Prisma Access by Palo Alto Networks Reviews

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.

One of the main advantages we have found of Prisma Access is that it has gateways across multiple continents. Due to that, many users can connect from different parts of the world will be able to access everything very fast. Also, internet access through VPN has become much simpler in getting the traffic to our on-prem data center.

The main example is my particular client that has employees working from different parts of the world - Malaysia, Singapore, India, Europe, and even the Middle East. The use of multiple continental gateways has helped us a lot. The users who are working in different parts of India can connect to different gateways. There are four gateways, including in India itself, the Middle East, and Europe as well.

The WildFire Analysis is one of the good features we observed. Due to the fact that the traffic from the user to the internet is not passing under our on-prem, there is generally less control over it. With the help of WildFire Analysis, we are able to make sure the users are not downloading or accessing any malicious sites or any malware or anything.

The use of Microsoft Teams from a VPN used to give some issues earlier, however, with the Prisma Cloud, that has improved quite a lot. Even if you're tunneling the traffic of MS Teams through this Prisma terminal, there has been no issues yet. The VPN access it allows for is great.

The stability of the solution is very good.

The scalability of the solution is excellent.

Our security team had a concern that they are not able to filter out a few things. There is some particular traffic that the security team wants to filter out and apply their own policies and they cannot. Earlier, we used our on-prem solution for that, however, when it is in the cloud, the problem is that it has to be done manually. When we do changes on the on-prem, it will not automatically sync to the cloud. Therefore, manually, the admin has to do changes on the on-prem for spam filtering and at the same time on the cloud as well.

We actually faced some a problem with using the failure of authentication. Our primary authentication happens through a RADIUS server, to a non-IP solution, so that there is a double-factor authentication. In that double-factor authentication, we are using three different RADIUS servers. Apart from that our requirement was that if all our RADIUS servers failed, we wanted the authentication of users to fall back to LDAR.

The problem we faced is that each RADIUS server was consuming 40 seconds each for the timeout, and then only will it go to LDAR. However, the total timeout of the global product timeout, we are not able to adjust. If you take an on-prem Palo Alto device, you can adjust or increase the Global Protect time out value from 30 seconds to up to 125 seconds or 150 seconds. Later, we were able to resolve this by reducing the timeout value for each RADIUS server.

Technical support could be a lot better.

We have deployed the Prisma solution and environment almost six months ago and we have been using it for the last six months.

The solution is very stable. It doesn't have bugs and glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze.

So far, we haven't observed any such issues. We have been closely monitoring for the last six months but there have been no issues with latency or anything. The only thing we are worried about is that what if something goes from the cloud if the cloud set up as an issue. So far, we haven't encountered such an issue yet, however, the client is always worried about that point as all these things are happening externally to our own firm. That said, so far it hasn't given any trouble.

Scalability-wise it's a very good solution as we will be able to increase the number of users or decrease the number of users or even the bandwidth. Scalability-wise it's a perfect solution.

This solution is used by little over 8,000 users in our intranet and the user roles span from high-level management up to the contacts and their employees who are supporting the calls and the suppliers for the telecom. It is being used by a lot of different variety of users, management, IT, admin, business users, call center users, everyone.

When we decode, we decode it for 10,000 users. So far, we haven't increased it yet. In the future, if our number of user accounts increases or if the Work from Home situation due to COVID continues, then maybe our client will think about increasing it.

Technical support for this solution is via one of our third-party vendors. One problem is that the third-party vendor is not able to resolve all the issues. They will have to go to Palo Alto technical support via their exclusive support. One problem is ASP. Palo Alto is taking a lot of time for coming online and supporting that could be for a minor issue or a major issue. The time taken by Palo Alto Support to get online and support us has been a pain area. We're not really that satisfied.

Before Prisma, we were using the Palo Alto on-prem solution, Global Protect Solution. We had Palo Alto firewalls in our on-prem which we were using for VPN and before that, we used a few VPN solutions.

The initial setup was a mix of difficult and straightforward. We did the deployment in phases for users across different continents. By the time we finished the deployment, which took nearly six months, it was in our case a stable solution and simple to use as well. However, it took a while as we were working on different continents and moving from one to the other in a particular order.

The team was a combination. The team was a combination of one of the vendors in Malaysia and my team, who's from a client end. So there was a total of seven members in the team.

Our implementation strategy was as follows: we already had one Palo Alto Global Protect Retail Solution, so it was not big trouble for us to migrate it to a cloud. We started implementing, planning the redundancy for such two different sites. We established the IP set terminals with our two different sites, which will terminate from the cloud to Palo Alto VPN Box on our on-prem. Then, we gradually migrated the users from on-prem to the cloud.

In terms of maintenance, first of all, we have to keep on monitoring it. If there is something wrong with the cloud, we will have to get the alert and act accordingly. Maintenance-wise so far we have increased the bandwidth for internet links. At that time we had set up redundancy and there was no trouble with that. Apart from that, so far, no other maintenance has been done.

We had a vendor assist us a bit during the implementation.

I can't speak to the licensing costs. We had a two-year license, which we are still on.

We're just customers and end-users.

We are using a SaaS version of the solution.

I will definitely recommend implementing this product as it has a very good scalable solution. Considering this work from home scenario in COVID, it is one of the best solutions one can implement. However, my advice would be to make sure you have enough internet bandwidth while implementing and also make sure there is site-level redundancy at your end. If you are a client then you won't implement it. Make sure there are two separate IP set terminals published from the client to your end. That way, if something goes wrong, your internet goes down or something, the VPN will be accessible.

One good lesson I have learned is that earlier in my thought process related to VPN was very narrow. I never thought that you can put it across multiple continental gateways and allow users to access it so fast. 

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

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.

I use the solution in my company for our remote workers and branch access.

The product's price is an area of concern where improvements are required. The solution's price should be lowered.

Our company faces some issues during the product's configuration phase. The product's configuration part is slow and not very effective. In my company, we have to change the configuration multiple times to make it effective. The configuration part of the product can be improved.

The product's support team needs to improve the quality of services offered.

I have been using Prisma Access by Palo Alto Networks for a year.

Stability-wise, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.

Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

The product is suitable for medium to large-sized companies.

I have experience with the solution's technical support. I rate the technical support an eight out of ten.

Positive

I have experience with Fortinet FortiEDR.

The product's initial setup phase is simple.

The solution is deployed on the cloud.

The solution can be deployed in a couple of hours.

Zscaler is a good product. In terms of features, Prisma Access by Palo Alto Networks and Zscaler are at the same level. Prisma Access by Palo Alto Networks may have an advantage over Zscaler in terms of security. Palo Alto Networks comes from security vendors, and Zscaler is available from cloud vendors. When it comes to simplicity and connectivity, Zscaler is better than Prisma Access by Palo Alto Networks.

The product is secure for remote workers since it has many cloud-based facilities that can offer protection.

The product can provide improved access to those clients who do not directly go to SaaS applications but prefer to use such applications via Prisma Access since it provides security policies to help secure the network traffic.

For security needs, the product's security profile is good.

I have experience with the product's GlobalProtect VPN feature, and I feel that it works fine. The feature also allows the customer or client to go through a tunnel to Prisma Access.

The integration of Prisma Access with Palo Alto Networks can provide a better security posture. The integration of Prisma Access with Palo Alto Cortex XDR is the best, especially when our company sends the logs from Prisma Access to Cortex Data Lake. My company gets a full view of the attack part, consolidation, and timeline of the attacks in Palo Alto Cortex XDR.

I recommend the product to those who plan to use it.

I rate the tool an eight out of ten.

It can be used for remote access to web applications and to grant secure access to users.

I've mainly used their solutions for VPN connections from mobile devices. 

It's quite reliable and performs well for users.

It wasn't so satisfying to work with it. There is room for improvement in the policy management. It is difficult to cover the entire scenery through Palo Alto products. 

In future releases, more focus on integrations would be beneficial, along with improvements in policy management.

I am familiar with this product. 

It seemed quite a stable product. 

We have a couple of customers using this solution. 

The initial setup was relatively easy, but there were complexities due to the policies we had to generate. 

I was more of a user than an administrator. However, the deployment process seemed quick.

Primarily setting up the software. The team involved in the setup handled the rest.

One person is enough for the deployment. 

From the management side, I'm sure there are several people involved. From an end-user perspective, it's very simple. It likely doesn't need more than one person to manage it.

Overall, I would rate the solution a seven out of ten.

Prisma Access protects all app traffic so that users can gain access to all apps. This is very important when you have multiple applications in your environment. You do not want any network traffic to get compromised. It inspects all the incoming traffic so that the user can access that traffic in a secure way.

It secures both non-web and web-based apps, which is very important. You have applications in your environment. So, you want them to be accessed in a secure manner. It also provides security on the internet when you are trying to access something, such as PaaS apps. It provides security to that as well with the security management policy. It has an inbuilt security management policy. You just need to enable that, and that's it. This security of the non-web and web-based apps reduces the data breach. It is good for our operations that our non-web apps as well as web-based apps are secured.

We have two ways to manage Prisma Access. One is Panorama, and the other one is the Cloud Managed application. The graphical UI is very easy to use. It has a user-friendly graphical user interface, and we have a graphical statistics page as well, which gives you an insight into what's happening. It is very user-friendly.

It makes it very easy that in a single interface, you get all the features, such as routing, security, decryption, and other application functionalities. So, in a single graphical interface, you get everything, and it's easy to manage.

It provides traffic analysis, threat prevention, URL filtering, and segmentation. These elements are very important because you do not want to allow all the URL categories in your environment. You can simply block the categories that you don't want your users to access in your network. That's where these features come in handy. We can simply block these URL categories, and we have that functionality in Prisma Access.

It provides millions of security updates per day. Technology is changing every day, and Palo Alto is providing regular updates so that we can keep ourselves up to the market level. Constant enhancements are provided with the help of the Prisma Access plugin version. New plugins and features are coming every month.

Autonomous Digital Experience Management (ADEM) features are very good. It's a very helpful application. It helps us to troubleshoot network-related issues. It makes the job easy. We get to know whether an issue is at the endpoint level, ISP level, or system Access level. It helps us to determine the issue so that we can isolate and focus on a specific area. It makes our job easy.

ADEM is very impressive, and the users are enjoying this application. If they're not that tech savvy, it helps to isolate the issue at a particular level, making the job easy.

It enables us to deliver better applications. It is helpful because I can connect all my branch offices. If I have one office in the US, one in Asia, and one in Europe, I can connect all my offices to Prisma Access. I can also connect my data center and my mobile users spread across the globe. In Prisma Access, we have more than 100 locations provided by Palo Alto. So, it is very easy.

We have different security profiles inside Prisma Access. We have file blocking. We have anti-spyware. We have antivirus, and we have vulnerability protection. We also have DoS protection. All of these features are provided by Palo Alto Prisma Access, and we can utilize these options to make our security even better.

GlobalProtect is one of the best features of Prisma Access. It provides a remote access VPN solution.

We have an application called ADEM that helps us troubleshoot network-related issues. It helps us to isolate an issue whether it is on the ISP level, endpoint level, or system access level.

The Cloud Managed Prisma Access needs some more enhancement. Its GUI needs to be updated with respect to the inside application of Prisma Access.

The BGP filtering options on Prisma Access should be improved.

It has been three years.

It is very stable. If one node goes down on Prisma Access, we always have a backup node so that the traffic is not impacted. A backup node is always available, and the traffic is not compromised.

It is a scalable solution. Many clients are using the Prisma Access solution. I have personally worked with clients from across the globe, such as Germany, Australia, and Asia. They all are enterprise customers. 

People who work with or manage it are cybersecurity architects and cybersecurity leads. 

Sometimes, there's a long wait, and it is hard to get technical support, but it's improving day by day. I would rate them a 7 out of 10.

Neutral

I didn't use any other solution. 

It's straightforward and very easy. The deployment duration depends on the client's infrastructure. It depends on how many branch offices they are going to have. They could have only 3 offices, or they could have 100 offices. On average, if they have only 4 offices, it will take a max of four sessions. If they have 10 offices, it would take about 20 hours with two hours for each session.

We need an infrastructure subnet so that we can create an infrastructure over Prisma Access. We need to decide on the routing part, whether we are going with BGP or traffic routing. We need to have the IP address information for the IPsec tunnel. Apart from that, we need to take care of the DNS and resolve internal domains, if they have any. 

From my end, only one consultant is assigned for delivering the solution to the customer.

I would advise choosing your options according to your company's needs. Just go for what you want and do not pay for anything extra in terms of licensing. You need to determine how much bandwidth is required in your company network, and according to that, you should pay for the license. The mobile user license is based on the number of users who are going to use the VPN solution. You need to determine how many mobile users you are going to have in your network, and you should pay according to that.

There are no other costs in addition to licensing, but if you go for the consultant services of Palo Alto networks to deliver the solution for you, then you need to pay something extra. That is not a part of licensing.

If you have a company with branch offices, you do not need to have your own data center. You can simply connect your branch offices as well as your remote VPN users to the Prisma Palo Alto data center. You do not need to maintain your own data center. It will save your LAN cost, electricity cost, and labor cost.

Make sure that you are familiar with your company's network design and your design is compatible with Prisma Access. Make sure that the design is properly done and every use case or scenario is properly discussed. After that only go for the Prisma Access solution.

I would rate Prisma Access an 8 out of 10.

We are a solution provider and we have implemented Prism Cloud for a couple of clients.

Our clients use this product for their container security.

The remediation process is easy compared to other platforms.

The interface is user-friendly.

My clients would like to see a more feature-rich product.

We have been using Prisma SaaS for about three months.

Stability-wise, I feel that it is good.

We have not yet tried to expand beyond our integration with one cloud platform. This is something that we may do in the future.

There are three people in my organization who use it.

Technical support from Palo Alto has been responsive and they are good.

We implemented Azure Secure Center before trying this product.

This product is straightforward to set up and the integration is good.

The licensing fees are paid on a yearly basis and for what we get, the price is good. However, the pricing should be better.

We did not have a great deal of time to evaluate other products.

For anybody who is looking for a contained-based solution, I definitely recommend this product.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

As a Palo Alto provider, their Platform as a Service (PaaS) for their Prisma Cloud-Native product, is offered as a hosted or Software as a Service (SaaS) version. As a user their product should scan and manage cloud container images to identify vulnerabilities. It's a key feature for identifying CI/CD development issues for remediation. 

The most valuable feature of Prisma Cloud-Native, in my opinion, is that it assists in identifying, analyzing, and remediating vulnerabilities.

Palo Alto does a great job on managing updates to their products. It can be difficult managing all the subscription updates, especially if they are manual. There should be a process in place. 

One area of challenge is for them to stay on top of current CVEs on their platform. Anything in the lines of compliance should be current from potential attacks. They have a URL link where customers can make recommendations to map to specific compliance frameworks or standards. That's great, but instead of having the customer identify those, they should make sure they're using the most recent version. The NIST SP 800-53 Rev. 4, should be mapped to NIST SP 800-53 Rev. 5 current version. Many people are unaware of this change. Should use the most current version, unless you have an exception for legacy systems.

I have been using Palo Alto Prisma Cloud for about a year now.

I'm currently supporting a Prisma Cloud-Native re-configuration project. It's their Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) version in the Cloud to scan for vulnerabilities. 

Prisma Palo Alto Networks is an optimal solution. They use the Amazon platform. They have some extremely talented engineers who keep the product up to date. Version updates could be a challenge as some versions are not automated. They don't always push you to update unless you're maybe using the hosted version. If you are unaware of this, you may have been using an older version for an extended period of time. There will be bugs and issues, and it will not perform optimally. It's important to use the most current version. 

Palo Alot support is great. There are no complaints.

I am familiar with Trend Micro, and WatchGuard solutions. I really like Trend Micro. They are excellent, in my opinion. They are great for anti-malware, as well as scanning your desktops and computers for personal or business use.

Proofpoint is another product that I really like for DLP Endpoint Security. They do an excellent job.

I didn't do the original configuration, but I am doing some of the re-configuration. It is important to understand your organization's infrastructure, cloud containers, and all the various types of administrative access controls. It all comes down to having the knowledge and visibility to configure it with your environment. 

The pricing is reasonable for Palo Alto. They price their products using credit modules. There are various types of modules in each section. I believe there are four different modules. If you want to ensure that you are saving on cost, you should develop a very good DevOps or DevSecOps process with the cloud engineers and development team. Meaning, when the development team is no longer creating apps or working in their CI/CD environment, they must scale down, repave and decommission or it could increase your costs significantly.