Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks Reviews

I do not personally use it in my organization. I am a consultant, and I support my clients. I understand the environment, and based on that, I suggest they implement Prisma Cloud. My job is to do a technical evaluation of the product and recommend it to my clients. I give my recommendation to the client as an advisor. I tell them about the features and capabilities of Prisma Cloud and how they can utilize it. I also do a price or cost-effectiveness comparison of different products, but in the end, my clients decide whether they want to choose the technology over the cost or vice versa.

There have been multiple use cases of Prisma Cloud. The use cases vary based on a client's requirements. It is not necessary to implement all the features and capabilities of Prisma Cloud, but generally, it is for continuous compliance monitoring. The Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) feature identifies vulnerabilities within your IT organization or ITOps environment. The main part is to ensure compliance with industry standards such as GDPR and CIS Benchmarks.  

Vulnerability scanning has been a major problem for clients. Nowadays, clients do not have just one cloud. They are not using just AWS or Azure. They have multiple clouds. For example, the primary site is on Oracle, the disaster recovery site is sitting on AWS, and some of their applications are on Azure, so there are three hybrid cloud environments. We try to identify the best solution that can seamlessly integrate with all three cloud providers. Our clients want a centralized Cloud Security Posture Management solution for monitoring vulnerabilities and threats. This is one of the major use cases for which we recommend the Prisma Cloud CSPM solution to our clients.

Prisma Cloud can seamlessly integrate with all clouds. When you go into a cloud, there are multiple landscapes. Some are Windows machines, and some are Linux machines. There are different APIs, different databases, and different types of environments with microservices, Kubernetes, etc. Prisma Cloud has the capability to integrate with all these. That is the beauty. This seamless integration is very critical in every product.

There are multiple CSPM products in the market. The key feature of Prisma Cloud is seamless integration. They have thousands of in-built APIs. You do not need to do much customization. It can seamlessly integrate with multiple clouds. It can integrate seamlessly with Azure, AWS, Oracle, Alibaba Cloud, etc. This is the main feature and the key selling point of Prisma Cloud. For example, today, the client is using only Azure Cloud, but tomorrow, the requirement might come for AWS or Oracle Cloud. It does not mean that they are going to buy a new product for CSPM. That is the beauty of Prisma Cloud, and this is where Prisma Cloud scores. It integrates seamlessly. It does not mean that other products cannot integrate. They can integrate, but they might not seamlessly integrate, or they might integrate only with AWS and Azure but not with Oracle or Alibaba Cloud. All of my client base is in the GCC region. I have clients in UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, and Oman. Oman has Google Cloud. Saudi Arabia has Alibaba Cloud and Oracle Cloud. UAE has AWS Cloud and Azure Cloud. In Saudi Arabia, there are even private clouds. Prisma Cloud can even integrate with your private cloud. You can integrate your on-premise cloud.

Prisma Cloud can protect the full cloud-native stack. It is great, and it can solve your needs from a security point of view. The whole purpose of Prisma Cloud is to scan vulnerabilities.

Prisma Cloud's security automation capabilities are good. For example, you can define a policy for virtual machines. The policy hits an API and scans all your virtual machines. It can identify a virtual machine that is not supposed to have access to the Internet, but its ports are open. If you have set the rules, it can also remove the access of the port or the VM to access the Internet. This capability is definitely there, but it is based on the defined rules and policies and how you do the configuration.

Prisma Cloud provides good visibility. The dashboard or UI is user-friendly. You get a holistic view of your entire infrastructure. 

Prisma Cloud integrates security into our CI/CD pipeline at the resource,  component, and infrastructure levels, but at the application level, it is limited. For application-level security, you need to do something else. You need to have an additional capability or additional security solution.

It provides a single tool to protect all of our cloud resources and applications, without having to manage and reconcile disparate security and compliance reports.

It provides risk clarity at runtime and across the entire pipeline, showing issues as they are discovered during the build phases. It discovers issues at the scanning level. It also has the capability to rescan. For example, if you have discovered an issue or vulnerability, after resolving it, you can rescan the same resource to identify whether it has been mitigated or not.

Prisma Cloud has reduced runtime alerts by 60% to 70%. It has also reduced alert investigation time by 60% to 70%. With these time savings, you also save money. By preventing any vulnerabilities or threats, you also save your organization's reputation.

It has a feature for customized security policy. I implement it in banking, health insurance, and other sectors, and every organization has its own customized policies and procedures. In Prisma Cloud, you can customize policies, and based on that, you can do monitoring. 

It has multiple capabilities, such as threat detection and remediation. You can even orchestrate. For example, you can set a rule that a specific set of users need to have XYZ access. If any user is identified as having an additional level of privilege, which he or she is not supposed to have, Prisma Cloud can scan and identify it. If you have set the policy, it can also do mitigation. It can remove the access accordingly.

One major observation is that it is not possible to implement Prisma Cloud on-premises. This is the limitation. Prisma Cloud itself is on a cloud. It is sitting on AWS and Google Cloud. It is a SaaS solution, but some of my clients have a local regulatory requirement, and they want to install it locally on their premises. That capability is not there, but government entities and ministries want to have Prisma Cloud installed locally.

It is stable. It is a leading product.

It is a SaaS-based application, so we need not to worry about scalability. It is their responsibility. They have to ensure its scalability and high availability.

From what I know, their support is good enough. They meet the SLAs. They have been good so far. That could be because they are new in the GCC market, and someone from Europe or the UK might have different feedback. 

I did not use any similar solution previously.

We provide consultancy. We do the implementation but with the support of the vendor. It is not just about buying the product. It is about how you design and configure it. We ensure that the implementation is done as per the defined design.

The key point for a successful product implementation is how you configure it and what is your use case. Every client has different requirements and different use cases. It depends on how you drive it. You need to define the use cases, the policies, and the procedures, and you need to ensure they are aligned with your business objective. You may have the best product in the world, but if you do not know how to configure it based on your use cases and your environment, it will not work for you. You will have vulnerabilities in your environment even after you have invested millions.

The vendor takes care of the implementation, and we validate and guide them with the implementation.

In terms of maintenance, it is not a set-it-and-forget-it solution. It is based on your IT environment. Generally, small organizations do not use a CSPM solution. It is used by mid to large organizations. In such organizations, there are multiple changes in the IT resources. The environment is agile. Every day you add something or change something, and you need to ensure that it is integrated with Prisma Cloud. It is an ongoing operational activity.

We evaluated multiple products. Zscaler was one of them.

My clients are quite happy with this solution. Some of my clients are also based in the UK and Europe. So far, it has been good. It met their expectations. Their use cases are met, and they are able to monitor all their infrastructure. It has been good so far, and it worked for all the generic or standard use cases. That does not mean that it is going to solve all the use cases for all customers. If you want to go for a CSPM solution, you need to do a technical evaluation.

If you are looking into implementing a CSPM solution, I would advise first understanding your existing cloud landscape or your on-premise landscape. Understand your local regulatory requirements and local laws. After that, define the use cases. Define what exactly you are looking for and then go to market and evaluate different products. You can check whether there is an integration with AWS, Oracle, Alibaba, or any other cloud. If your regulatory requirements are that you cannot host your solution outside your country or you need to have it on-premises in your data center, not someone else's data center, you have to choose accordingly. You cannot go for Prisma Cloud. If you do not have any such regulatory requirements, you can go with Prisma Cloud or any other solution. 

You should also understand your future landscape in terms of:

• Over the next five or ten years, how do you want to grow? 
• What is your current IT strategy? 
• How are you evolving? 
• What would be your technology? 
• Would there be any major digital transformation? 
• How seamlessly can it integrate? 

You need to consider multiple parameters. It is also about money. It should also meet your financial budget.

Overall, I would rate Prisma Cloud a seven out of ten.

We primarily use Prisma Cloud as a cloud security posture management (CSPM) module. Prisma Cloud is designed to catch vulnerabilities at the config level and capture everything on a cloud workload, so we mainly use it to identify any posture management issues that we are having in our cloud workloads. We also use it as an enterprise antivirus solution, so it's a kind of endpoint security solution.

Our setup is hybrid. We use SaaS also. We mostly work in AWS but we have customers who work with GCP and Azure as well. About 60 percent of our customers use AWS, 30 percent use Azure, and the remaining 10 percent are on GCP. Prisma Cloud covers the full scope. And for XDR, we have an info technology solution that we use for the Gulf cloud. So we have the EDF solution rolled out to approximately around 500 instances right now.  

Prisma Cloud is used heavily in our all production teams. Some might not be directly using the product since our team is the service owner and we manage Prisma. Our team has around 10 members teams, and they are the primary users. From an engineering aspect, there are another 10 team members who use it basically. Those are the actual people who work hands-on with Prisma Cloud. Aside from that, there are some product teams that use Prisma indirectly. If we detect something wrong with their products, we take care of it, but I don't think they have an active account on Prisma Cloud.

Prisma Cloud has been helpful from a security operations perspective. When a new product is getting onboarded or we are creating a new product — specifically when we need to create a new peripheral— it's inevitable that there will be a kind of vulnerability due to posture management. Everything we produce goes through via CICD, and it's kind of automated. Still, there are some scenarios where we see some gaps. So we can discover where those gaps exist, like if someone left an open port or an instance got compromised. 

These kinds of situations are really crucial for us,  and Prisma Cloud handles them really well. We know ahead of time if a particular posture is bad and we have several accounts in the same posture. Prisma gives us a deep dive with statistics and metrics, so we know which accounts are doing bad in terms of posture, how many accounts are out of alignment with the policy strategy, how many are not compliant. Also, it helps us identify who might be doing something shady. 

So we get some good functionality overall in that dashboard. Their dashboard is not customizable, however, so that's a feature we'd like to say. At the same time, what they do provide on their dashboard is pretty helpful. It enables us to make the posture management more mature. We're able to protect against or eliminate some potential incidents that could have happened if we didn't have Prisma. 

Prisma Cloud is quite simple to use. The web GUI is powerful. Prisma Cloud scans the overall architecture of the AWS network to identify open ports and other vulnerabilities, then highlights them. It's really good at managing compliance. We get out-of-the-box policies for SOC 2, Fedramp, and other compliance solutions, so we do not need to tune most of the rules because they are quite compliant, useful, and don't get too many false positives. 

And in terms of Prisma Cloud's XDR solution, we do not have anything at scope at present that can give us the same in-depth visibility on the endpoint level. So if something goes bad on the endpoint, Prisma's XDR solutions can really go deep down to identify which process is doing malicious activity, what was the network connection, how many times it has been opened, and who is using that kind of solution or that kind of process. So it's a long chain and its graphical representation is also very good. We feel like we have power in our hands. We have full visibility about what is happening on an endpoint level. 

When it comes to securing new SaaS applications, Prism Cloud is good. If I had to rate it, I would say seven out of 10. It gives us really good visibility. In the cloud, if you do not know what you are working with or you do not have full visibility, you cannot protect it. It's a good solution at least to cover CSPM. We have other tools also like Qualys that take care of the vulnerability management on the A-level staff — in the operating system working staff — but when it comes to the configuration level, Prisma is the best fit for us. 

Prisma Cloud's dashboards should be customizable. That's very important. Other similar solutions are more elastic so you have the power to create customized dashboards. In Prisma Cloud, you cannot do that. Prisma also should allow users to fully automate the workflow of an identified set. Right now, it can give us a hint about what has happened and there is an option to remediate that, but for some reason, that doesn't work. 

Another pain point is integration with ticketing solutions. We need bidirectional integration of Prisma Cloud and our ticketing tool. Currently, we only have one-way integration. When an alert appears in Prisma Cloud, it shows up in our ticketing tool as well. But if someone closes that ticket in our ticketing tool, that alert doesn't resolve in Prisma Cloud. We have to do it manually each time, which is a waste of time. 

 I am not sure how much Prisma Cloud protects against zero-day threats. Those kinds of threats really work in different kinds of patterns, like identify some kind of CBE, that kind of stuff. But considering the way it works for us, I don't think it'll be able to capture a zero-day threat if it is a vulnerability because Prisma Cloud actually doesn't capture vulnerability. It captures errors in posture management. That's a different thing. I don't know if there is any zero-day that Prisma can identify in AWS instantly. Probably, we can ask them to create a custom policy, but that generally takes time. We haven't seen that kind of scenario where we actually have to handle a zero-day threat with Prisma Cloud, because that gets covered mostly by Qualys.

I've been using Prisma Cloud for almost two years now.

Prisma Cloud is quite stable. At times, it goes down, but that's very rare. We have some tickets with them, but when we see some issues, they sort it out in no time. We do not have a lot of unplanned downtime. It happens rarely. So I think in the last year, we haven't seen anything like that.

Prisma Cloud is quite scalable. In our current licensing model, we're able to heavily extend our cloud workload and onboard a lot of customers. It really helps, and it is on par with other solutions.

I think Prisma Cloud's support is quite good. I would rate them seven out of 10 overall. They have changed their teams. The last team was comparatively not as good as the one we have right now. I would rate them five out of 10, but they have improved a lot. The new team is quite helpful. When we have an issue, they take care of it personally if we do not get an answer within the terms of the SLA. We tend to escalate to them and get a prompt answer. The relationship between our management and their team is quite good as well. .

We have a biweekly or weekly call with their tech support team. We are in constant communication about issues and operating problems with them. It's kind of a collab call with their tech support team, and we have, I think, a monthly call with them as well. So whenever we have issues, we have direct access to their support portal. We create tickets and discuss issues on the call weekly.

Transitioning to the new support team was relatively easy. They switched because of the internal structure and the way they work. Most of the engineering folks work out of Dublin and we are in India. The previous team was from the western time zone. That complicated things in terms of scheduling. So I think the current team is right now in Ireland and it's in the UK time zone. That works best for us. 

We have an engineering team that does the implementation for us, and our team specifically handles the operations once that product is set up for us. And then that product is handed over to us for the daily BA stuff accessing the security, the CSPM kind of module. We are not involved directly. When the product gets onboarded, it's handed over to us. We handle the management side, like if you need to create a new rule or you need to find teams for the rule. But the initial implementation is handled by our engineers.

I would rate Prisma Cloud six out 10. I would recommend it if you are using AWS or anything like that. It's quite a tool and I'm impressed with how they have been improving and onboarding new features in the past one and a half years. If you have the proper logging system and can implement it properly within your architecture, it can work really well.

If you are weighing Prisma Cloud versus some CASB solution, I would say that it depends on your use case. CASBs are a different kind of approach. When someone is already using a CASB solution, that's quite a mature setup while CSPM is another side of handling security. So if someone has CASB in place and feels they don't need CSPM, then that might be true for a particular use case at a particular point in time. But also we need to think of the current use case and the level of maturity at a given point in time and consider whether the security is enough.

We are a Palo Alto Alliance partner and our clients are Fortune 500 companies. We utilize a multi-cloud network architecture, with the primary constraint being the inability to manage everything through a single interface. By implementing uniform guardrails, we address the issue of inconsistent security policies when using native cloud security controls. This is one of the key considerations. Additionally, we employ micro-segmentation using cloud network security modules of Prisma Cloud to minimize the attack surface for various workloads.

The primary use case that was lacking was a single pane of glass. Additionally, prior to implementing Prisma Cloud, we used to manually perform these tasks using AWS CloudFormation Templates or Azure Resource Manager Templates. However, Prisma Cloud helped us address this issue by providing a unified administration interface. One of the problems we faced was the inability to view vulnerabilities across different cloud workloads and compare risks across different platforms. These were the challenges we encountered before deploying Prisma Cloud. While we didn't completely solve all of them after implementing Prisma Cloud, we did make significant progress in that regard.

Prisma Cloud offers security scanning for various cloud environments. In some client environments, there is only a single cloud, so the fact that Prisma Cloud can scan multiple clouds doesn't make a significant difference. These clients have a limited presence in the cloud, with few workloads or resources deployed. Consequently, it doesn't provide substantial value in such cases. However, for large companies, manufacturing companies, or companies with significant IT intellectual property in the cloud, with multiple tenants and a widespread cloud presence across different regions and replication, deploying a solution like Prisma Cloud becomes necessary.

Prisma Cloud enables us to adopt a proactive approach to cloud security. It goes beyond providing visibility and monitoring capabilities by offering a wide range of auto-remediation features. It provides numerous security controls and the ability to enforce commonly configured guardrails, primarily in monitoring mode. It is a comprehensive product that caters not only to detection but also prevention.

Prisma Cloud has helped reduce the number of people required to support or manage these cloud platforms, especially in terms of security. So now, instead of needing three different individuals to manage three different clouds, it may be possible to use just one resource to handle all three clouds, particularly focusing on security. This approach facilitates resource reduction, which is especially beneficial for clients operating within tight budgets. Additionally, there's the advantage of having a single pane of glass, where we can access various informative graphs, charts, and reports. These resources assist in explaining technical matters to non-technical leadership, making it easier to articulate concepts and insights to executives and other non-technical individuals. Personally, this has been helpful for me and our organization. The benefits for clients vary depending on the size of the environment. Personally, when we started using Prisma Cloud as an offering, it took two and a half to three months, which was the rough estimate. However, back then, not all the modules that are available today existed. So those numbers might have changed if all the modules were available at that time.

Prisma Cloud offers the visibility and control we require, regardless of the complexity or distribution of our cloud environments. Since it is built on top of these existing clouds and utilizes many of the services provided by large-scale cloud platforms, there is typically no issue with visibility. Regardless of the complexity of the environment, we always achieve visibility. The way we store and analyze the data, as well as how we visualize information, depends on the operator of the tool. Prisma Cloud is a reliable tool that never fails.

Prisma Cloud enables us to integrate security into our CI/CD pipeline. We primarily use it for the container. We have integrated image scanning and registry scanning into our CI/CD pipelines, specifically Azure DevOps. The DevSecOps team is responsible for managing this process.

Prisma offers us a unified tool that safeguards all our cloud resources and applications, eliminating the need to handle and reconcile separate security and compliance reports, with the exception of billing costs and management. From a security perspective, we haven't encountered any other reports for the majority of our clients. While a few clients may have additional requirements, Prisma Cloud efficiently handles all of those as well.

Prisma has reduced runtime alerts.

Prisma has reduced the time required for alert investigation. We now have a comprehensive understanding of the entire lifecycle of where things went wrong or which part of the runtime or execution for a specific process went wrong, particularly in terms of security.

Prisma Cloud has saved us money by reducing resources. 

Cloud security posture management is the preferred feature among other vendors.

There is room for improvement on the logging and monitoring front because it's still not as holistic as I would want it to be. Especially in the sense that we have different modules within Prisma Cloud, but then the visibility that we get from the output of each of these modules cannot be stitched together. Perhaps we could deploy something like a SIEM or SOAR platform to get this telemetry. As of now, we are lacking that part. So now I'm sure that was not the primary intent for that. It would really make a difference if Palo Alto Networks improves this.

The identity-based micro-segmentation in our cloud-native services requires a significant improvement. It fails to address many of the problems that its predecessor used to solve. Previously, there was identity-based micro-segmentation, but it was phased out, reaching its end-of-life and end-of-support. Now, we have cloud network security, which lacks a crucial feature that IBM used to offer. This is something we strongly desire, as we have had multiple discussions with Palo Alto regarding this matter. I am uncertain if there is a roadmap for implementing this feature, but the cloud network security module requires a substantial upgrade.

I have never encountered any challenges regarding any modules. Occasionally, they do undergo planned maintenance outages, but those are well-communicated in advance. Therefore, I don't consider them to be challenging. Prisma Cloud is reliable, and I would rate its stability at nine out of ten.

I would rate the scalability of Prisma Cloud as an eight out of ten. The only concern lies not with Prisma itself, but rather with the existing client environment. Many clients have flawed infrastructures, making it challenging to achieve the level of optimization required to fully realize the benefits of Prisma Cloud. However, this issue cannot be attributed to Prisma.

We extensively contacted technical support because we used to experience numerous issues. However, our main purpose is to inquire about additional capabilities and make minor tweaks. The tech support provided by Palo Alto is excellent, without a doubt. This could be one of the reasons why Prisma Cloud is relatively expensive. 

We are an advanced partner, rather than an end user, which grants us easier access to technical support compared to clients. However, based on feedback from our clients, their technical support is exceptional.

Positive

The initial setup is straightforward. In the beginning, we used professional services for a couple of clients but now we do it all in-house. 

The implementation is completed in-house.

From a security standpoint, we have significantly enhanced our client's security posture by implementing Prisma Cloud. However, we still need to assess the return on investment. While we have achieved notable resource reduction, it remains uncertain whether it has yielded a better long-term ROI.

Prisma Cloud is remarkably expensive. Not everyone can afford it, without a doubt. Although we don't directly sell the product, we occasionally engage in reselling certain components, and it requires significant effort to make sales. There's no denying that it's expensive.

I evaluated Snyk, which is a competitively priced product. However, I personally am not very familiar with how it works or the benefits gained by the different clients I've worked with, as I haven't had much experience with it. I conducted a couple of use cases and found it to be quite similar to Prisma Cloud in terms of features, although the interface has a different look and feel. I have been informed that Snyk is considerably cheaper compared to Prisma Cloud.

I would rate Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks a seven out of ten, primarily due to the need for improvement in identity-based micro-segmentation and cloud network security. I appreciate the potential it offers for deployment, but the new module has yet to reach a point where we can effectively reduce risks.

All the cloud environments existed before Prisma Cloud came in. I don't believe we can build many things using Prisma Cloud, except for implementing guardrails. For instance, we can secure these workloads, but it will take time for them to be fully developed. The scanners, such as the infrastructure as code scanners that Prisma Cloud can certainly check, are capable of performing static and code analysis, among other tasks. However, I don't think Prisma Cloud is designed specifically for that purpose.

Prisma offers risk clarity from a core security perspective, but it does not cover the entire pipeline. To cover the entire pipeline, we would need to utilize a SaaS or DaaS tool. Prisma Cloud cannot serve as a substitute for those tools.

I used to primarily work with cloud-native services. So, I would leverage cognitive services across all three clouds. That was my main focus initially. However, now I have started using other tools such as Snyk and various reports. Additionally, I have also recently started using CSPM. I'm not entirely familiar with all of them yet, but I have been working on them since the beginning.

No maintenance is required from our end.

We were using it for remediation. I was working on a client's project on behalf of our company, and they had multiple subscriptions. They were using not only Azure but also AWS. Rather than managing remediation and governance separately through different clouds, it was proposed to use Prisma Cloud as a single place for remediation of everything.

Prisma Cloud provided a single window for all security issues, irrespective of the subscription, account, or service provider I was trying to see. The information was totally transparent with Prisma Cloud. Otherwise, it was a daunting task for us to manage everything within AWS itself because each region's or subaccount's data needed to be moved over to another account to see a full picture, and a similar approach was required in Azure as well. The data from a different subscription needed to be copied, which required a batch process to do this job on a daily basis. By integrating AWS and Azure subscriptions with Prisma Cloud, the same task became easier. It was as simple as adding a new account and a credential. That was it. Prisma Cloud took care of the rest of the functions

Prisma Cloud provided security spanning multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud environments. We integrated it with AWS and Azure with multiple subscriptions for each.

With both AWS and Azure, the presentation of the native cloud data was not good. We were more comfortable looking at the same data in Prisma Cloud.

Automation is possible with Prisma Cloud, and that is why we liked it. Automation is still not that good in the native clouds, and Prisma Cloud definitely has an edge compared to the facility that AWS or Azure provides. Although it is an additional cost for IT, overall, there are cost savings. I am not aware of the features provided by GCP. I did not integrate it with Prisma Cloud, but at least with AWS and Azure, Prisma Cloud works much better.

Prisma Cloud provides an agent that can scan container images or Docker images. Otherwise, for Docker images and accounts, AWS provides its own tool and its own format for the report. Similarly, Azure provides its own format to scan those images. We used the agent provided by Prisma Cloud. It unified the approach. Irrespective of the provider, the format of the output and reports was similar. It was easy to compare apples to apples rather than comparing apples to oranges, which definitely is a challenge when we use different cloud providers. Prisma Cloud solved that problem for us.

The level of abstraction is sufficient enough. The complexity is hidden. Only the information that is relevant is displayed, which is better from a developer's perspective because developers do not need to handle that complexity. If architects, like me, need to understand those complexities, they can go into a respective subscription and get the details. The level of abstraction was good enough with Prisma Cloud.

Prisma Cloud provides a single tool to protect all of our cloud resources and applications, without having to manage and reconcile disparate security and compliance reports.

Prisma Cloud reduced the alert investigation time because now, we have a single window. It is quite easy for anyone. A single resource can work on the alerts and memorize similar issues in the past and work on the current issues faster. It has improved productivity.

Prisma Cloud reduced costs. With the different service providers and different subscription models that we had previously, we divided the subscriptions between the analysts. They were responsible for the issues related to the subscription. We had a team of six people previously. After the implementation of Prisma Cloud, all the issues got consolidated, and our team size got reduced to two. The productivity increased because the same analyst could see past issues, revisit those issues, learn quickly, and fix similar issues. They got an idea of how to fix a similar issue, so the overall productivity increased, which reduced the cost.

When we work on, for example, AWS, we need to consolidate the data from different regions, which is an exercise in itself. The same exercise or similar exercise can easily be done in Prisma Cloud. It is as easy as registering a new subscription to AWS, and you start seeing all that data. For example, it is very easy to do analysis of the Defender data, which can include warnings, errors, etc. Although it is natively AWS data, the presentation is not easy for a developer. Prisma Cloud makes it a bit easier. 

The first time I looked at Prisma Cloud, it took me a while to understand how to implement the integration and how to enable features by using the interface for integration. That portion can probably be improved. I have not looked at the latest version. I used the version that was available three months back. It is portal-based, and they might have changed it in the last three months, but at that time, integration was a bit tricky. Even though documentation was available, it took a while for a new person to understand what integration meant, what will be achieved after the integration, or how the integration needed to be done on the Azure or AWS side. That was a bit challenging initially.

I used it for eight or nine months. I last used it about three months ago.

It is stable.

The client's team interacted with the customer support team. We used to highlight the issue to them, and they used to contact Palo Alto's support. We required their support two or three times, but I or my team was not directly involved with their customer support for help.

I have not used a similar solution before.

I was involved in the implementation. It was all cloud-based. There is a bit of a learning curve when trying to understand how to integrate it. Although some good documentation is available for Prisma Cloud, it was still a bit difficult to understand the product initially. However, the UI that analysts use to work on issues and remediation is quite good. It is not complex. After you have done one or two integrations with your AWS or Azure account or subscription, it becomes a routine activity. It is easy to integrate more subscriptions, but the initial one or two subscriptions of the AWS or Azure account will take some time because some features need to be enabled on the respective cloud as well. It is not only the configuration on the Prisma Cloud side. Some configuration is required on the AWS or Azure side as well.

It is a website, so deployment is not a challenge. It is as simple as registering an account and making the payment, which the IT team already did before they created an account for us, so, as such, there is no deployment. If we want to use an agent, then certainly some deployments are required on the machines, but that is the agent deployment. The product itself does not require any deployment.

From a maintenance perspective, not much maintenance is required. It is a one-time integration. It will then be set for a few years unless you want to remove some of the subscriptions or something changes in Azure or AWS. There is a limitation on the Azure or AWS side but not on the Prisma side, so maintenance is there, but it is low.

There was a cost reduction. That was the benefit that we had visualized while evaluating Prisma Cloud as one of the possible solutions. The complexity of IT operations had also reduced, and the team size had also reduced after implementing Prisma Cloud.

We used the enterprise edition. A standard edition is also there. I am aware of these two editions. I know that there is some cost, but I do not have the exact figures with me. The cost was not on the higher side. Overall, the cost gets recovered with its implementation.

I have not compared it with other tools, but overall, I found it to be pretty good when resolving the challenges that we were facing early on. I did not get a chance to look at the Gartner report in terms of where it stands, but based on my experience with this solution, I was quite satisfied.

It is a good solution. Each team should utilize it. Every good organization is now moving towards or trying to be provider agnostic, so if you are using multiple providers, you should at least give Prisma Cloud a try.

Prisma Cloud enables you to integrate security into your CI/CD pipeline and add touchpoints into existing DevOps processes. I know it is possible, but we were already using some other tools, so we did not try this feature. We already had a good process utilizing other scanning tools, so we did not try that feature, but I know that they have this feature.

Prisma Cloud provides risk clarity at runtime and across the entire pipeline, showing issues as they are discovered during the build phases, but this is linked to the CI/CD pipeline, which we did not implement. We looked at the risk level of the infrastructure deployed. We also looked at which cloud platform is having issues. The risk-level clarity was certainly there. It was possible to see the risk level and prioritize the activities or other items with a higher risk, but we never tried CI/CD pipelines.

Overall, I would rate Prisma Cloud a nine out of ten.

I'm using the main module of Prisma Cloud, which manages security at scale in cloud environments.

Prisma Cloud offers a very interactive UI that lets you work more effectively, faster, and more efficiently. It can also be used as a dashboard for querying the cloud provider since it integrates with most of the APIs of the cloud service providers. It's a very unique tool in the sense that it lets you centralize the security control of all your cloud providers.

The first aspect that is important is the fact that Prisma Cloud is cloud-agnostic. It's actually available for the five top cloud providers: AWS, GCP, Azure, Oracle, and Alibaba Cloud. 

The second aspect is the fact that we can write our own rules to try to detect misconfigurations in those environments.

And Prisma Cloud is a single tool that protects cloud resources and applications without having to manage and reconcile disparate security and compliance reports. That's the main purpose of the CSPM module of Prisma Cloud: You can manage every cloud platform, every cloud account, from a single place, which is the Prisma Cloud dashboard. It gives you a very high overview of every asset, a full site inventory. And you can see the context as well as the severity of the errors that have been raised on each service and asset that has been deployed in the cloud.

In my experience, Prisma Cloud is a valuable asset for enterprises that tend to have a lot of cloud-native applications and that wish to secure, and take control of the security posture of these applications. One of the most important considerations is that Prisma Cloud is a product from Palo Alto Networks, a company that invests heavily in cyber security. There are a lot of features that have come out over time. In the beginning, Prisma Cloud was known for its CSPM capabilities, but today, Prisma Cloud is doing a lot of things that are very beneficial for cloud-native applications.

There are a couple of things that can be enhanced. The first is the coverage that Prisma offers. Today, there are hundreds of built-in policies for AWS and Azure, but GCP and Oracle are not covered as much as AWS. There is a lot of work to do on that part. There is, obviously, a tiny bit of favoritism towards AWS because it has the most market share. It's logical, but the other cloud providers are not as well covered as AWS.

The second issue is the alerting process. Today, it does monitor the resources—and I'm only speaking on the CSPM side of things. Prisma Cloud scans the environment and checks if there are misconfigurations, but it lacks context. There is a real lack when it comes to taking into consideration how the application was designed. For example, you can have an application that is deployed with an open S3 bucket, which is one of the most basic services in AWS. Prisma will tell you that there is a high-severity alert because, with that bucket, there is a possibility of having your data extracted. But sometimes, the data inside those buckets is actually public. So, the process lacks some intelligence.

I've been using Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks for 10 months.

I'm using the SaaS version which is running on Palo Alto's infrastructure, so I've never encountered instability. 

There is some patching behind Prisma Cloud when Palo Alto delivers new features so there are some "patch intervals," but most of the time, Palo Alto does notify you when something like that is coming up. It will say, "Hi. This Friday, the application will be unavailable from 6:00 PM to 7:00 PM." But it is not very disturbing at all.

Because I'm using the SaaS version, there is no issue with scalability. It all depends on the credits and the amount of money that you have put into the tool. Aside from that, you can use it to onboard any cloud account no matter how many resources are in it.

I have contacted their tech support many times, and they are pretty quick. They are very invested and proficient. I get answers within a day or two, at most.

Sometimes, when an issue becomes pretty complicated, it can span a week because it is transferred to different people.

Positive

I did not use another solution before Palo Alto.

We have definitely seen ROI in that using Prisma Cloud is an eye-opener regarding cloud security. In general, Prisma Cloud helped us see a lot of blind spots that we left when designing applications. There were a lot of security misconfigurations that we wouldn't have been able to spot without Prisma. The return on value is in the securing of the applications that we are deploying, as well as through a better understanding of the types of issues in the type of environment.

The cost is run by credits. You can allocate them as you wish, so there are no issues there. I believe the credits, licensing, et cetera, are based on the size of the enterprise that is buying the product.

There are no additional costs beyond the standard fees.

Wiz was one of the tools we looked at. I was not the only one who made the choice, but we went with Prisma because of its capabilities as well as the support. We are investing a lot in Palo Alto Networks, meaning we use a lot of their products, so we know the enterprise itself. We know the quality of their catalog of services.

My advice is to take your time before going the CSPM route. Look at your environments and inventory everything in it. There is, obviously, no shadow IT in the cloud. It's very easy to get an inventory of the resources you are running on. Get an overview and see if having a powerful CSPM at your side is really a need. There are a lot of open-source solutions that can do the job for smaller environments.

From what I understand, Palo Alto is trying to push Prisma Cloud to become more than a simple CSP tool, since it offers the ability to cover the global environment of cloud applications, such as doing scanning and infrastructure-as-code, and managing IAM, rather than doing it directly in the cloud provider. They are trying to centralize things.

It can also be used to manage containerized applications. It can do runtime security in container-based managed services of cloud providers, such as EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service) which is a service managed by AWS. You can rely on Prisma to put an agent in such environments to monitor and supervise the security. You can also use it to scan the container images that are stored in repositories, whether they are on-premises or in the cloud. I've heard that Palo Alto is doing a lot of things like this, but as of today, I'm only using the CSPM part.

And in terms of security automation capabilities, I've used Checkov, which is the tool they are using for scanning specialized code like Terraform. In its origins, Checkov is an open-source tool and I've been using it with my clients by deploying it in CI/CD chains to scan, automatically, the code that is pushed inside repos and deployed in the cloud. But I have never used the Chekhov that is built into Prisma Cloud.

Similarly, I know Prisma offers the possibility of auto-remediation, but I have not enabled this option. It could be a bit dangerous because there is the context and a lot of things to take into consideration before blocking something, before deployment or after deployment. So, I have not used its preventive actions.

The solution provides visibility into complex or distributed cloud environments, but I can think of a couple of scenarios where clients might not think the same. It supports the top five clouds, but if you are using another cloud provider, you won't be able to use Prisma Cloud for that instance. You would be able to use the Compute module, but it would be very hard to use the CSPM capabilities on such a cloud provider since their APIs are not working with Prisma. But if you are using the most commonly used clouds, Prisma Cloud is a very valuable asset.

Prisma Cloud is a very powerful tool and it can be used in various scenarios, but it doesn't cover everything. You might choose a cloud provider that is not supported or prioritized by Prisma. If you are using Oracle Cloud or Alibaba, you might want to get another solution, maybe one that comes with better policies and a better investment in those technologies.

Aside from that, Prisma Cloud is a good solution if you are using a mainstream cloud provider. Prisma Cloud can help enhance your security posture. Because it's a Palo Alto product, you can be sure that there is a lot of maintenance behind it. The product will be able to keep up with the market. They will keep the features coming and it will continue to be a better product over time.

We use Prisma Cloud in several ways and there are a lot of use cases. The first way that we use it is for inventory. It keeps a near real-time inventory of virtual compute storage and services. Second, we use it for monitoring and alerting of misconfigurations or other items of security significance. Next is compliance. We use it to monitor compliance with the centers for internet security (CIS) benchmarks.

Prisma provides security that spans multi/hybrid-cloud environments. We have it configured to watch for compliance in AWS, the Google Cloud Platform, and very soon, Azure as well. This is important to us because our risk management organization mandated the fact that we would maintain this overwatch capability in any of our clouds that have virtual compute storage or workloads.

Prisma's comprehensiveness for protecting the full cloud-native stack is excellent.

The comprehensiveness of the cloud-native development lifecycles is excellent. For us, the deploy functionality is not applicable but the build and run capabilities are. It positively affects our operations and gives us optics that we wouldn't otherwise have, at the speed of the cloud.

Prisma provides the visibility and control that we need, regardless of how complex our environments are. This very much boosts our confidence in our security and compliance postures. It's also been deemed acceptable as a sufficient presence and efficacy of control by our internal auditors and external regulators alike.

This solution has enabled us to integrate security into our CI/CD pipelines and add touchpoints as a control stop in the release chain. The touchpoints are seamless and very natural to our automation.

Prisma Cloud is a single tool that we can use to protect all of our cloud resources without having to manage and reconcile several security and compliance reports. It unifies and simplifies the overall operations.

Using this tool provides us with risk clarity across the entire pipeline because we use it as a pre-deployment control, ensuring that the run state is known and the risk posture is known at runtime. Our developers use this information to correct issues using our tools for YAML, JSON, CloudFormation templates, and Terraform.

Prisma does so much pre-screening that it limits the number of runtime alerts we get. This is because those pre-deployment code controls are known before the run state.

The investigations capabilities enhance our process and lower incident response and threat detection time. However, it is an enabler and it is run in parallel with our SIEM, which is Splunk. Most of what we're going to do, investigation-wise, is going to be in Splunk, simply because there's better domain knowledge about the use of that tool in Splunk's query language.

The most valuable feature is the continuous cloud compliance monitoring and alerting. The way Prisma works is that it has a tentacle from Palo Alto's AWS presence into ours. That tentacle is an application program interface, an API, a listener. That listener goes in and is entitled to look at all of the Amazon Web Services' logging facilities. It can then do event correlation, and it can tattletale on misconfigurations such as an S3 storage bucket made publicly available. We wouldn't otherwise be aware of that if Prisma didn't watch for it and alert on it.

Prisma provides cloud workload protection and cloud network security in a single pane of glass, and these items are very important to us. It also provides cloud infrastructure entitlement management but identity and access management is not something that we use Prisma for. We implemented a PoC but we opted to use another tool for that use case.

The security automation capabilities provided by this product are excellent and industry-leading. Palo Alto bought a company called Twistlock, which makes a pre-deployment code scanner. They added its functionality to the feature set of Prisma in the form of this compute module. Now, we're able to use the Twistlock capability in our automation, which includes our toolchains and pipelines.

This tool provides excellent features for preventative cloud security. We use all of the auto-remediation capabilities that Prisma offers out of the box. That "see something, do something" auto-remediation capability within Prisma keeps our human responders from having to do anything. It's automated, meaning that if it sees something, it will right the wrong because it has the entitlement to do that with its Prisma auto-remediation role. It's great labor savings and also closes off things much quicker than a human could.

Palo just keeps bolting on valuable features. They just show up in the console, and they have their little question mark, down in the lower right-hand corner, that shows what's new, and what's changed for August or September. They just keep pouring value into the tool and not charging us for it. We like that.

We would like to have the detections be more contemporaneous. For example, we've seen detections of an overprivileged user or whatever it might be in any of the hundreds of Prisma policies, where there are 50 minutes of latency between the event and the alert. We'd always want that to be as quick as possible, and this is going to be true for every customer.

The billing function, with the credits and the by-workload-licensing and billing, is something that is a little wonky and can be improved.

We began using Prisma Cloud in October or November 2018, when it was still known as RedLock.

Stability-wise, it has been perfect.

The scalability is excellent. Palo keeps adding cloud support, such as for Alibaba, Oracle, and others.

We have approximately 5,500 employees. Our deployment is all-encompassing overwatch to all of our AWS accounts, of which there are 66. We also have two or three different folders within GCP.

We do have plans to increase our usage. This includes using it for more of its capabilities. For example, there is a workload protection link that we haven't fully embraced. There are also some network security features and some dashboarding and geo-mapping capabilities that we could make better use of.

The technical support is excellent. We have premium support with Palo Alto and I never have any critique for the quality or speed of support.

We have used this solution from the outset of our cloud journey. It began with Evident.io, then it became RedLock, and then it became Prisma Cloud.

The initial setup is very straightforward. We did it several times.

The first one was deployed to AWS, which probably took about an hour. Years later, as we adopted the Google Cloud, it was configured in probably half an hour.

Palo provides the necessary setup instructions and you can't go wrong, as long as you have the role entitlement set up for Prisma. The handshake only takes about an hour.

Our deployment was done entirely in-house.

We have three people, full-time, who are responsible for the maintenance. Their roles are policy management, meaning these are the rule sets. It's called RQL, the RedLock query language, the out-of-the-box policies that are ever dynamic. When there's a new policy, we have to go in and rationalize that with our cyber organization.

We have to scrutinize the risk rating that's put on it by Palo. We have to realize when we're going to turn it on and turn it off. Also, we have to consider the resulting incident response procedures associated with the alert happening.

One metric that would be meaningful in this regard is that our company has had no cloud-based compromise. 

You can expect a premium price because it is a premium quality product by a leading supplier.

We are a strategic partner with Palo Alto, meaning that we use all of their solutions. For example, we use their NG firewalls, WildFire, Panorama, Prisma, and all of their stuff. Because Prisma was an add-on for us, we get good pricing on it.

There are costs in addition to the standard licensing fees. The credits consumption billing model is new and we're going to be using more of the features. As we embrace further and we start to use these workload security protections, those come at an incremental cost. So, I would say that our utilization, and thus the cost, would trend up as it has in the past.

We evaluated several other products such as DivvyCloud, Dome9, and a product by Sophos.

We did a full comparison matrix and rationalization of each of the capabilities. Our sister company was using DivvyCloud at the time and as we do from time to time, we conferred with them about what their likes and dislikes were. They were moderately pleased with it but ultimately, we ended up going with Palo Alto.

My advice for anybody who is considering this product is to give it a good look. Give it a good cost-balance rationalization versus the cost of a compromise or breach, because it's your defense mechanism against exposure.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

It is pretty easy to onboard accounts with Prisma Cloud. We use Prisma Cloud Compute and Prisma Cloud policy management. The latter is our primary solution and we use Compute to manage our container security, including threats and vulnerabilities. But we primarily focus on managing the policies for our entire cloud configs, internal threats, and network patterns.

For our market requirements, we do need several other services to be maintained for the perfect security posture. For example, one of the primary resources that we are using in our cloud is EC2 instances. That does need some primary security features, like security groups with proper closures, and proper networking with our firewalls. To make sure all of these premade configs are working, Prisma Cloud helps us to identify whenever any deployments meet up with our cloud. It is helpful with our singular architecture.

Prisma Cloud is very helpful with a full native stack. We don't want to leverage any of the resources directly. Instead, Prisma provides us with the services to automate and increase security posture without any internal agents to run it. Other products have internal agents to run with our cloud to help with the security posture of that cloud, but Prisma does not do that. It has a very simple mechanism to onboard the accounts with their console, where we can use the IAM to scan all of the accounts and identify threats and config mismatches.

The solution has also been helpful when it comes to our investigation times because we have fully automated it with our ticketing system. We use ServiceNow and whenever there are any alerts from Prisma Cloud, we have it configured so that they go directly to ServiceNow. That means the user can identify their incident and can resolve it based on the priority of service level agreements. When they do remediate an issue, Prisma Cloud will resolve the alert within Prisma Cloud and ServiceNow will close it on behalf of the user.

Prisma Cloud saves a lot of manual effort that we had to do within our cloud organization.

Prisma Cloud policy management is more valuable than Prisma Cloud Compute. While we use Compute often, we are not leveraging container security as much. We have limited resources for the containers in our cloud environment. Sooner or later, we will launch multiple container features in our cloud, but right now, we don't have much scope so we haven't had a chance to explore the Compute side much.

The solution supports multi- and hybrid-cloud environments. It has multiple cloud strategies like GCP and Azure. It has policy fixes for those cloud environments. We leverage it for AWS and it's important that we can use it for that singular platform.

Prisma Cloud also has log retention periods for the alerts and policies that are triggered, for each account. For example, my account has a specific policy that is high severity. If I need to further investigate, I can do that investigation in the upcoming 30 days. After 30 days, the logs of the triggered alert are not retained by Prisma Cloud on the Palo Alto network.

It also provides us with a single tool to manage our entire cloud architecture. In fact, we are using a multi-account strategy with our AWS organization. We use Prisma as a single source of truth to identify high- or medium-severity threats inside our organization.

Another feature is the automation. It has certain types of policies that can identify network-based threats, such as unusual port or protocol activities. It has tremendous machine-learning capabilities to identify patterns.

When it comes to automation and machine learning, it still needs some more work because sometimes they can give false positives.

In addition, since cloud services are coming up with new features and solutions, Prisma should also keep up with the same level of security. For example, at the previous AWS Summit, numerous services were introduced. Our businesses wanted to develop some of the services with the features in our cloud, but Prisma hasn't come up with any new APIs. Prisma needs to keep up with quick changes as soon as any cloud platform comes up with a new invention.

And one of the main backlogs in their development is in the area of integration. For example, we have ServiceNow in place for ticket management, and Prisma Cloud is supposed to send closure emails for incidents. But from time to time, it fails to do so. We have several other mismatches between Prisma Cloud and ServiceNow. So we have had to focus on incident management.

Integrations with third-party vendors, such as ServiceNow, Slack, and other ticketing tools that Prisma supports have full automation, but there are still some bugs to fix. We see failures from time to time. When our team fixes vulnerabilities or threats, they still see the incidents in place, which makes them liable to pay for SLA failures. Those kinds of things can be avoided if we have fully fledged event management integration with those tools.

They also need to increase their log retention periods to allow further investigation. Sometimes it takes time to check with asset owners and do deep investigations. Because we have numerous accounts, it can take time for asset owners to investigate each and every alert. The log retention period is one of the cons. 

I have been using Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks for more than a year. I started in my role as a cloud security engineer about two and a half years ago, and Prisma Cloud is one of the CSPM solutions that we use.

I use Prisma Cloud every day. It is one of the primary tools I need to monitor and manage the security of our cloud environment. I use it very extensively and my team members use it for identifying threats and managing them with the asset owners.

In terms of performance, they have cloud releases of security features during the first week of every month. Whenever they release new policies, all of a sudden it starts to throw multiple alerts within our console. It is a bit annoying for the DevOps team, but from a security perspective, it is a useful process. But a pre-announcement or pre-testing of the alerts would be a better way for them to do this, instead of creating 50 or 100-plus alerts for our DevOps. We are suggesting better pre-testing of new policies.

It is pretty scalable. When we deploy new AWS accounts within our organization, it applies the same security posture policies to those accounts as well. We can see the security postures it recommends whenever we onboard any new accounts with our organization. The scalability is very good with the management it provides for any accounts we onboard.

Palo Alto Networks is one of the fastest-growing security products in our organization.

From time to time we experience delays in support for critical scenarios. They do have engineering teams at the backend that work with the policies. I understand that. But I'm expecting a more responsive service on their side because sometimes it can even take a week to get a response back from the engineering team.

When we go through the toll-free number to submit a case, they suggest that they are working on it, but sometimes they don't give solutions for such cases for some time.

Positive

We used AWS native security, which is Security Hub. They have their own benchmarks which we leveraged. But we wanted to see more variables with the policies to have a stricter and more secure cloud environment so we moved to Prisma Cloud.

We have been customers of Palo Alto Networks for a very long time because they have several security products, including firewalls that we use in our organization.

The deployment was very straightforward. We were able to onboard IAM policies from our AWS master account to our console with a few clicks. We were able to see that Prisma had started to onboard and ingest for alerts and asset variations within our inventory.

We have a security architect and Palo Alto has a security architect. We deployed it together with the support of a Palo Alto engineer.

When we started using Prima Cloud a year ago, we had 7,000-plus alerts. We went through many of the policies that resulted in numerous false positives and we went through the RQL (Resource Query Language) queries that were not applicable to our environment and that created false positives from their side. We reported them with the details via their case submission. They checked on them and they modified some of the alerts as a result of our request. They are progressing with their changes. We have reduced to 500-plus alerts in the past eight months and we are in good shape in terms of security posture.

Overall, I would rate Prisma Cloud at seven out of 10. It has the scalability and easy onboarding where we can onboard an organization with a few clicks and the integration part will take care of the rest. I appreciate that. But the log retention and integration with third-party solutions need improvement.

We use it for compliance management and policy detection, especially for hybrid clouds.

If you have just one or two clouds the detection policy provided by the cloud provider is sufficient. But if you have more than two clouds, a tool like Prisma Cloud is required because you want to go to one place and do things once. The value of a solution like this is that when you have multiple cloud providers, it plays a vital role in security posture management, security detection management, and alert management.

The solution also enables us to make security alerts and security risks visible to our tenants, as we have a common dashboard. In addition, it helps us to improve knowledge of the environment by allowing people, and not just the central team, to always access the data and to see what the security posture looks like. It gives us a central location to see what the security posture is like for multiple cloud providers.

Prisma Cloud also provides the visibility and control you need, regardless of how complex or distributed your cloud environments become. It helps to simplify that complexity. Now we know what the best practices are, and if something is missing we know.

It also helps us to confidently certify compliance for a customer. The reports it provides become a basis for compliance certification. It gives us a single tool to protect all of our cloud resources and applications without having to manage and reconcile disparate security and compliance reports.

In addition, by using the Prisma Cloud 2.0 Cloud Security Posture Management features, our security teams get alerts with the context to know which situations are the most critical. That helps because we have visibility without having to log in to multiple cloud providers. It gives us one simple way to look at all the three cloud provider policies. Those alerts provide us with a good place to start. Our teams get all the data they need to pinpoint the root cause.

Prisma Cloud provides security spanning multi- and hybrid-cloud environments. That is very important when you have a multi-cloud environment because it gives you a single pane of glass for all of them.

In that single pane of glass it gives you Cloud Security Posture Management, Cloud Workload Protection, and Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management, and the vast majority of Cloud Network Security. Without this kind of tool, you would have to go through the three cloud providers and do the mappings for each one. It would be a huge amount of mapping and cross-referencing work, but that work is already done with this solution. Not just the referencing work is done, but it also does the monitoring and scheduling. And a given workload that needs to be compliant with the requirements of a certain country or with your business will be compliant, based on the regionality. Visibility and monitoring are things that are required and Prisma Cloud provides them.

It provides mapping for all compliances so that you do not have to do it. Mapping policies to different compliances can be tricky but it's also a good thing. And you can reuse it as-is. You do not have to do anything. It also provides mapping to the compliance history.

And when it comes to detection, it allows you to write policies that are not just based on compliance but also on your cloud security controls. It allows you to write customizations. It is also the sort of tool in which customization of alerts, notifications, and cloud posture management is possible.

In addition, Prisma Cloud gives you visibility over all of your policies. I know that it can do auto-collection, but I have not seen that implemented by anyone because auto-collection requires organizational maturity, but that lack of implementation is not due to tool immaturity.

And it is a perfect tool, in terms of security policy detection, when it comes to the comprehensiveness of the solution for protecting the full, cloud-native stack. It's very effective.

Another great feature of Prisma Cloud is its integration with Jira and ServiceNow. With those integrations, you do not have to manually intervene. If you do an integration, alerts can be assigned to the respective group, using Jira and ServiceNow. That definitely helps in reducing a good amount of work.

It also provides integration with Agile tools, and that is a great thing. It integrates security into the CI/CD pipeline for container workloads. (We have not used it for non-container workloads, but that's not an issue with the tool). The touchpoints in our DevOps processes are just API calls, making the integration very easy and very smooth.

Developers are able to correct issues using the tools they use to code. The way we have it set up, it's a process of reverse engineering. When an alert comes up it is used to see what was detected and how that can be converted into a preventive policy. That feedback loop is manual, but that input helps to turn the policy into a preventive one. Prisma Cloud has helped to reduce runtime alerts by about 30 percent because we are converting everything into preventive policies. And because it gives you an idea of what needs to be done, it has reduced alert investigation times by 30 to 40 percent.

There is some work to be done on preventive security policies. I would give the existing preventive approach a seven out of 10. I'm sure they will be doing something in this area.

In terms of securing cloud-native development at build time, a lot of improvement is needed. Currently, it's more a runtime solution than a build-time solution. For runtime, I would rate it at seven out of 10, but for build-time there is a lot of work to be done.

Another area for improvement is support for OPA (Open Policy Agent) rather than the proprietary language. Nowadays, people mix things, but you don't want to write a policy in different languages.

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

We haven't seen any issues with the stability of the solution in the last two years. It's good, with no problems at all.

As for the scalability, we haven't seen any issues. We are not cloud-busting, but so far, so good.

We want to extend the solution more in the container world and have more service automation. Those are scenarios we have not gotten to yet.

I am happy with Palo Alto's technical support. It has been good.

Positive

Before Palo Alto, we used the cloud providers' native tools. We switched because, while the native tools were great, managing three different cloud provider portals was not ideal. We needed some centralization and customization.

The initial deployment was a simple and automated process. It was good. It took four or five hours per cloud provider. We use it with AWS, Azure, GCP, and Oracle. There was some strategy involved in the implementation because there are differences among the cloud providers. For example, in AWS you have a Control Tower. A good strategy reduces manual intervention, but it's a SaaS solution so we did not have to do much.

We don't need any staff members to maintain the solution but we do need people to write the custom policies and to make sure that someone is there to take action when there are alerts. We have three staff members involved because writing the policies is not easy. One of the guys is responsible for policy writing, one of the guys is responsible for communication and checking the portal to make sure we communicate with people, and the other guy is helping them both with whatever tasks they need help with.

We tried a few other options but once we looked at Prisma Cloud we decided it was a better option.

The advantage of Prisma Cloud was its support for all the cloud providers and its automation. The ease of automation was one of our selection criteria. Cost was another consideration. While Prisma Cloud is not cheap, it's in the medium range. But if an organization is already using Palo Alto, they can negotiate a good price.

It makes sense for a smaller company to use the native cloud tools, but for a large organization it makes sense to have a tool like Prisma Cloud with centralized information, especially for security.