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Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks pros and cons

Vendor: Palo Alto Networks

4.2 out of 5

110 reviews
98% willing to recommend

1,361 followers

Pros & Cons summary

Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks enables dynamic workload identity management and seamless security across environments. It offers comprehensive monitoring and integration with major cloud providers, enhancing threat detection. However, better documentation and competitive pricing are needed. Improved risk and compliance features, particularly for GCP and Oracle, are necessary alongside enhanced report customization for stakeholders and expanded integration with operations tools to streamline automation.

Buyer's Guide

Get pricing advice, tips, use cases and valuable features from real users of this product.

Prominent pros & cons

PROS

Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks excels in container and serverless security, filling gaps in the market and offering robust protection for complex architectures.

The application dependency map for compliance helps users understand dynamic container topology and manage security through policy applications.

The runtime mechanism supports effective network mapping between containers, allowing for connections between multiple containers and creating a comprehensive network link.

The tool's ability to monitor the artifact repository provides a single point of security control for disparate development processes.

Prisma Cloud enables proactive cloud security, offering visibility into workloads and setting policies to prevent risky behavior and configuration errors in the cloud.

CONS

Palo Alto needs to improve documentation with more real-world use cases.

There is a need for better alignment and distinction in the deployment of Twistlock Defender agents across cloud and on-premise repositories to prevent unnecessary scans.

The cost structure associated with monitoring workloads in Prisma Cloud may be prohibitive for smaller companies.

Automated responses like counter-attacks, although legally complex, would be beneficial if included.

The integration of Prisma Cloud with other platforms often requires manual intervention, and more automation could streamline this process.

Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks Pros review quotes

LL

Cloud Security Specialist at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees

Nov 3, 2020

You can also integrate with Amazon Managed Services. You can also get a snapshot in time, whether that's over a 24-hour period, seven days, or a month, to determine what the estate might look like at a certain point in time and generate reports from that for vulnerability management forums.

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reviewer1472745

Director, Cloud Engineering at Cerner Corporation

Dec 15, 2020

The ability to monitor the artifact repository is one of the most valuable features because we have a disparate set of development processes, but everything tends to land in a common set of artifact repositories. The solution gives us a single point where we can apply security control for monitoring. That's really helpful.

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Security Architect at a educational organization with 201-500 employees

Sep 3, 2021

The application visibility is amazing. For example, sometimes we don't know what a particular custom port is for and what is running on it. The visibility enables us to identify applications, what the protocol is, and what service is behind it. Within Azure, it is doing a great job of providing visibility. We know exactly what is passing through our network. If there is an issue of any sort we are able to quickly detect it and fix the problem.

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Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks

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DC

Sr. Security Operations Manager at a healthcare company with 5,001-10,000 employees

Oct 26, 2020

The policies that come prepackaged in the tool have been very valuable to us. They're accurate and they provide good guidance as to why the policy was created, as well as how to remediate anything that violates the policy.

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Mindaugas Dailidonis

Security Solutions Architect - Cloud Security Consultant at a consultancy with 10,001+ employees

Sep 3, 2024

The Cloud Workload Protection module is a very strong solution. I like the Cloud Workload Protection part. It is something I have not used for the banking client, but I had a chance to try it out for roughly a month on actual deployment of another customer. That part was really robust. Cloud Workload Protection would be the main feature that I enjoy the most.

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reviewer2268216

Senior Security Engineer at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Sep 7, 2023

The solution's dashboard looks very user-friendly.

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AJ

Information Security Manager at Cobalt.io

Feb 24, 2021

Prisma Cloud has enabled us to take a very strong preventive approach to cloud security. One of the hardest things with cloud is getting visibility into workloads. With Prisma Cloud, you can go in and get that visibility, then set up policies to alert on risky behavior, e.g., if there are security groups or firewall ports open up. So, it is very helpful in preventing configuration errors in the cloud by having visibility. If there are issues, then you can find them and fix them.

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HariharanManikumar

Cloud Presales & Solution Architect at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Jul 31, 2022

The container and serverless security is most valuable. It is quite a new technology for this region. Even though containers have been there for a long time, the adoption of containers is very minimal in this region. When it comes to using Kubernetes containers in a complex architecture, there is a lack of security in the market. People aren't aware of the security controls or the process for governance. Container security provided by Prisma Cloud is quite good at filling that gap.

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reviewer1442412

Sr. Information Security Manager at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Oct 26, 2020

It scans our containers in real time. Also, as they're built, it's looking into the container repository where the images are built, telling us ahead of time, "You have vulnerabilities here, and you should update this code before you deploy." And once it's deployed, it's scanning for vulnerabilities that are in production as the container is running.

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reviewer1456956

Security Architect at Refinitiv

Nov 19, 2020

One of the main reasons we like Prisma Cloud so much is that they also provide an API. You can't expect to give someone an account on Prisma Cloud, or on any tool for that matter, and say, "Go find your things and fix them." It doesn't work like that... We pull down the information from the API that Prisma Cloud provides, which is multi-cloud, multi-account—hundreds and hundreds of different types of alerts graded by severity—and then we can clearly identify that these alerts belong to these people, and they're the people who must remediate them.

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Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks Cons review quotes

LL

Cloud Security Specialist at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees

Nov 3, 2020

It's not really on par with, or catering to, what other products are looking at in terms of SAST and DAST capabilities. For those, you'd probably go to the market and look at something like Veracode or WhiteHat.

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reviewer1472745

Director, Cloud Engineering at Cerner Corporation

Dec 15, 2020

When it comes to protecting the full cloud-native stack, it has the right breadth. They're covering all the topics I would care about, like container, cloud configuration, and serverless. There's one gap. There could be a better set of features around identity management—native AWS—IAM roles, and service account management. The depth in each of those areas varies a little bit. While they may have the breadth, I think there's still work to do in flushing out each of those feature sets.

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Security Architect at a educational organization with 201-500 employees

Sep 3, 2021

Getting new guys trained on using the solution requires some thought. If someone is already trained on Palo Alto then he's able to adapt quickly. But, if someone is coming from another platform such as Fortinet, or maybe he's from the system side, that is where we need some help. We need to find out if there is an online track or training that they can go to.

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Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks

Free Report: Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks Reviews and More

Learn what your peers think about Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: April 2025.

849,686 professionals have used our research since 2012.

DC

Sr. Security Operations Manager at a healthcare company with 5,001-10,000 employees

Oct 26, 2020

The integration of the Compute function into the cloud monitoring function—because those are two different tools that are being combined together—could use some more work. It still feels a little bit disjointed.

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Mindaugas Dailidonis

Security Solutions Architect - Cloud Security Consultant at a consultancy with 10,001+ employees

Sep 3, 2024

To see the full picture, at least when I last used it in April or May, you needed to switch between the modules. To see the cloud infrastructure and pipeline configuration, you need to switch to that module. To see the code security part, you need to switch to the Code Security module. It is the same story with CSPM. Two competitors of Prisma Cloud do it in a better way. They show the full view of a risk. Prisma Cloud unfortunately lacks in that area, but they are catching up.

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reviewer2268216

Senior Security Engineer at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Sep 7, 2023

The dashboard can be created at the user level instead of the cloud account level, which will help save time.

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AJ

Information Security Manager at Cobalt.io

Feb 24, 2021

Some of the usability within the Compute functionality needs improvement. I think when Palo Alto added on the Twistlock functionality, they added a Compute tab on the left side of the navigation. Some of the navigation is just a little dense. There is a lot of navigation where there is a tab and dropdowns. So, just improving some of the navigation where there is just a very dense amount of buttons and drop-down menus, that is probably the only thing, which comes from having a lot of features. Because there are a lot of buttons, just navigating around the platform can be a little challenging for new users.

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HariharanManikumar

Cloud Presales & Solution Architect at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Jul 31, 2022

We identified two things that we felt would be great to have, but they are under NDA. So, I can't disclose them. Other than those two things, we identified a generic bug in the secret key management service on AWS that needs to be fixed. We reported it to them, and we want them to fix it.

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reviewer1442412

Sr. Information Security Manager at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Oct 26, 2020

The challenge that Palo Alto and Prisma have is that, at times, the instructions in an event are a little bit dated and they're not usable. That doesn't apply to all the instructions, but there are times where, for example, the Microsoft or the Amazon side has made some changes and Palo Alto or Prisma was not aware of them. So as we try to remediate an alert in such a case, the instructions absolutely do not work. Then we open up a ticket and they'll reply, "Oh yeah, the API for so-and-so vendor changed and we'll have to work with them on that." That area could be done a little better.

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reviewer1456956

Security Architect at Refinitiv

Nov 19, 2020

Based on my experience, the customization—especially the interface and some of the product identification components—is not as customizable as it could be. But it makes up for that with the fact that we can access the API and then build our own systems to read the data and then process and parse it and hand it to our teams.

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Product Categories

Product Categories

Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP)

Web Application Firewall (WAF)

Container Security

Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)

Data Security Posture Management (DSPM)

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Product Categories

Product Categories

Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP)

Web Application Firewall (WAF)

Container Security

Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)

Data Security Posture Management (DSPM)

Popular Comparisons

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Wiz vs Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks

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