it_user1206177 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. Manager IT Operations at a tech vendor with 5,001-10,000 employees
Real User
Provides cross-cloud security but it isn't so user-friendly
Pros and Cons
  • "The product is quite good for providing multi-clouds or cross-cloud security from a single-pane -of-glass."
  • "Palo Alto should work on ease-of-use and the user-friendliness to be more competitive with some competing products."

What is our primary use case?

We use cloud solutions generally for client demos of products.  

How has it helped my organization?

It has not been implemented, but Prisma or Dome9 will provide us with better cloud security and less administration time for our cloud instances. 

What is most valuable?

RedLock is quite good for providing multi-clouds or cross-cloud security.  

What needs improvement?

In our testing, we have found the Check Point product CloudGuard Dome9 to be more user-friendly at this point. Palo Alto Prisma's interface was not as user-friendly. Palo Alto should work on this part of its solution to be more competitive with ease-of-use. I do not feel Palo Alto is short of any features, but if we compare the two side-by-side, I think the user interface for Palo Alto needs to be improved to make it at least as good as Dome9.  

Buyer's Guide
Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks
April 2024
Learn what your peers think about Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: April 2024.
769,065 professionals have used our research since 2012.

For how long have I used the solution?

We just started evaluating it, so we have just been using it for a little more than a month doing some evaluations and proof of concept.  

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The product is stable.  

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

We have not tested scalability extensively to this point because our cloud accounts are not being used so much that it warrants scaling it up. We only dedicated a small amount of resources for the product at this point while exploring it.  

There are up to 10 users on RedLock in our company and there are never more than 10 at this point.  

How are customer service and support?

We worked with both the Palo Alto and Check Point technical support teams during our evaluations. So we were connected to the technical team at Palo Alto. Their technical support was excellent. The presales team was very proactive and helped us in every aspect we needed to resolve our queries during implementation and they provided knowledge to our team internally. The technical support from both vendors was very good. This was not a problem.  

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We have been using the native security solutions from each of the clouds or cloud service partners we deal with, but they have limited functionality. That is why we began to look into other options. 

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup was not too easy and yet not too complex. It was pretty good. The deployment took a couple of days. For deployment, it required only one person. For maintenance, it requires a team of engineers. We have a team with different roles and responsibilities. We have someone from the network team, we have someone from the infosec [information security] team, we have someone from the cloud team, and we have someone from our Unix team. So there is one person from each team who has been assigned roles and responsibilities with explorations of Prisma. The team monitors the system on a day-to-day basis and checks for threats and then, according to what they find, then they decide on any necessary course of action.  

What about the implementation team?

Our company did the deployment ourselves with an internal team. We did not use an integrator or consultant.  

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We did not use any specific or dedicated cloud security product before evaluating the options we chose to review. Currently, we do not have any specific product that we purchased specifically for cloud security. Recently we came across Palo Alto Prisma Cloud Security and Check Point Cloud Guard Dome9 products and we chose to evaluate both and engage in POCs.  

We wanted to find some solution where we could see all our cloud accounts and manage them in one single pane of glass. When we used the native solutions that were in place through our cloud providers, we had to manage several different clouds by going to each individually. These dedicated products have everything for cloud security management in one place and we can monitor all our cloud activity from there. There is also the benefit that the functionality of dedicated products is more robust.  

Currently, we have stopped using RedLock. We are focusing on exploring Dome9 by Check Point. We have found it very easy to use and the interface is quite user-friendly.  

What other advice do I have?

The advice I would give to someone seriously considering these cloud solution products is to be careful with procedures you use while testing them. During the setup phase, there were not many challenges. But while integrating the cloud accounts, I would recommend the users initially provide only read-only access not read-write access, just as a precaution. The users should also be cautious not to expose cloud data to vendors like Dome9 or Palo Alto or whomever the vendor will be.  

On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate the Palo Alto product overall as a seven-out-of-ten. Dome9 I would currently rate eight-out-of-ten. Palo Alto's rating could improve with enhancements to ease-of-use.  

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Hybrid Cloud
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Partner
PeerSpot user
Engineer at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
Benefits organizations because it uses the newest technology to provide a safe cloud environment
Pros and Cons
  • "The most valuable feature of Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks is the CSPM, which we use the most. Additionally, the investigation and alerts are useful, and the creation of queries."
  • "Support is an area that needs improvement."

What is our primary use case?

We provide our customers with a secure cloud platform. The client uses this solution for their architecture and we check the reports once a month and provide them with guidance on how to improve their cloud operation.

How has it helped my organization?

Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks provides a security span in multiple cloud and hybrid cloud environments. This is an important step to be able to have visibility of all the cloud environments.

The solution has helped me to take a preventative approach to cloud security. This technology is what is going to be used predominantly in the future. The newest standards are being used in this solution technology providing us with a preventive approach.

This solution benefits organizations because it uses the newest technology to provide a safe cloud environment.

We do not have a very complex environment but for our usage, the solution provides us visibility and control.

The solution provides us with a single tool that protects all our cloud resources without having to manage and reconcile security compliance reports.

What is most valuable?

The most valuable feature of Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks is the CSPM, which we use the most. Additionally, the investigation and alerts are useful, and the creation of queries.

The solution is improved frequently, approximately twice a month.

What needs improvement?

Support is an area that needs improvement.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks for approximately two years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks has been a stable solution.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

We have approximately six engineers using this solution in my organization.

The scalability of Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks is good. If we want to scale, we only need to purchase another license.

How are customer service and support?

The technical support is not good at responding to questions compared to other companies. They can be slow to respond and not professional enough. There are times when we have a question and they give us a general answer that is not helpful.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup of Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks is easy.

What was our ROI?

The solution has saved us money.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

The pricing structure is easy to understand. Depending on the use case the pricing of the solution can be different. There are not any additional costs to the standard living fees.

What other advice do I have?

I rate Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks an eight out of ten.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Buyer's Guide
Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks
April 2024
Learn what your peers think about Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: April 2024.
769,065 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Real User
Top 20
Good cloud security posture management and easy to use
Pros and Cons
  • "The most valuable feature is its cloud security posture management."
  • "The user interface should be improved and made easier."

What is our primary use case?

When we migrated our workloads from the on-prem to the cloud, we used Prisma Cloud to tell us whether our workloads were PCI compliant.

How has it helped my organization?

Prisma Cloud ensures that our organization is PCI compliant.

What is most valuable?

The most valuable feature is its cloud security posture management. Prisma Cloud is very easy to use and gives us daily reports.

What needs improvement?

The user interface should be improved and made easier.

For how long have I used the solution?

We have been using Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks for five years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The stability is good.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

The scalability is good.

How are customer service and support?

Prisma Cloud’s customer support is good.

What was our ROI?

We have seen an ROI with respect to time and metrics.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Regarding Prisma Cloud's pricing, we started small, and then we just kept on growing.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

Before choosing Prisma Cloud, we evaluated SolarWinds as an option. We chose Prisma Cloud because SolarWinds wasn't an enterprise-level software.

What other advice do I have?

The solution has a moderate level of ease of use. Prisma Cloud has helped free 50% of our staff's time to work on other projects. Many tasks were done manually before, but now things are faster with Prisma Cloud.

We are trying to learn about new cybersecurity issues and what other solutions are available to combat them.

Overall, I rate Prisma Cloud an eight out of ten.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Talent Acquisition Leader at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Allows us to generate real-time alerts and does a fairly good job from the data exposure perspective, but could use better reporting
Pros and Cons
  • "As a pure-play CSPM, it is pretty good. From the data exposure perspective, Prisma Cloud does a fairly good job. Purely from the perspective of reading the conflicts, it is able to highlight any data exposures that I might be having."
  • "Currently, custom reports are available, but I feel that those reports are targeting just the L1 or L2 engineers because they are very verbose. So, for every alert, there is a proper description, but as a security posture management portal, Prisma Cloud should give me a dashboard that I can present to my stakeholders, such as CSO, CRO, or CTO. It should be at a little bit higher level. They should definitely put effort into reporting because the reporting does not reflect the requirements of a dashboard for your stakeholders. There are a couple of things that are present on the portal, but we don't have the option to customize dashboards or widgets. There are a limited set of widgets, and those widgets don't add value from the perspective of a security team or any professional who is above L1 or L2 level. Because of this, the reach of Prisma Cloud in an organization or the access to Prisma Cloud will be limited only to L1 and L2 engineers. This is something that their development team should look into."

What is our primary use case?

The main reason why we are using Prisma Cloud is to identify any compliance issues. We have certain compliance requirements across our different resources, such as something should be completely inaccessible, logging should be enabled, and certain features should be enabled. So, we are using it to identify any such gaps in our cloud deployment. Basically, we are using it as a Cloud Security for Posture Management (CSPM) tool.

It is a SaaS solution. 

How has it helped my organization?

One of the things that we have been able to do with Prisma Cloud is that we have been able to generate real-time alerts and share them with our technology team. For certain resources, such as databases, we have certain P1 requirements that need to be fulfilled before our resource goes live. With Prisma, if we identify any such resource, then we just raise an alert directly with the support team, and the support team gets working on it. So, the turnaround time between us identifying a security gap and then closing it has gone down drastically, especially with respect to a few of the resources for which we have been able to put this plan into motion. We have reduced the timeline by 30%. That's because the phase of us identifying the gaps manually and then highlighting them to the team is gone, but the team still needs to remediate them. Of course, there is a provision in Prisma Cloud where I can reduce it further by allowing auto-remediate, but that is not something that we have gone for as an organization.

We are using it to find any gaps, create custom policies, or search in our cloud because even on the cloud portal, you don't get all the details readily available. With Prisma, you have the capability of searching for whatever you're looking for from a cloud perspective. It gives you easy access to all the resources for you to find any attribute or specific values that you're looking for in an attribute. Based on my experience with Azure and Prisma, search becomes much easier via Prisma than via your cloud.

What is most valuable?

As a pure-play CSPM, it is pretty good. From the data exposure perspective, Prisma Cloud does a fairly good job. Purely from the perspective of reading the conflicts, it is able to highlight any data exposures that I might be having.

What needs improvement?

There are two main things that Palo Alto should look into. The first is the reporting piece, and the second one is the support. 

Currently, custom reports are available, but I feel that those reports are targeting just the L1 or L2 engineers because they are very verbose. So, for every alert, there is a proper description, but as a security posture management portal, Prisma Cloud should give me a dashboard that I can present to my stakeholders, such as CSO, CRO, or CTO. It should be at a little bit higher level. They should definitely put effort into reporting because the reporting does not reflect the requirements of a dashboard for your stakeholders. There are a couple of things that are present on the portal, but we don't have the option to customize dashboards or widgets. There are a limited set of widgets, and those widgets don't add value from the perspective of a security team or any professional who is above L1 or L2 level. Because of this, the reach of Prisma Cloud in an organization or the access to Prisma Cloud will be limited only to L1 and L2 engineers. This is something that their development team should look into.

Their support needs to be improved. It is by far one of the worst support that I have seen.

We are using Azure Cloud. With AWS, Prisma is a lot more in-depth, but with Azure, it's still developing. There are certain APIs that Prisma is currently not able to read. Similarly, there were certain APIs that it was not able to read six months ago, but now, it is able to review those APIs, top-up resources, and give us proper security around that. Function apps were one of those things that were not there six months ago, but they are there now. So, it is still improving in terms of Azure. It is much more advance when it comes to AWS, but unfortunately, we are not using AWS. A problem for us is that in terms of protecting data, one of the key concepts is the identification of sensitive data, but this feature is currently not enabled for Azure. This feature is there for AWS, and it is able to read your S3 buckets in the case of AWS, but for Azure, it is currently not able to do any identification of your storage accounts or read data on the storage to give security around that. So, that is one of the weak points right now. So, from a data exfiltration perspective, it needs some improvement.

It is currently lacking in terms of network profiles. It is able to identify new resources, and we do get continuous alerts from Prisma when there is an issue, but there have been a few issues or glitches. I had raised a case with Palo Alto support, but the ticket was not going anywhere, so I just closed the ticket. From a network security group's point of view, we had found certain issues where it was not able to perform its function properly when it comes to the network profile. Apart from that, it has been working seamlessly. 

For how long have I used the solution?

I've been using Prisma Cloud for around six months.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

It is a stable platform. Especially with it being a SaaS platform, it just has to make API calls to the customers' cloud portals. I haven't found any issues with regard to stability, and I don't foresee any issues with stability based on the architecture that Prisma has.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

It is pretty scalable. The only limitation is the licensing. Otherwise, everything is on the cloud, and I don't see any challenges with respect to scalability. I would consider it as a scalable solution.

Currently, there are around eight to 10 people who are working with Prisma, but we are still bringing it up to maturity. So, majorly, I and a couple of my colleagues are working with Prisma. The others have the account, but they are not active with respect to Prisma. Almost all of us are from InfoSec.

How are customer service and support?

The support from Palo Alto needs to be improved a lot. It is by far one of the worst support services that I have seen. It takes a lot of time for them to come back, and nothing conclusive happens on the ticket as well. 

There was a ticket for which I called them for three months, and nothing was happening on that ticket. They were just gathering evidence that I had already shared. They asked for it again and again, and I got frustrated and just closed the ticket because I was just wasting my time. I was not getting any response. There was no progress that I was seeing in getting my issue getting resolved even after three months. This is not just for one ticket. There have been a couple of other tickets where I've faced similar issues with Palo Alto. So, support is definitely something that they should look into. 

Today, I won't recommend Palo Alto Prisma to someone because I'm not confident about their support. Their support is tricky. I would rate them a three or four out of 10. They are polite and have good communication skills, but my requirement from the support team is not getting fulfilled.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We haven't used any other product. 

How was the initial setup?

I've been involved with the entire implementation of Prisma Cloud. I've manually done the implementation of Prisma in my current organization in terms of fine-tuning the policies, reviewing the policies, and basically bringing it up to maturity. We have not yet achieved maturity with the product. We have also encountered some problems with the product because of which the implementation has been a bit delayed.

The integration piece is pretty straightforward. In terms of the availability of the documentation, there is no issue. If you reach the right document, your issue gets resolved automatically, and you don't have to go to the support team. That was pretty smooth for me.

The initial integration barely took half a day. You just have to make some changes on your cloud platform, get the keys, and just put the keys manually. We had a lot of subscriptions, and when we were doing the integration, tenant-level integration was not available. So, I had to manually integrate or rather onboard each subscription. That's the reason why it took me half a day. It might have even been just a couple of hours.

What was our ROI?

As of now, we have not seen an ROI because we are not yet mature. We have not yet reached the maturity level that we want to reach.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

My colleague had reviewed other solutions like Aqua and Cloudvisory. One of the reasons for selecting Prisma was that we have planned a multi-cloud approach, and based on our analysis, we felt that Prisma will be better suited for our feature requirements. The other reason was that we already have quite a few Palo Alto products in our environment, so we just thought that it will be easier for us to do integrations with Prisma. So, these were the two key reasons for that decision.

Currently, there are not many options to choose from across different products. So, from that perspective, Prisma is pretty decent. It works how CSPMs are supposed to work. They have to read up the config, and then throw you an alert if they find any misconfiguration. So, from that perspective, I didn't find it to be that different from other CSPMs. The integration pieces and other things are pretty simple in Prisma Cloud, which is something that we can take into account when comparing it with others.

What other advice do I have?

I would recommend others to consider a CSPM product, whether they go with Prisma or another flavor of CSPM. It also depends on the deployment that the organization has, the use case, and the budget. For an organization similar to mine, I would definitely recommend going for CSPM and Palo Alto Firewall.

I would advise others to not go with the higher level of Prisma support. They should go for third-party professional services because, in my experience, they have a better understanding of the product than the Prisma support team. Currently, we have one of higher levels of support, and we are not getting the return on that support. If we go for a lower tier of support, we save that money and give it to a third-party professional service. That would be a better return on investment.

Prisma Cloud hasn't helped us to identify cloud applications that we were unaware that our employees were using. That has not been the case so far because when we had initially done the deployment, we had done it at the subscription level rather than at the tenant level. So, in our case, it is quite the opposite where there would be subscriptions that the client is not aware of. I think Prisma has come up with a release wherein we can integrate our cloud on a tenant level rather than the subscription level. That is something that we will be doing going forward.

I would rate this solution a seven out of 10.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Cloud Security Engineer at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees
MSP
Top 20
Good alert correlation helps us investigate issues more easily, and automated scripts generate reports for remediation
Pros and Cons
  • "The most valuable feature is the option to add custom queries using the RQL language that they supply so that we can customize the compliance frameworks to what we need to look for."
  • "One definite area for improvement is the auto-remediation or the CWP area. The second one is the RQL language. It is still not very flexible and does not cover a lot of use cases. The RQL language could be dramatically improved to add more options."

What is our primary use case?

We use it for visibility, compliance, and governance. It is the official CSPM solution for our bank.

The only module we are using is the compliance module.

How has it helped my organization?

In Prisma Cloud, we were able to create frameworks using the RQL language, frameworks that are modeled after our Archer security baselines. Archer is the tool that we used to track all exceptions and security baselines. With Prisma Cloud we have been able to create custom baselines, based on the Archer framework that we have, and not just go off of CIS or NIST frameworks. 

We have also been able to generate reports for teams using the automated scripting tools that Prisma Cloud provides. On a weekly basis, we share those reports with the teams that are impacted. They go back and remediate their findings as needed, or we fine-tune the Prisma Cloud compliance language as needed if there is any ambiguity in there. 

Over the course of a few weeks, the teams remediate these issues and our compliance percentage goes up. Our compliance percentage for production environments was 95 percent. We then made some new acquisitions and they were at 40 or 50 percent, which was very bad. When we brought them under our company's umbrella, we gave them these reports, and they improved their compliance percentage. That has been helping us hugely.

Also, it does a good job of providing a view of our overall posture. Our confidence in our security and compliance posture was what I would describe as a "head in the sand" type of situation before. People would say, "Ah, we should be okay." But once we started digging into stuff and started putting our Archer baselines into the Prisma Cloud queries, that's when we realized that things looked poorer than we had imagined or assumed. This has been a wake-up call for our organization, and everybody has taken notice that we really have a hard job ahead of us.

In addition, with this solution we are seeing a single pane of glass to protect all of our cloud resources and appliances. We are seeing multiple occurrences with multiple platforms under one roof. That has really helped to simplify things.

Prisma Cloud does have some good investigation built into it. When an alert is generated, it does a good job at correlation, not the greatest in the world, but it gives you a good starting point. So it has helped us work on those alerts or investigate them more easily. It reduces our investigation time by 40 to 50 percent because it does all the initial investigation and puts all the findings together. You don't have to manually log into a lot of different accounts or tools to find out that information.

Financially, the only way I can think of that the solution has improved things is in our compliance structure. We spend less time after audits by putting in the effort beforehand. Recently, we have had a lot of good wins where audits have not been able to find a lot of issues. In the past, they used to find 15 or 16 findings, and now, they're able to find only one or two. When you have fewer audit findings, you have fewer man-hours dedicated to dealing with them. We are able to move those man-hours into our actual work rather than just audit work. We have been able to achieve some productivity there. I would estimate it has saved us 5 to 10 percent, in terms of money.

What is most valuable?

The most valuable feature is the option to add custom queries using the RQL language that they supply so that we can customize the compliance frameworks to what we need to look for.

The comprehensive view that it offers, the compliance percentage based on a framework for a particular account or a particular environment, is extremely useful. We can give those reports to the individual application teams so that they can remediate the findings. It also helps that we can give them read-only access, so we don't even get involved. They log in on their own and can pull a report, based on our instructions, and then do the remediation themselves. It helps us not be the middleman and not waste our time just generating reports for the application teams.

Also, Prisma Cloud provides security for multi and hybrid-cloud environments. We started off using it for our AWS environments, but now Azure and GCP are starting to come into play. We haven't started using those yet, we have just started initial discussions with them, but it has already been decided that Prisma Cloud would be the CSPM even for our Azure and GCP environments.

What needs improvement?

One definite area for improvement is the auto-remediation or the CWP area. 

The second one is the RQL language. It is still not very flexible and does not cover a lot of use cases. The RQL language could be dramatically improved to add more options. The cloud is adding more and more complexity in terms of number of services or the number of options for each service, especially when it comes to security options like encryption at rest and encryption in transit. And there is the issue of the interlinking of these services. One cloud service uses another cloud service, like CloudFront in front of a load balancer. These interactions are creating numerous new combinations and the RQL language really needs enhancement to handle those queries. 

We ourselves have put in a lot of enhancement requests to Palo Alto, looking at these corner cases, so they can look into those and improve them.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks for about two years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Prisma Cloud is a little slow, but it is fairly stable.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

It is a scalable solution. No matter how many accounts you add, it still can scale. Even the reports that we set up run pretty quickly. They have done a good job of making their platform scalable.

We have been acquiring companies quite a bit recently so we will be using Prisma Cloud heavily. This is our only company-approved CSPM tool. Even though we have some of the native tools in use, like Security Hub from AWS, or Azure Security Center, now called Defender for Cloud in Azure, the official CSPM is Prisma Cloud. It is the center of attraction for us so it is being used by everybody. In the future, we will be adding more accounts as needed until a decision is made on Wiz. We still have a good amount of time left in our Prisma Cloud contract, so we are not looking to switch to Wiz anytime soon.

How are customer service and support?

Technical support is excellent. We have a dedicated account manager from Prisma Cloud who has an office hours session every Monday, and he also attends our standup calls. If Prisma Cloud has any new improvements or any updates that we might be interested in, he brings them up on those calls. We also have a weekly knowledge-sharing session where Prisma Cloud's personnel come in and make a 30-minute presentation and address the enhancement requests that we put in. They'll tell us what updates have happened, what improvements have happened, et cetera.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup was straightforward. It was done by one of our team leads, who is a cloud security fellow. He used to be a senior cyber security engineer. It took him three months of full-time work to set up those compliance frameworks, the custom RQL queries based on our Archer baseline, and then, import all the accounts. The importing of the accounts is pretty straightforward. They provide an API or you can even import manually. That's not at all a problem.

We have 10 to 15 users in the solution. Four or five of us are from cloud security proper, and we have administrative rights. Our cloud operations team, seven or eight people, looks at the alerts and investigates and resolves them. They engage us if they need any assistance because they're not very cloud aware yet. And we have a few pilot users who are from the application teams, and they have a read-only role. They generate a report for themselves. Many people still want spoon-feeding and say, "Can you generate a report for us or give us a screenshot of this and that?" We do that occasionally, but we are trying to move away from that process.

For maintenance, there are only two of us, and one of us is doing it full-time, more or less. The other one is more of a standby. We are documenting the procedures. We do weekly maintenance in Prisma Cloud, where we make sure the users are onboarded, there are no stale users, and take care of the general upkeep of the tool. The idea is that, in the future, we'll probably get a junior engineer for that role, while the senior engineer can perform enhancements or more advanced configurations.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

When it comes to protecting the full cloud-native stack, Prisma Cloud is fairly okay. Compared to other tools out there, I don't think it is an extremely good product, but it's a reasonably okay product to work with. I've used Wiz in the past, and Wiz does a better job on full native-cloud security.

For example, there is the auto-remediation feature in Wiz, which Prisma Cloud eventually caught up to. Wiz also has agentless scanning that Prisma Cloud is, again, catching up to. There is also Terraform code scanning for CI/CD pipelines that Wiz came up with, ISC code scanning, et cetera. Those are some of the excellent features of Wiz.

Wiz also offers granular compliance frameworks in the sense that you could write your own compliance queries and make them part of a framework. Prisma Cloud's RQL is not that flexible. We are still running into some issues in some corner cases where there are no RQL queries available.

Prisma Cloud's security automation capabilities are very basic. Prisma Cloud is primarily a CSPM, not a CWPP. Even Wiz does not offer that many automation capabilities; they were coming out just at the end of the last year. But compared to other products that I have worked with, which are purely CWPP, Prisma Cloud would not even come close.

I would rate Prisma Cloud at about six out of 10 for helping to take a preventative approach to cloud security. It gets the job done. Our company has invested money in it, so we can't move away from it for another two or three years. But we are already piloting Wiz to see if we like it. Once the contract with Prisma Cloud is up, we will probably jump to Wiz. That's the idea within the company.

If I were to rate Prisma Cloud from one to 10, I would maybe rate it at six, while Wiz would be a nine.

What other advice do I have?

We have started using some of the modules for securing the entire cloud-native development cycle across build, deploy, and run, but we have not really operationalized them. They're in the initial phases. It's not the maturity of Prisma Cloud that's in question, it's about the maturity of our company as a whole. Our company was not really tuned to CI/CD, secure DevOps, and the like, so we are slowly starting to integrate that. We haven't seen the results yet, but I would say it's very promising on that front at this time.

My advice would be to compare other products and understand what you want to do before you purchase or implement it.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Senior Manager at a computer software company with 501-1,000 employees
Real User
Flags cloud compliance issues for us
Pros and Cons
  • "One of the most valuable features is the compliance of RedLock, which we are using for any issues with security. It flags them and that's the primary objective of that feature."
  • "The feedback that we have given to the Palo Alto team is that the UI can be improved. When you press the "back" button on your browser from the Investigate tab, the query that you're working on just disappears. It won't keep the query on the "back" button."

What is most valuable?

Prisma Cloud has multiple components. We are already using RedLock, and it has Twistlock included in it. It also has PureSec, which should be pretty useful for our cloud security.

One of the most valuable features is the compliance of RedLock, which we are using for any issues with security. It flags them and that's the primary objective of that feature. We are still working on implementing the other features that were integrated into Prisma Cloud from Twistlock and PureSec.

What needs improvement?

The feedback that we have given to the Palo Alto Networks team is that the UI can be improved. When you press the "back" button on your browser from the Investigate tab, the query that you're working on just disappears. It won't keep the query on the "back" button.

Also, the way the policies are structured and the alerts are created could be better. It requires a lot of manual work to search through the policies when creating an alert.

These are minute nuances. They are not major issues and are more about convenience than they are product bugs.

For how long have I used the solution?

We are still working with the Palo Alto Networks representatives to implement our rollout.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Because we are already using Palo Alto Networks firewall, we expect Prisma Cloud should be pretty stable.

How was the initial setup?

It's a team effort and multiple people will be involved.

What other advice do I have?

It's definitely a good product. If a company is heavily into the public cloud environment, they must look to use a product like this to gain good visibility into their security. It will also help with the compliance of how they are doing things in the cloud. It's definitely a good, must-have tool.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Info Sec Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Top 20
Provides good policies and violation alerts and is easy to use
Pros and Cons
  • "CSPM is very useful because it gives us good policies and violation alerts."
  • "They need to improve the API gateway."

What is our primary use case?

We use the Bridgecrew, IaC, and CSPM domains.

How has it helped my organization?

Prisma Cloud has given us a good approach to view our security loopholes. Container security has also helped us.

What is most valuable?

CSPM is very useful because it gives us good policies and violation alerts. The solution is very good for IaC too.

What needs improvement?

The reporting should be much more refined.

They need to improve the API gateway.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using Prisma Cloud for three years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The stability is improving.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

The scalability is good. We can extend it to many cloud vendors.

How are customer service and support?

Palo Alto's support is good.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

What other advice do I have?

The solution is good. It is easy to use, but Prisma keeps on releasing new features. So the console becomes a little bit typical. Auto-remediation is time-efficient.

The RSA conference is valuable to my organization. The conference has an impact on our organization's cybersecurity purchases sometimes. Overall, I would rate Prisma Cloud an eight out of ten.

Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Partner
PeerSpot user
PeerSpot user
Cloud Architect, Oracle ACE, Oracle DBA at Pythian
MSP
Helps secure our client's Linux workloads on any infrastructure, with end-to-end encryption
Pros and Cons
  • "The dynamic workload identity creation, attestation, and assignment is the best feature. In addition, the application dependency map across heterogeneous environments for compliance is a striking feature."
  • "More documentation with real-world use cases would be helpful."

What is our primary use case?

Our client needed a solution which would be a true implementation of the concept "Trust, but verify," and Aporeto fulfills that notion as it decouples security from network and infrastructure. It services microservices in a nifty and seamless way.

How has it helped my organization?

Aporeto has accelerated our client's expansion to the cloud. With Aporeto, they have secured their Linux workloads on any infrastructure with end-to-end encryption and have a path for modernizing with a security layer that is future-proofed.

What is most valuable?

The dynamic workload identity creation, attestation, and assignment is the best feature. In addition, the application dependency map across heterogeneous environments for compliance is a striking feature.

It integrates quite well with the AWS products as it uniquely fingerprints each workload. Aporeto is designed to combine metadata from the orchestration layer, the container, the operating system, and the AWS instance identity document. By combining these information sources, along with dynamic attributes such as image scanner inputs, Aporeto is designed to create a strong cryptographic identity for each workload. It authenticates and authorizes all network communications within a virtual private cloud (VPC), across VPCs independent of their region or availability zone, and across cloud environments.

What needs improvement?

More documentation with real-world use cases would be helpful. Another useful feature would be greater transparency and visibility into the security checks being implemented.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

In AWS, it scales with the cloud and we have found no issues at all with the stability.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Aporeto is now available in AWS where it efficiently deploys, manages, and secures applications at scale on various platforms including Kubernetes, Docker, Linux, and Mesos, among others.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

The purchasing process was easy and quick. It is a very economical solution.

We chose to procure this solution via AWS Marketplace because that's where we get all other solutions and to make sure it's supported by AWS.

What other advice do I have?

I would rate it as a nine out of ten, due to its cloud-facing features which fit in nicely with the whole cloud ecosystem.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Buyer's Guide
Download our free Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.
Updated: April 2024
Buyer's Guide
Download our free Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.