did not take a long time. However, our infra is very big. While the initial setup was done in four to five hours, finishing everything took us one week.

If you are planning on using the SASE model for your organization, I would recommend Palo Alto Prisma Access. It works well, based on my experience.

I have come across many firewalls and I have hands-on experience with various devices, but Palo Alto is the best for everything. It is the best device for infra security. It not only has security, but it works well when it comes to routing and switching.

Overall I would rate Prisma Access at 8 out of 10. It gives us centralized management and reliability, scalability, and ease of configuration.

We use Prisma Access, not only for our remote users, in a distributed workforce, but for our offices as well. Right now, because of COVID, there is a very limited footprint on the office side of it. But we would like to cover our offices so that when people are working in them and trying to access resources, whether those resources are hosted on public cloud, private cloud, in data centers, or on-prem, Prisma Access is involved.

Prisma Access is completely hosted on Google Cloud Platform. Palo Alto Panorama, which is the centralized management tool, is also hosted on a public cloud environment. So the entire solution lies in the cloud.

The fact that Prisma Access provides millions of security updates per day is really important because it takes care of the equivalent of preparing patches and pushing them to your environment, without the headaches of managing and maintaining those processes for your infrastructure. If you get security intelligence from different verticals and different alliances, or through some sort of open API integration where vulnerabilities arise at different times, it's going to be difficult to keep up. Subscribing to this service and having it take care of that is really phenomenal.

And the best part is that you know that you are part of a bigger ecosystem where this learning about security issues is happening, and things are made available to you on a scheduled basis every day. It automatically strengthens your security posture. We are quite happy with this feature and feel very confident that the Palo Alto security stack takes care of all of these things automatically. That is one of the salient features and was one of our evaluation parameters for choosing a solution.

Another benefit is that before, if we had to set up a restricted environment for a given project, the lead time was about a day to get everything functioning correctly and to get the go-ahead from the security team. Now, setting up these environments can literally happen in less than five minutes. It is already segmented. All you need to do is ensure the people who are part of the project are included in a single access-control list, which these days is based on GCP Identity-Aware. Based on that, it provides the right privileges required to access certain things. That is the building block of any SasS solution with zero cross-network access. And it is very easy now.

The Prisma Access remote side is pretty good with respect to the footprint that it covers. Because it is built on the Google platform, using the Google Premium Tier network, it is almost everywhere geographically. From wherever we initiate a connection, it connects with the nearest point of presence, which minimizes the latency. And we can access applications wherever they are hosted.

It protects all app traffic so that users can gain access to all apps. Unlike other solutions that only work from ports 80 and 443, which are predominantly for web traffic, Prisma Access covers all protocols and works on all traffic patterns. It is not only confined to web traffic. This is important because security is something that should always be baked in, rather than being an afterthought. The most sophisticated attacks can arise from sources that are not behind 80/443. They could come through bit-torrent traffic, which uses a non-standard port, altogether. We want to cover off those possibilities. We were very sure, from the start of our deployment when conducting PoCs, that the solution we picked should have coverage for all ports and protocols.

The fact that it secures not just web-based apps, but non-web apps as well, is important because the threat landscape is quite big. It not only includes public-facing applications that are accessible via web protocols, but it also includes many attacks that are being generated through non-standard protocols, like DNS tunneling and newly-registered domain control names. There are also a lot of critical applications being accessed on a point-to-point basis, and they might be vulnerable if those ports and protocols are not being inspected. You need to have the right security controls so that your data remains protected all the time.

In terms of the solution's ease-of-use, once you understand the way the various components stitch together, and once the effort of the initial configuration, setup, and rollout are done and you have set up the policies correctly, you're just monitoring certain things and you do not have to touch a lot of components. That makes it easy to manage a distributed workforce like ours in which there are 10,000-plus users. With all those users, we only have a handful of people, five to seven individuals, who are able to gracefully manage it, because the platform is easy to use. It does take considerable effort to get up to speed in configuring things during the initial deployment, but thereafter it is just a case of monitoring and it's very easy to manage.

In addition, whether traffic is destined for a public cloud environment, or for a private data center, or you are accessing east-west traffic, you can apply the same security policies and posture, and maintain the same sort of segmentation. Prisma Cloud offers threat prevention, URL filtering, and DNS protection, and east-west traffic segmentation. These features are the foundation of any security stack. There are two primary purposes for this kind of solution, in the big picture. One of them is handling the performance piece, providing ease of access for end-users, and the second is that it should handle security. All of these components are foundational to the security piece, not only to protect against insider threats but to protect things from the outside as well.

Prisma Access offers security on all ports and protocols. It covers the stack pretty well, leaving no stones unturned. The same unified protection is applied, irrespective of where you access things from or what you access. That also makes it a very compelling solution.

There are definitely a number of things that could be improved. 

One of them is geographic coverage. China is still an issue because the solution does not operate there properly due to government regulations. I believe Palo Alto is trying pretty hard to get into partnerships with Alibaba and other cloud providers, but they do not have the same compelling offering in China that they have in the rest of the world. Businesses that are operating within China have to be very sure to evaluate the solution before making a buying decision. It is not an issue with Palo Alto, rather it is predominantly the result of government rules, but it's something that Palo Alto needs to work on.

There is also room for improvement when it comes to latency in a couple of regions, including India and South America. They might have to increase their presence in those locations and come up with more modern cloud architectures.

The third area is that, while Palo Alto has understood the essence of building capabilities around cloud technology and have come up with a CASB offering, that is a very new product. There are other companies that have better offerings for understanding cloud applications and have more graceful controls. That's something that Palo Alto needs to work on.

I've been using Prisma Access by Palo Alto for two to three years. We started deploying Palo Alto gear back in 2015 and, along the way we have looked into multiple tools from them and invested them.

On a scale of one to 10, I would give the stability a seven. There are a couple of reasons for that score. One is that when we make certain changes to configs, it takes about 14 to 15 minutes to populate. And there have been scenarios where it has taken about 45 minutes for the config changes to happen. When you sell a product by saying that it's cloud-native and that users can make all configuration changes on-the-fly, when those changes are made they should happen within a minute. They should not take that much time.

It might be that Palo Alto is still using a certain type of infrastructure in the backend that is causing these delays. If they pile on the cloud technologies, and work towards a more microservices-based architecture, I'm hopeful that they can bring this delay down to less than a minute.

Going from one user to 10,000 or 15,000 users, we haven't faced a lot of problems. However, for companies that are considering investing in this solution, if they have more than 50,000 end-users, a config change could take 10 to 15 minutes. In an environment where 50,000 people are expecting certain things to work, those things might not work for them. Such companies have to look at the solution very thoroughly in terms of the cloud piece, the integration piece. But from one to 15,000 or 20,000 end-users, it is flawless. We don't tend to see a lot of issues. But beyond, say, 25,000, I would suggest doing a deeper analysis before purchasing the product, because there are some glitches.

Initially, Palo Alto technical support was okay around sales discussions and getting up to speed on doing a PoC. But one once we deployed and then raised queries, those lead times increased quite a bit. Unless you take their premium support, where there is an SLA associated with every issue that you raise, it becomes very difficult to get hold of engineers to work on a Prisma Access case. If you just take some sort of partner support, you cannot expect the same level of support on your day-to-day issues that you would get with premium support.

Fundamentally, when a company sells a product, whether you are taking the premium support or some other level of support, the support metrics should be more or less the same, because you are trying to address problems that people are facing. Their response should be more prompt. And if they can't join a call, they should at least be prompt in replying via email or chat or some other medium, so that the customer feels more comfortable about the product and the support. If it takes time to resolve certain problems, post business hours, it can be very difficult for people to justify why they have deployed this product.

Neutral

COVID was a surprise for us, just like for everyone else in the world. We had a solution from Palo Alto, but it was not a scalable one. We configured things in a more manual way because our requirements were not that high in terms of remote use cases. Post-COVID, the situation has completely changed for us and we have to think about a hybrid situation where we can still gracefully allow access to end-users in a more secure fashion. That led us to evaluate this solution from Palo Alto.

The initial setup is not so straightforward. There is a learning curve involved because you need to understand which component fits where, with all of these modern, edge infrastructure secure-access services. You need to do capacity planning well, as well as a budgetary plan. You need to know the right elements for your business. Once you set that up, it is very simple to manage.

It took us about two to three months to deploy because we have a lot of geographical constraints. Different regions have different requirements. Accounting for all of those needs is why it took us that amount of time to set everything up.

We have to do an apples-to-apples comparison. If you had a very small set of people who had to create a dedicated setup like Prisma Access, and manage the infrastructure piece and the upgrading piece and the security piece, it would be a nightmare. Prisma Access offers that ease and flexibility so that even a handful of people, with the right knowledge, are still able to manage the configuration piece of it, because the infrastructure and other things are handled by Prisma Access. If you had to build that whole thing versus buying it, obviously Prisma offers a good ROI.

It all depends on your requirements. If your requirements enable you to do those things on a much smaller scale, then you need to be very cautious about which components of Prisma you actually pick for your use case. If you get all the components, you might not be getting the right ROI.

For our use case, we feel we are getting a return on investment, but it could be better.

The most pricey solution is Zscaler, followed by Prisma Access, and then Netskope.

The initial prices of Prisma Access were okay. But as soon as you start deploying Palo Alto gear, the support prices and the recurring prices, which are the major operational costs, tend to increase over time. For example, if you go ahead with a one-year subscription, just for testing purposes to see how the whole solution works, and you plan to renew for the next two or three years, you tend to see that the solution gets really costly.

We understand that when you purchase a hardware component, the cost goes up because you have a physical asset that depreciates over time. But when you are getting a subscription-based service, the cost should tend to be reduced over time. With Prisma Access, the cost is increasing and that is something beyond any kind of logic. This is something that Palo Alto needs to work on if they want to be competitive in the market.

We evaluated other options like Zscaler and Netskope. Prisma Access has more coverage for ports and protocols. It doesn't only inspect web protocols but all ports and protocols, and that's an advantage. Other solutions are still relying on web protocols.

The positive side of these other solutions, because they came along a little later, is that they have understood the demerits of a solution like Prisma Access. They are using more cloud-native components and microservices architectures. That makes these solutions faster. As I said, some config changes in Prisma Access take 14 to 15 minutes, but these other solutions literally take a minute to make the same config changes happen.

It's a constant race.

Put your business requirements up against the solution to see how it pans out. Look at the stability of the product, and at how much time it takes to make configurations and apply them in practice. And if you have a distributed workforce, like us, try to run this solution in southern countries where there is a latency issue or known issues with ISPs. You may not get the same set results that you tend to get in northern countries around the world.

We don't have a subscription to Prisma Access' Autonomous Digital Experience Management features, but we have done some testing of it. It's pretty good because it can help ease the work of an office helpdesk person who constantly gets tickets but has no visibility for monitoring things. With everybody conducting their work from home, it gets very difficult to know the setup of the internal environment and how people are accessing things and where the bottlenecks are. The ADEM tools are going to help immensely in that regard, because without having knowledge of the underlying infrastructure at every individual's home location, you can still identify whether a problem is specific to their home office or to the application the user is accessing or to the network that is causing the problem. That information is absolutely at your fingertips. Analyzing those types of things becomes really easy. 

ADEM will also help with the efficacy of troubleshooting and providing support to end-users. If there are certain applications that are critical to an organization, you could easily define a metric to see, out of all the people who are accessing those applications every day, how many of them are facing a problem. And if they're facing a problem, what the parameters of the problem are. Avoiding the problem could turn out to be something that people need to be educated about, or maybe there is something we can proactively tell users so that they can take precautionary measures to get a better experience. It is certainly going to help in enhancing the end-user experience.

Palo Alto's building blocks clearly illustrate an app-based model. It analyzes things based on an application so that we know what the controls are within an application. For example, if you want to block Facebook's chat but continue to allow basic Facebook to be browsed, that kind of understanding of the application would allow you to do so. That is way more graceful than completely blocking the end-user. It's not something that is specific to Palo Alto Prisma Access but it is a core component of Palo Alto.

One of our use cases is that it is used by our internal users, our employees, when they need to work remotely. They'll be out in the field and, wherever they have an internet connection, they run the GlobalProtect client, connect, and they can access our resources as if they're in our building. For example, we have health inspectors who go to different sites.

Of course, we're doing more teleworking like everyone right now. Also, our admins all use it because that's how we get in and do remote work. And, periodically, we have contractors or vendors who need remote access. We'll build an account in AD and either have them download the client and connect to us, or if they currently use the GlobalProtect client for some other VPN connection, we can just provide our gateway and they can use their existing client to connect to the resources that we allow them.

We also have a clientless VPN by Palo Alto. It's a website where you can enter your AD credentials, and it will publish internal web apps that you can access through a browser. We have some users, and a set of contractors, who use that to access some of our internal systems for COVID response.

It's a cloud-based VPN, but it's managed from our Panorama instance, which is on-site. There's the GlobalProtect client that gets installed, that's the VPN client on your laptop, and that automatically updates from the cloud when a new version is available.

Prisma Access is our first cloud-based VPN solution. I like that aspect because I don't have all the traffic hitting my firewall interface directly. Users go to the cloud, wherever they are, and connect to some kind of cloud. It will grab their config, and our firewall doesn't see any extra traffic from that. That's awesome.

Because we are in the health sector, the clientless, web-based VPN that we're using has allowed us to partner with some external companies to do contact tracing for COVID. That means that if someone is positive for COVID, those companies track back to the people they have been in contact with and try to find the source. The fact that the only way a couple of hundred of our employees can access our records at any time is through the web-based VPN has really improved our ability to respond to the pandemic.

I like it because it's very easy to use. You install the client and you have to know your gateway, but that's something we give to our users. Beyond that, it takes about three seconds to train them on how to use it. And it just works well. That's great for us because it means less administrative time.

It's also nice that Prisma Access provides all its capabilities in a single, cloud-delivered platform. 

The thick client secures non-web apps in addition to web-based apps. If you have the client installed on your laptop, it's a completely secure VPN connection and anything you run will be secured by it. The clientless VPN, the web-based one, only allows you to redirect to URLs; it's only web. Being able to access non-web apps is important to us because it's how we get our remote work done. Not everything is web-based. We have to run applications and access Windows shares and the like. 

This ability helps decrease the risk of data breach. Information security is more and more a huge concern for everyone. Knowing that everything's going across an encrypted tunnel, and that we can manage what is accessed by which user, are huge benefits.

Another important aspect is that Prisma Access provides millions of security updates per day, because security has really become our number-one focus lately. That feature is very good.

I've been using Prisma Access by Palo Alto Networks for about two years, maybe a little longer.

It has been very stable. We've had a couple of small outages, but overall it's very trustworthy and stable.

It's cloud-based, so it's infinitely scalable. For us, it has worked fine. We went from a few users at first and we built up to hundreds.

It's our clientless VPN that really builds up our user count. It is consistently between 300 and 400 users. It rises and falls depending on what kind of campaign we're doing. If a new COVID variant is discovered and we have to ramp things up because of CDC guidance, the user count will bump up.

The one thing that I've been a little bit disappointed with is when we have had to open cases with Palo Alto about Prisma Access issues. Versus their other platforms, like their firewalls, where we tend to get really quick responses and very definitive answers, the few tickets I've had to open for Prisma Access have taken them longer to respond to. And they haven't necessarily given me the kind of answer I was looking for, meaning a fix to the problem. Maybe this technology is not as cut and dry as some of their other technologies. But I think they could improve their support offering for Prisma a little bit and put more expertise in place.

Overall, I'm very happy with Palo Alto's support. I'm not saying that their Prisma support is awful. It just hasn't been quite up to par with other support I've seen from them, which has been pretty phenomenal.

Positive

For VPN, we used Cisco AnyConnect. The switch to Prisma Cloud was part of a platform switch from Cisco ASA to Palo Alto firewalls.

We also have other solutions, such as a virtual desktop solution that is available externally. Some of our users use that and others use the VPN.

The setup was medium complex. Because of the way we're doing it through our Panorama, it's a little more complex than it would be on the cloud-only solution. There is definitely some  complexity to it.

I wasn't involved in the initial deployment of it, but our organization worked with a vendor called CompuNet, a company with Palo Alto expertise. I would guess it took one to two days to get through everything and test it. 

The evaluation happened before my time here, but we had people who had worked with Palo Alto previously. They knew its reputation and were happy with it. I think the switch happened directly.

It functions like a lot of other VPN solutions. It's not special in that sense. It just works.

I have spoken with another agency that was looking at Prisma Access. The one thing they weren't aware of was the clientless, web-based VPN that is part of the product. They were pretty excited when I explained to them how we use it. So make sure you review the full feature set that Prisma Access offers. It may be broader than you expected.

We are using it as a hybrid solution where we manage it through our onsite firewall. There is a Prisma Access full-cloud solution where you do all the management there. If we were to start over again today, I would probably go full-cloud. That would ease the management a little bit. People who are using the cloud-only solution probably have fewer hoops to jump through to get certain things accomplished. But we've been fine.

The biggest issue I've run into is that most of the documentation for Prisma Access is based on the full-cloud model, as opposed to our hybrid implementation. It's a little trickier to find out how to implement some of those changes through Panorama. There are also some connectors you have to set up to make sure that your Panorama is talking to the cloud the way it should. Those wouldn't be necessary in the cloud version, and that means it's probably a little easier to sync your AD, set up your users in the cloud, and you're done. Everything is already on the cloud.

Overall, I'm very happy with the security provided by Prisma Access. Palo Alto is a security company and is always working on ways to make things more secure. I feel very confident that our data is safe using the solution, which is the whole point.

Prisma Access GlobalProtect is our always-on VPN. We use it for URL filtering, to make sure people don't go to websites that are not permissible according to our security policy, such as gambling and pornography sites. We also implement Data Loss Prevention and decrypt the packets so that we can analyze the inside and make sure that nobody is trying to exfiltrate data. It's always on and it doesn't matter if you're in an office or at home or in a coffee shop or a hotel. 

We also use their service connections to access our internal services through them.

Since everybody is on the network all the time, it's allowing us to eliminate the step of having to connect to a VPN. That's the whole premise of an always-on VPN. Nobody has to think, "Oh, I need to get on VPN before I can connect to that server," or, "Oh, my VPN timed out because I've been on for 12 hours." The whole premise is that you're constantly on a VPN and it's constantly securing the system. That has helped from an end-user perspective. It hasn't come without its challenge, but that is one thing that is definitely a benefit.

In terms of security, it's definitely better than what we had because a user could just disconnect from the VPN before. They couldn't shut off the cloud proxy, but the cloud proxy only handled web-based traffic. If they wanted to FTP to a server, when they were connected to the VPN, it would get blocked. But they could just disconnect from VPN and then connect to FTP. Now, it goes through more security controls. So we are definitely more secure because of it. But it's just a completely different technology; it's more because of that than the product itself.

It's also somewhat of an alternative to SD-WAN. We had been looking at SD-WAN solutions and, realistically, the way the users are connecting now with Prisma Access, there's really no need for it.

It's an always-on solution and it supports both Mac and Windows. We have one configuration globally, and the only area where we had to do something differently is China.

Prisma Access protects all app traffic, so that users can gain access to all apps and that's very important because we need to be able to access everything. 

It also allows us to access non-web apps; anything internal that we need access to, we can access. Because we're using it as a VPN solution, our users are always on the internal network, regardless of where they are. They can't do anything because we lock them down so that if GlobalProtect doesn't connect, they can't get out to the internet. It's helped in that there were things that people would work around in other ways with our old model, things that they can't work around with the new model.

Also, having a single cloud-delivered platform, a global solution, was a key requirement for us.

We use the solution's threat prevention, URL filtering, and segmentation and they're all extremely important, based on what we're doing with the product. It's also very important to the business that Prisma Access provides millions of security updates per day.

We've run into some challenges, having hit a lot of bugs over the past year in the deployment of GlobalProtect. We've had our fair share of issues that I haven't been happy with. We're working with the support organization to remediate them and waiting for updated releases. The response on getting the bugs fixed has not been what I would consider adequate for a product like this. We've had some very pointed discussions with the support organization and the development teams on those issues and on doing what we can to help remediate them as well. They have been more responsive now towards our needs but it's a work in progress. 

They're going from being an organization that supported physical hardware, the Palo Alto firewall, into the realm of a SaaS-based solution. As a result, they need to change their operating model, support model, and release model to support that SaaS-based solution. That is related to support, related to operational efficiency, and deployments of code. Those are the areas where they need to improve.

I've been using Prisma Access by Palo Alto for about a year.

I don't see issues yet in terms of its scalability. We have more capacity than we need, so I think it's fine. We have firewalls in every region and in every country that Palo Alto has available. It's fairly scalable.

We previously used Cisco AnyConnect for VPN and a cloud proxy solution for web-based security. We went from two products to one. The main purpose was to find a replacement for the cloud proxy solution. VPN just wound up being a good and positive outcome, in addition to it.

The initial setup was complex. It has taken us almost a year, but we have about 7,000 users. We're just finishing up the main deployment of 5,000-plus users. We had an acquisition earlier this year and that will add another couple of thousand users. There have been a lot of hurdles with the bugs that we hit in the product. The stability of the software has been our biggest challenge.

We did the deployment ourselves. In terms of maintenance, I manage the network engineering team globally, and our team is responsible for it.

We did look at other vendors when we were deciding on our VPN software and we went with Palo Alto for security reasons. 

My advice would be to wait until they fix the bugs. We've been on a pretty stable version for the past several months and haven't had any issues. But other users who are on the same version have hit bugs on a regular basis, and it has been a nightmare to try to support. We're waiting on the final update of version 5.2.9 to get some of these issues fixed, and we're also waiting on 5.2.10 to support Windows 11 and the new version of Mac.

It's a balancing act in terms of security and nothing is perfect. We do have Palo Alto hardware as well as the Prisma Access solution, so we're reliant on Palo Alto's security for a lot of our security needs. I think the security is adequate.

I like the product in principle and I would rate it pretty high, but the bugs that we've hit pull the score down a bit. And then there are the operational support issues that we've had with Palo Alto, in general, that contribute to the score of six out of 10, as well.

My customers are military and federal government agencies. They're really interested in Secure Access Service Edge technology for their endpoints. Palo Alto Prisma is one of the solutions we use to make the SASE solution work for endpoints. For our customers, we normally do SD-WAN, Zero Trust, SWG, and SWaaS. Nobody has really asked for ADEM yet.

Prisma Access lets us compete in the cloud space.

Prisma isn't hard for the average system admin to use, and our customers are interested in Prisma's SD-WAN and Zero Trust capabilities. Government customers are particularly interested in the CASB capability. Prisma protects all app traffic, so our customers can access all of our apps, which is essential. That's one of the main reasons my business and customers use this technology, especially in the COVID-19 environment.

My military customers have users who need secure access to their information from all over the world. If they're using Microsoft Office products or some other app that isn't web-based, they can still access them through the web whether they're using their corporate devices or working on their personal devices using corporate information. Prisma will still protect that from phishing or other attacks.

Having all of these capabilities on a single cloud-delivered platform was extremely important to us. We also liked how well Prisma integrates with other solutions. Other solutions offer the same functionalities Prisma does when it comes to Zero Trust, CASB, and SD-WAN within the Microsoft Cloud. Prisma helps us protect our customers when a user isn't going to the Microsoft Cloud. 

Prisma also helps with traffic analysis, and that is controlled through the Manager. We can see what websites individuals within organizations are going to. For example, we can do cybersecurity analysis, such as phishing and so forth, to determine the cybersecurity risk of a particular site. While Prisma is doing that, we're also sending those Prisma files to our security operations, and they're also doing the analysis. In addition to threat detection, we're doing threat prevention. URL filtering fits into that category because we can determine what website an individual was able to access.

Prisma does segmentation either through the management of user groups or according to network access. Prisma provides millions of security updates per day, which is crucial for my government customers and business partners. It helps us keep up with security violations or phishing attacks by bad state actors. These threats are dynamic.

Prisma should implement industry updates in near real-time. Also, Prisma's integration between operational technology and IT should be more seamless. Right now, it requires additional setup and maintenance.

We've been using Prisma Access for about a year.

Prisma is stable. It works as advertised.

Prisma is highly scalable and global.

I rate Palo Alto's tech support 10 out of 10. It's outstanding. But I'd like to highlight the difference between technical support and government technical support because it's two different beasts. I'm talking about Palo Alto's government technical support. They have a separate set of personnel inside the organization that handles government customers.

Positive

Setting up Prisma is pretty straightforward. It takes around an hour to get it up and running. The amount of time needed to fully deploy Prisma depends on the size of the enterprise and the number of units, groups, endpoints, etc. Pre-deployment preparation also varies according to the size of the enterprise. It takes about a couple of days for a medium-size organization. You have to set up the architecture, determine who the users are, set up the IP schema, establish your Zero Trust scheme, set up network access, and send your log files over to the site. All of that takes about three days. Two network engineers can handle setup and deployment. After that, Prisma can be maintained by normal networking staff and at least one engineer.

Integrators from our partners at Tech Data help us deploy. We also get help integrating from my engineers over at TOSIBOX, our proprietary VPN solution.

We're now able to go after contracts that require a Zero Trust solution and Prisma's other technology solutions. 

We looked at other competitors, including Aruba, HP, Cisco, and Microsoft Enterprise solutions. 

I rate Prisma Access nine out of 10. It has been constantly changing since it was released. Palo Alto is the leader in all these technologies on the Gartner Magic Quadrant. 

I would advise anyone considering Prisma to look at their endpoint protection and evaluate how it fits in the overall enterprise solution, including integration with operational technology.

We use it to monitor our cloud environments to get a real-time inventory of what's being stood up, what's being torn down, vulnerability management, risk management, and all of our cloud resources across all AWS, Azure, and GCP.

If somebody configures something in a way that's vulnerable, we know instantly. We'll get an alert and address it so that it's remediated and not left open. For example, if somebody stands up a new storage container and inadvertently makes it publicly accessible, that's something we'd want to know right away to prevent a breach. We could automate it to prevent it from being stood up with public access. 

We can prevent specifically forbidden configurations automatically by using this tool to never allow a resource storage container to be stood up and made publicly accessible. Automation is key there, and I'd say that would be an example of how Palo Alto has improved my organization.

Prisma SaaS helps us keep pace with SaaS growth in our organization. Everything's going to the cloud, and containers are being used more and more. As security professionals, we don't live in the development world, so we need to know what's going on in that realm, and the platform will help us identify those things and make sure that they're stood up securely. 

If there's something new, a new vulnerability, or a new standard, we'll be alerted about it. That's important because we don't speak developer language, and we, as security folks, consume the data. We must understand what's being stood up and how, and the platform will help us identify that and explain why it's vulnerable and needs to be fixed.

Prisma's most valuable feature would be its ability to identify bad or risky configurations. People stand up stuff in the cloud all the time, and as security professionals, we're not always aware of it. Prisma is critical for flagging real-time inventory and configuration risks, general vulnerabilities, and also issues in Kubernetes. Prisma is very effective for securing new SaaS applications. The code used to configure new SaaS applications is critical for identifying what we want as our security standards and confirming that they're being practiced.

Prisma would be a stronger solution if it could aggregate resources by project or by application. So say we have an application we've developed in AWS and five applications we've developed in Azure. The platform will group it according to those applications, but it's based on the tags we use in Azure, which means I have to rely on development teams to tag resources properly. If they don't do that, it doesn't group them properly in the platform. 

It would be nice if we could group the application according to the platform itself instead of relying on the development team to tag correctly in the cloud environment. My development team for one project might be different from the development team in another project. If I see a resource that needs to be fixed or changed, I need to know what project that resource is associated with. Ideally, I don't want to have to go into Azure and try to figure that out. So if I could tag it using the platform itself rather than relying on the tags that the development team uses in Azure, that would be extremely helpful. I wouldn't say Prisma is particularly useful for protecting data. It's hard to say. We're not looking at the data of the resources, so to speak, using Prisma. It's more like the resources that hold the data.

I've been working with Prisma SaaS for about five years.

I'd say Prisma is extremely stable. We haven't had any issues there.

Prisma is highly scalable. It's a cloud solution, so it automatically updates when new resources come out. We don't have to do anything. It just sees it and adjusts accordingly. I recently started a new role at a company, and we're planning on implementing it and using it more. Where I came from, we used it extensively and relied on it to monitor and manage our cloud environment.

I rate Palo Alto tech support seven out of 10. The technical support used to be a lot better when they were a smaller company. Back when they were called Evident.io and then RedLock, they were more personable and provided good one-on-one technical support. Their support structure changed about a year and a half ago. Now, they're more like group support, and I don't think it's as thorough, but it's still okay. 

Neutral

I would say the cloud SaaS part was extremely straightforward to set up. We had no problems there. Then there is the container compute area called Compute in Prisma. It's almost like a product within a product. You have to deploy the container section on an agent to your container host. That's a little more complicated because we have to rely on development teams to deploy the agent, but tying the platform to your cloud subscriptions was straightforward and took only 30 minutes to an hour. 

It is a little more involved to set up the Kubernetes containers and deploy the agent. That could take up to a day because you have to collaborate with other teams to get that deployed and make sure it's pulling the right data. Then again, it depends on how receptive your development team is to deploying the agents. That part usually takes around three hours. It takes one or two security engineers to deploy and maintain. 

We did it in-house with some help from Palo Alto that we purchased through a support license.

I don't have specific metrics, but I will say that it helps us know what we don't know, and that's ideal from a security perspective—seeing things that we didn't realize were an issue. The return on that investment is significant because you can't secure what you don't know is there. Prisma accomplishes that pretty easily without having to be on the platform constantly responding to alerts.

Prisma integrates pretty nicely even if you aren't using other Palo Alto products. It's very effective for a CSP solution, and the time to value is almost instant. As soon as you stand it up, it shows value by telling you all the vulnerabilities or risks in that environment. I feel like Prisma is one of those things that is essential. If you have resources in the cloud, you're going to need something to monitor it, and it's not ridiculously priced. I'm not too involved in the budget, so it's one of those things that's a necessary evil. I feel like it's a reasonably priced necessary evil.

Prisma is in the middle of the road. It's not the most expensive, but it's not the cheapest. There aren't any additional costs, to my knowledge. I know they have some extra modules, but we didn't use them. 

I'd say the price fits the solution. Prisma is capable of many other things, but Palo Alto doesn't charge you extra for those things, unlike other companies. You can use them or not. Because your environment grows, you may not use it now, you may not need it now, but you may in the future. Those capabilities are there without an additional cost for a different module where other companies will break it out, where you have to pay for those things.

We evaluated a few, including Sysdig, Threat Stack, and Lacework. The deciding factor was the ease of use. It's critical to understand what you're looking at and for the platform to provide value with reports. The data presentation in Prisma was more straightforward.

I rate Prisma SaaS nine out of 10. Ideally, you want a platform that will save you time by giving you the information quickly so you can understand it and act on it. Many platforms have loads of colorful graphs or bells and whistles, but they don't help you get to the bottom of what you're looking at. I feel that Prisma does that. You can get so much information directly from the platform without the need to reach out to other teams or go into the cloud to understand what you're seeing.

We could write a book about our use cases. It provides best-of-breed optimization in CASB and SASE together. Our primary use case is enabling users from all walks of life, and all over the planet, to have remote access in the most optimized way.

Prisma Access is a SASE-oriented solution, making it a hybrid and SaaS. Of course, it's built on Google's high-capacity backbone, but it is provider-neutral.

With the centralized remote access solution we had before, F5, we used to see a lot of latency and a lot of intermittent disconnects. But our people have reported that they like Prisma Access so much better in terms of speed and how it operates. The user experience is so much better in terms of throughput. They don't see as much lag. Of course, there are users who don't have the most stable internet connection, but even for those users, by optimizing data reduction, it works better. We can't really help users who have some sort of wireless connection, because if their underpinning link is not good, this overlay won't do much. But for users who are using a satisfactory type of connectivity, even for people who are on 10 Mbps, it works well.

In addition, from an application accessibility standpoint, the integrated features that come with the QoS mean you can choose what types of applications get higher priority than others. It optimizes applications for QoS prioritization.

At the end of the day, the most valuable feature of Prisma Access is user accessibility and performance. For us, it all comes down to how well this product performs.

In addition to that, we feel that the security is absolutely spot-on, really top-notch. It's the result of all the components that come together, such as the HIP [Host Information Profile] and components like Forcepoint, providing end-user content inspection, and antivirus. It incorporates DLP features and that's fantastic because Prisma Access makes sure that all of the essential prerequisites are in place before a user can log in or can be tunneled into. Until these requirements are met at a satisfactory level, it doesn't let you in. Once users are onboarded, they are going through Palo Alto's firewall inspection. Users' traffic is encapsulated and inspected well. It gives us the flexibility to apply various policies and inspections. All of these come into play and give us peace of mind that this platform is best-in-class in terms of security features and tool integration.

The architecture is essentially a fabric-type SASE-based architecture. From a technical leadership standpoint, we are very pleased and satisfied with how efficient the product is, especially, again, when it comes to security.

One of the features that we really like in Prisma Access is its integration capabilities with Palo Alto's other platforms such as Cortex Data Lake. The best thing about it is that it gives us visibility and clarity. We can say, "This is what our threat metrics framework looks like. Yesterday we had this many potential threats, and out of that, this many have been fended off or mitigated." It gives us a really good single pane of glass that tells us what our attack surface looks like and how things have been mitigated." It gives us data that we can utilize for the benefit of our users and our senior executives.

From a user standpoint, it's very easy and very usable. Our users have used F5's products and it's not much different. There can be intricacies in that you have to have your laptops' antivirus protection updated, but that's not a big deal. Those are the types of things that users have to comply with anyway.

Traffic analysis, threat prevention, URL filtering, and segmentation are some of the features that come with Palo Alto itself. On the cloud controller platforms you have the ability to enforce controls, including things like the application layer inspection, granular policy constructs, as well as app-ID-based and application layer inspection. The inspection engines, such as the antivirus, malware, spyware, and vulnerability protection, are integrated into Palo Alto's cloud services platform. These features are quintessential to our entire cloud services security fabric. Users are users. You never know what's going to happen to a user. If somebody goes to Madagascar or to Bali and gets compromised, it is our job to protect that user and the organization. All of these interrelated features come into play for those purposes.

The challenges we have faced are not connected with Prisma's core fabric, but more with the end-user. To use the GlobalProtect client and meet all the requirements, your laptop or your end-user system has to be at a point where things are up to date. It's not really Prisma's fault, but when you try to create exceptions you don't really have those abilities. You cannot say, on the management platform, "Hey, for these users I want to create these exceptions." That is one thing that I have gotten some complaints about, and we have faced some challenges there.

It's always a challenge when people at the executive level start complaining because they're using the latest version of the MacBook Pro and it's not playing very well with Prisma.

I used the predecessor to Prisma Access, which was GlobalProtect Cloud Services and I have been using Prisma Access for a good two years.

I wouldn't call their technical support a pain point, but they need to improve it. That is one of the biggest drawbacks.

It was pretty straightforward at the PoC level. But the rollout of something like this across an enterprise is never like a one-shot thing. We went through some bumps and bruises and roadblocks along the way, but, overall, it was a pretty straightforward path.

The entire onboarding took around four months for our approximately 20,000 users.

On a day-to-day basis, we have security engineers and SMEs managing the platform. But there are not as many intricacies and challenges as there are in some of the other products that we deal with. From administrative, operational, and management standpoints, the way Prisma has let us do it, things are pretty efficient.

We used Palo Alto's professional services.

It's pricey, it's not cheap. But you get what you pay for.

My most crucial advice to colleagues who are looking to purchase this product would be to look at it from a 50,000-foot point of view, and then narrow it down to 40,000, 30,000, 20,000, and 10,000. The reason I say that is because, at the 50,000-foot view, the executives care about the pricing and the costing model; it's all about budget and how they can save the organization money.

If you are in a high-end organization, this is the product you had better get, hands-down. If you are an executive at a highly visible bank, please get your head out of the sand and see what is best for your organization. If you are a manufacturing company that doesn't need this level of integrative security, go get something else, something cheaper, because you don't need this extensive level of security controls and throughput. But if you want to get the best-of-breed, then Palo Alto's product is what you should definitely get.

Our journey with Prisma Access started out with a battlecard comparison of what Prisma Access had to offer versus what ZPA [Zscaler Private Access], Symantec, and F5 had to offer. In doing all of these comparisons, we realized that Palo Alto had built a cloud services fabric that is user-first and security-first.

If I compare Zscaler and Prisma Access, not all of the security controls that are in place with Zscaler are inherent to their own fabric. Zscaler has done a fantastic job with ZPA in terms of putting the components together. But when it comes to security enforcement, they are lagging behind on some things. One of them is the native security control component enforcement on their fabric. We feel like that is not done as efficiently as Prisma access does.

In a simple scenario when doing a side-by-side comparison, if we were onboarding and providing access to an end-user using ZPA, they would be able to get on and do their job fine. But when it comes to interoperability, cross-platform integration, and security enforcement, we feel that ZPA lacks some of the next-gen, advanced features that Prisma Access has to offer. Prisma Access provides us with cross-platform integration with things like Palo Alto AutoFocus and Cortex Data Lake, which is great. ZPA does not provide all of these extensive security features that we need. In a side-by-side comparison, this is where Prisma Access outshines its competitors.

With all of that in mind, the big question in our minds was, "Well, can you prove it?" PoCs are just PoCs. Where the rubber meets the road is when you can prove your claims. Palo Alto said, "Okay, sure. Let us show you how you can integrate with your existing antivirus platform, your existing content filtering platform, and your existing DLP platforms." We gave it a try. And then, we did various types of pen testing ourselves to see if it was really working the way they said it would. For example, could you take an encrypted file and try to bypass the DLP features? The answer was no. Prisma Access made sure that all of the compensating controls were not only in place but also being enforced. "In place" means you have a security guard, but you have told him to just keep a watch on things. If you have a robbery going on, just watch and don't do anything. Let the robbers do whatever they want. Don't even call the police. Prisma Access doesn't just watch, it calls the police.

There are some encrypted traffic flows that you're not supposed to decrypt and intercept, but even for those we have constructs that give us at least some level of inspection. Once tunnels are established, we have policies to inspect them to a certain extent. We try to make sure that pretty much everything that needs to be inspected is inspected. All of this comes down to accountability and to protecting our users.

Organizations with a worldwide footprint and distributed-services architecture require best-in-class security. Health organizations and pharmaceutical companies also do, because they are dealing with highly sensitive patient data or customer data. Organizations like these that have public, internet-facing web applications, need top-of-the-line security. Prisma Access, from an interoperability standpoint, addresses the big question of how well their web-facing applications are protected from potential malicious attacks. And the answer is that it is all integrative, all a part of a fabric with interrelated components. It protects the users who are accessing the corporate network and the corporate network from any potential risk from those users. Prisma Access gives us the ability to design architectural artifacts, like zones and segments, that really make for effective protection for web-facing components and internal applications.

In terms of Prisma Access providing all its capabilities in a single, cloud-delivered platform, not everything gets on the cloud. You cannot take a mainframe and put it on the cloud. You have to understand the difference between Prisma Access and Prisma Cloud. Prisma Access is all about user accessibility to enterprise networks in the most secure way possible. Prisma Cloud is the platform to integrate various cloud environments into a unified fabric.

As for Prisma Access providing millions of security updates per day, I don't know if there are millions, but it is important. We take advantage of some of the automated features that Palo Alto has provided us. We try not to get into the granular level too much because it increases the administrative overhead. We don't have the time or the manpower to drill into millions of updates.

We are a small team of ITOps Engineers. With Prisma, we can manage all our Edge Network Infrastructure (Mobile Users, Remote Networks, and Data Centers) in one location.

We also decommissioned our  legacy MPLS connections and moved to VPN. If we need to expand to more offices, different countries, and different regions, it would be much simpler to do it with Prisma Access because the only things required are an internet connection and a pair of firewalls. 

On our IT team, we now have a single interface (using Palo Alto Panorama) where we can monitor our whole infrastructure. The office and Data Center Firewalls, as well as, the Remote User VPN, forward all the traffic to the Prisma Access Infrastructure. There we can apply deep packet inspection and allow or deny traffic, and also apply additional security features like threat prevention, DNS security, malware and anti-virus protection etc.

For remote users, the VPN connection is more secure and much faster than the legacy solutions. Some of our users are located in different European countries. Now they can pick their closest location and connect to a VPN "concentrator" near their region. Whereas before, they needed to connect with one of our data centers in the UK. 

Since everything is connected to Prisma, now we are able to be more proactive, detect end-user or site connectivity issues much faster. Before we were running multiple applications (NMS, Syslog, Netflow) that required a lot of engineering overhead to manage those, but also to extract the information needed. Now a lot of those tasks can be picked by the Service Desk team. 

In addition, similarly to any other Cloud "Platform" the administrative tasks have been dramatically decreased. The upgrade process is very simple compared with any on-premise solution.

I don't think we have actually fully utilised all the functions of Prisma yet. The main concept of Prisma Access is what really help us to transition our infrastructure from a legacy and complex approach to a more simple and easy to manage and maintain one.

Prisma Access has three major components / connections: 

- Remote connections: The links to the Remote Offices 

- Mobile Users 

- Service Connections : The links to the Data Centers. 

You connect everything by establishing VPN tunnels with the Prisma Access Infrastructure. Prisma is now the “brain” of the infrastructure. All edge devices send all traffic to Prisma and Prisma has the knowledge to route the traffic to the correct destination. In addition you can also apply all the additional security features a NGFW can offer. 

Since this is a cloud platform you can easily scale up adding more mobile users or new remote offices. Prisma will simple auto-run (if needed) additional instances in the cloud to support your load 

Also,  because everything's on the cloud, we don't have to worry about patching; we get all the new features as they come in. One of the biggest problems for us used to be to upgrade our VPN application. Now, it can be done with a click of a button. The administrative overhead has been reduced, and we are able to focus on things that actually matter.

The only drawback at the moment is that a “Cloud” solution like Prisma Access requires Palo Alto Panorama, which is normally a VM that sits in your DataCenter. Panorama is used for monitoring and mainly for configuring the different components of Prisma Access.

For the configuration part, Palo Alto has recently introduced an equivalent cloud application, but not all features are available yet. Also at this moment if you enable Prisma Access with Panorama you cannot migrate to the Cloud version.

I've been working with the Palo Alto team since the beginning of the year (2021), when we started the initial setup. It took us around 2 months (multiple weekly sessions) to complete the setup. And the last 2 months we are fully utilising the Prisma components (Remote Networks, Service Connections and Mobile Users)

We have utilised Prisma Access for the late couple of months. Now we are in the process of migrating all our Remote users from the on premise Firewalls to the Prisma Access VPN as a Service solution. 

Over this period we haven't faced any connectivity issues. Prisma Access underlying infrastructure is high available and scalable. 

As any major Cloud Vendors line Google or AWS we may face outages in the future, but we havent experience any problems yet. 

As with any infrastructure where the managent plane is in the cloud, we can know schedule an upgrade and the Prisma will take care the rest. No more complicated upgrade processes that could lead to outages and downtimes. 

A few days ago the Prisma Access dataplane was upgraded. We had zero downtime and the auto-procwss went smoothly (as expected).

As for scalability, you can easily bring more users to the platform; you would just need to buy additional licenses.

There is no need for purchasing new and more powerful hardware. Palo Alto will scale your platform up to support your infrastructure.

Simple integration with LDAP, SAML can help us to provision 100s of users quickly and onboard more users are the company is getting out of the pandemic freeze period.

I think Palo Alto has great technical support in terms of the time of response and the efficiency of response.

Over the past few months we raised multiple tickets (P2-P4). On all of them the responses were quick within the SLA timelines. All the support Engineers had deep knowledge of the product, and always went above and beyond not only by fixing our issues, but also by trying to explain us why was misconfigured or what actually went wrong. Everyone had great communication skills, they were patient and listening our needs and requirements.

We used local Cisco ASA Firewalls that were located in our two UK offices.Normally we had around 10-15 % of our users working remotely. During the pandemic we had to setup around 500 users to connect to the VPN. Unfortunately our ASAs had limited capabilities (250 max users for the 5515-X and 100 for the 5508-X). Our temporary solution was to use the AWS VPN solution for the remaining users. 

At that point we realised that we need a flexible and scalable solution. In addition the company has embraced the cloud first approach a few years back by moving all our servers to the cloud, so utilising a VPN as a Service (offered by Prisma Access) was an expected next  step. 

In my team there are Cisco certified engineers and we have been using Cisco products for many years, but for my opinion when it comes to security and NGFWs, but they haven't reached the level of Prisma Access by Palo Alto Networks. I believe Palo Alto is the key player in the market. 

We had a mixture of different applications and vendors, and we wanted to merge everything under Prisma Access. The terminology is a bit different between Palo Alto and Cisco ASA, and between their local firewalls and the Prisma Access firewalls. It took us about a month to wrap our heads around it and understand how things worked. Once we did that, it was easy to implement. We have gradually migrated all our services. We did our MPLS and the connection to AWS, and now, we're slowly migrating the users. No one has noticed, so it has been seamless.

We don't have a big infrastructure and did the migration piece by piece, and it was really easy and seamless.

To set up the infrastructure with the team, it took us less than a week. The gradual migration took us three weeks, but the basic setup takes less than a week.

We used the Palo Alto professional services, which mainly help us though multiple Zoom sessions to understand all the Prisma components and also to configure the core Prisma setup. The fine tuning was done by the in-house team. 

We had a great experience. All the Palo Alto consultants had a great knowledge of the product and they were very helpful, making it very simple for us to understand this new Platform. They were never leaving any questions unanswered and they were always providing accurate documentation and references for my team to get the required knowledge and to understand / follow up during the Setup.

I think the ROI has been good. We no longer need people to maintain the whole infrastructure, and we do not need to spend money on different services that we no longer use like MPLS or other kinds of support.

Also, the fact that we can quickly scale up without worrying about buying additional licensing is great for us.

The price has been good for the ROI during these difficult times for the cruise industry. With Prisma, you need three types of licenses

- Palo Alto support

- Number of Remote Users that are connected to VPN (concurrent connections)

- Total Bandwidth between Remote Sites offices and Prisma. If you have three or fewer DCs then you don't have to purchase additional connections or bandwidth.

There are no hidden costs; what the product offers is what you get.

We didn't run any PoC with other vendors. Before we were introduced to Prisma Access we were thinking of moving also our Firewalls to Meraki (as we will do with our switches). I believe no other vendor can offer what Palo Alto with Prisma provides, at least at this moment.

In my experience, Prisma Access is a great platform. However, since SASE is a new fairly new concept, it was a bit confusing to understand all the  different components and how all of them work together. On top of that if you are not very familiar with Palo Alto firewalls and especially Palo Alto Panorama, additional training would be recommended. Of course the same concepts of a NGFW from any other vendor are applied. 

 Once you grasp how Prisma Access works, then it's really a piece of cake to set everything up.

For example, we are a small team of three people, and I'm the senior network engineer. My VPN knowledge was not good because we've mainly had MPLS. Still, it was very easy to set everything up.

You setup everything through the web GUI (Palo Alto Panorama). You don't need to know a lot about CLI. With Cisco devices, you have to be an expert in CLI to set up a few things.

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate Prisma Access by Palo Alto Networks at ten because it's an innovative product. They “invented” the whole concept (SASE), and they're way ahead of other competitors.