Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks Reviews

I primarily use the solution for vulnerability management, compliance management, and sometimes defense and access control. It has a sandbox. We can scan and manage CI pipeline security. 

The cloud solution as one platform can provide us with a lot of features and cover most of what customers care about. 

I have some clients that are moving from computing to a container environment. For cloud sets, customers need to increase the power of security over the DevOps environment. It doesn't create any bottlenecks when launching new products. From a business perspective, it's very helpful and supportive. It expedites go-to-market.

The runtime defense and API security are very good. It offers very good application security.

It's very comprehensive. It can cover the full cloud-native stack. There is a wide range of integrations, and the compatibility with various cloud providers is very useful.

It's perfect in terms of the security automation. We can do everything from the portal and choose a variety of policies. It can cover medium to large customers. 

We can take a preventative approach to cloud security. It's helpful.

They are constantly updating and adding new features and offering support for each of the updates. 

It is very comprehensive. It covers all aspects of the customer's cloud.

It provides good visibility and control regardless of the complexity. 

We can integrate into CI/CD pipelines. It's very efficient. They can integrate with whatever CI tools the customer uses, including Windows, Linux, and so forth. 

Modules can be added to cover additional items from the customer's side.

It reduced runtime alerts. We've saved more than 50% to 60% of our time.

We've reduced alert investigation times. With any incident that happens, we can do an investigation and correlate and normalize the incident quickly. We've saved more than 70% of the time typically taken.

They could improve more features for the enterprise version of the solution. They need to also have more features for on-premises versions for companies that cannot access the cloud version. 

I've been using the solution for around two years. 

The solution is stable. I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. 

We use the solution for one location. 

It's a scalable solution. I'd rate it nine out of ten. 

I was not involved in the deployment of the solution. 

There is maintenance, however, it is very minor. You just need one to two people to manage it. 

The ROI users get from the tool is very high. 

The pricing is a little bit high. It is not a cheap product. 

I'm a partner and reseller.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. 

I'd recommend the solution to others. The cloud-based version is very good. Users can rely on the product.

I am using five modules of Prisma Cloud, and I have expertise in CSPM. The use cases are related to securing our host container environment and multi-cloud environment.

We were looking to resolve issues related to host and container security in the Kubernetes environment, vulnerability management, and compliance management.

One of the benefits of using Prisma Cloud is that we can easily make our cloud environment compliant. We can make it vulnerability-free, helping coders or application users bring their applications to production without vulnerabilities or malicious packages.

We have gotten good reviews from our customers, saying that they have improved their security with Prisma Cloud for their cloud environments. That includes customers in finance and in the medical field. And the reporting we get from Prisma is excellent.

It has helped us reduce runtime alerts by 70 to 80 percent.

And because it's very transparent, we can directly investigate things. It has reduced investigation time by 100 percent. We can easily go to the dashboard and check what's happening when investigating. We have to be experts with our tools to investigate and do a deep dive into an incident.

The best feature of Prisma Cloud is that the various modules have different features. With the CSPM, we have compliance management, and we also have an auto-remediation module. In CWP, we can go with runtime, where one of the great features is blocking vulnerabilities or malicious activities from the pipelines or CI. All five modules are taking a preventative approach to the security of the cloud environment, from the network to the cloud, posture management and workload protection.

In CI/CD, we have the option to add a Prisma scan, which helps us remove the vulnerabilities and malicious parts of packages used to create an application. This option enables us to scan the images before running or building them and to get a vulnerability report.

Prisma scans things and shows all the vulnerabilities and packages that are vulnerable, and which layers, by default, have vulnerabilities. So developers can easily go into the package or a particular layer and make changes to their code. It's very transparent.

Reporting from Prisma Cloud is very straightforward. We can export reports in CSV format, or we can use the APIs in Prisma to fetch reports. Reporting is very easy and customizable.

It is also compatible with multi-cloud and hybrid environments. It gives the option to onboard with five clouds: AWS, Azure, Alibaba, Oracle, and GCP. Most of the companies we deal with use parts of various services from different clouds. To provide them with solutions, we need Prisma Cloud, as it helps manage multi-cloud environments.

A lot of automation capabilities are coming out with the updates, and they are growing day by day. The basic automation covers remediation of alerts, and in live applications we can block malicious activities in the files where the vulnerabilities come across.

In terms of cloud-native application comprehensiveness, we can integrate various cloud-native applications with Prisma Cloud. We can use Defender to protect workloads or Kubernetes in any native cloud like AWS EKS.

The CSPM provides the whole asset inventory, where we can see all the services in our cloud environment and how they are working, as well as how the assets are connected to each other and which network is connected. We can see the configuration.

We face some GUI issues related to new permissions for AWS. So far, we don't have any automation to complete them through the GUI. We have to manually update the permissions. Our customers have faced some issues with that.

I have been using Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks for more than four years.

The stability is a nine out of 10.

The scalability is a nine out of 10. We just need some of the automations to come around in Prisma.

With all the capabilities it has and how comprehensive it is, with CSPM, CWPP, and more, we get help from the technical team at Palo Alto. They help us to get into what Prisma Cloud is and all the capabilities it has.

Their technical support comes up with good solutions for every difficulty we face.

Positive

The initial deployment is very straightforward, with the help of the technical team and tech support. It's very easy to get into Prisma Cloud. It takes time, one to two weeks, to complete the deployment. Most of our customers are enterprise-level, although we also have small clients.

The maintenance is mostly handled by Palo Alto teams. The updates are scheduled so that we know at what time they will update and what the new features are. They are good when it comes to updates.

I'm on the technical side and not into sales, but Prisma Cloud is better than the native applications when it comes to pricing.

I suggest that my customers adopt Prisma for every module. It's the best security platform, where we can provide security for multiple clients without using the native security approach.

I highly recommend this solution.

We use the GlobalProtect module within Prisma Cloud to ensure the security of our mobile users.

Prisma Cloud provides security spanning for multi and hybrid cloud environments.

It includes automation capabilities that we can deploy if the environment is suitable.

Prisma Cloud has enabled us to migrate from multiple vendors, creating a more user-friendly experience for everyone.

Prisma Cloud enhances the security of our cloud-native development lifecycle from start to finish.

One of the advantages of Prisma Cloud's GlobalProtect module is that it provides a centralized tool for monitoring applications, user connections, and latency. Additionally, it allows us to track the percentage of availability.

Prisma Cloud saves the equivalent time of one full-time employee.

The most valuable aspect of Prisma Cloud compared to other VPNs is its security and performance.

In the GlobalProtect module, we can easily guide users experiencing connection issues through the notification column. Within that column, we can submit and escalate notifications on host entries for troubleshooting purposes. Additionally, we can troubleshoot by collecting direct logs during user data connections. On the security front, we have a wide range of SaaS-based items at our disposal. Using Prisma Cloud, we can send internet-based reminders about the option to create a VPN tunnel internally.

Palo Alto needs to add more support staff to improve their response time.

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

I would rate the stability of Prisma Cloud ten out of ten.

I would rate the scalability of Prisma Cloud ten out of ten.

The support response time is slow, with resolutions sometimes taking up to two days.

Neutral

The initial deployment is straightforward. I have experience with two deployments. In my previous job, the deployment took six months to complete. Currently, we have 15 tenants to deploy and have successfully deployed ten within the first seven months.

The price for Prisma Cloud is reasonable.

I would rate Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks eight out of ten. However, the delay in support time negatively impacts my overall assessment.

We have 90,000 accounts and have already migrated 50,000 users over to GlobalProtect.

Palo Alto does the maintenance.

I recommend Prisma Cloud to others, as long as the solution meets their requirements for cost, support, and number of locations.

Currently, we use Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks in my company for our clients who operate in the finance and banking teams and want data, network security, and posture management for the cloud infrastructure.

The solution has improved our organization, and I believe that it is a continuous process to protect you in any environment. Prisma Cloud gives you an overview of what gaps are in their environment, but how they are going to be solved depends upon the client, especially the security gaps. Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks gives 60 to 70 percent of the overview, which the client ignores in their infrastructures. The tool provides users with a better overview of what is going on in their infrastructure.

The most valuable features of the solution are areas like compliance and asset inventories, along with runtime protection.

The tool's UI is an area with certain shortcomings where improvements are required. With the cloud protection and UI, the tool should have the option to download the data for the vulnerabilities. One should have the option to download detailed data about vulnerabilities in the host. The tool should have a guide or a knowledge base document. The tool should specifically provide a guide about the solution's UI, which can be helpful for clients.

Sometimes, it does provide an error, or I can say that when we integrate our infrastructure cloud with Prisma Cloud, we face some issues. Most of the time, the integration issues are not due to Prisma Cloud but from the client side.

The tool's support team needs to improve.

I have been using Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks for two years. My company has a partnership with Palo Alto Networks.

Stability-wise, I rate the solution a seven out of ten. I rate the stability at a seven, considering the time we needed to get the data from DSPM. Most of the time, when the client requires data, it is not available. At other times, it requires a lot of time to get the data. It also requires time to import data from the cloud as per our requirements.

It is a scalable solution. Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

My company's clients are medium and enterprise-sized businesses.

The solution's technical support team doesn't reply on time. There is a gap in communication. The solution's technical support team doesn't have enough engineers to handle the cases. The support team wants us to work as per their time, so it is not according to the clients’ needs and time. I rate the technical support a six out of ten.

Neutral

I got a chance to work with CrowdStrike and SharePoint, but I never got the project since the client did not give me a chance.

The product's initial setup phase is straightforward. For the deployment phase, we just need some minimal data from the cloud to be able to integrate with Prisma Cloud. Just in case of custom issues, there are some points where we faced some issues with the deployment, but it was basically from the client side as they had multiple policies deployed on AWS and Azure Cloud, making it a little difficult for Prisma Cloud to integrate. In general, it is easy to integrate anything on the Prisma Cloud.

For the product's deployment phase, one cloud admin from the client's end and one from my company's side, one person is required. Two to three people are required to take care of the deployment.

The solution can be deployed in a matter of days.

Though the company's clients have multiple tools, they were not able to integrate all of the cloud accounts in a single SIR tool, which is why we had to use Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks to monitor all of our company's clients' cloud accounts.

The solution provides security scanning for multi and hybrid cloud environments, but it does not provide the details about the product that provides the security. Most of the time, it just provides an overview of the security gaps. In real life, I didn't see any of the scenarios where it is protecting our company's infrastructure. Clients are sometimes not ready to use runtime protection for the Prisma Cloud because they don't want to take any risks in the production environment.

The comprehensiveness of Prisma Cloud for protecting the full cloud-native environment involves network protection. The most important thing is network security, and the second is IAM security, which is important for the banking team. I see that the tool has a large number of containers. Deployment and pipeline security are the main areas for the banking sector. Our clients don't use much of Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks because it contains complexity, and the UI is not user-friendly. There have been multiple cases of their client complaining about the UI. From the standpoint of the client, the tool is too complex.

Speaking about the tool's help that allows users to take a preventative approach to cloud security, I would say that based on the asset inventory, we check the details about the assets and the number of assets. Secondly, we go through the alerts, which consist of IAM and the network security rules. Following the severity, like critical, high, or medium, we first resolve those issues and take steps monthly. The alerts that are generated monthly should be resolved only in that month.

After the deployment, it took three to four months to notice the value derived from using the solution, from my point of view and experience.

The discovery is good. The discovery provides details about the assets and the data, along with the data inside the infrastructure and about the infrastructure. There are some issues because if only about the data, it does not give out any issues for the user and instead gives more information about the infrastructure and some within the infrastructure.

Palo Alto DSPM did not discover much data existing outside of our company's official IT systems.

The solution provides insights into the content that has been discovered, along with some detailed information.

I cannot reveal the type of insights into the content that the solution has provided because our client would not want our company to open up about such details.

The insights into the content have affected the data security operations since following the compliance provides and helps clients regulate their security. It also prevents data breaches. The data breaches open up whatever data can be opened, and it helps clients to determine what data they need to secure and how. Speaking about data security posture, our company's clients take steps to resolve any issues because they want to save their reputation, especially in scenarios involving hacking.

It took around two to three months to see the value derived from the use of the product.

The tool provides an automated discovery of new data assets as they get onboarded. It does take one to two days on an average basis to show all the data.

In terms of whether the solution provides a prioritized list of all the data security posture issues in our company's environment, I can say that as soon as the assets are discovered, Prisma Cloud starts scanning and does all of the data security scanning. It does not take much time, and it can be done in four to five hours. If it is a large-scale infrastructure, then it can take an average of eight to ten hours.

I have not used the solution's connectors for the SOC's DDR solution to help automate remediation since the plant where it is used did not integrate Prisma Cloud with the same tools they use, with one of the reasons being that Prisma Cloud overflows the alerts, and they did not want alerts to overflow with their production in an SIMP environment.

The solution provides visibility and control regardless of how complex or distributed the cloud environment becomes, but when it comes to getting the data from the UI shown to the upper management, things do become complex because the tool doesn't have many options to import or export data.

I cannot say that the solution has reduced all the alerts by prioritizing the ones that have the most impact on sensitive data. The alerts that were critical and high, have been resolved by the team, while also taking care of areas involving IAM and networks.

The prioritization of alerts in the tool has affected our company's operations, and from my point of view, right now, I am able to show my CIS and the upper management team what steps we have taken and how the issues that are there as per the alerts have been resolved based on the critical, medium and high severity basis. I can say that 60 percent of the issues have been resolved as per the alerts. It gives me the flexibility to provide details to the management team that we are on track to provide security to our infrastructure. It gives me the flexibility to provide data to management for some time. As the environment grows, it generates a lot of alerts, and it takes time to resolve all of them.

The solution does not require any maintenance, and one just needs to make sure that the tool is up to date.

Based on my experience, I would recommend Prisma Cloud because I have hands-on experience with the solution. The integration is easy. The tool provides visibility in the infrastructure and for the alerts about the security gaps, the tool provides precise details. Talking about the new app in the tool, I would say little improvements are required. The tool is quite informative for me, but from the client side, it does require some improvement.

If someone has a large infrastructure, I won't recommend Prisma Cloud to them. If they have medium and enterprise, then I will recommend Prisma Cloud to such people because it can handle and, as per the working out of the tool, it can change the details about the small-scale, medium-scale, and enterprise businesses, but not for the large scale enterprises.

I rate the tool an eight out of ten.

We use Prisma Cloud Data Security for security compliance and detection.

We implemented Prisma Cloud because it eliminates the need for hardware appliances, thereby reducing our on-premises footprint.

Prisma Cloud provides security scanning multi and hybrid cloud environments which is important.

Prisma Cloud provides comprehensive protection for the entire cloud-native stack, encompassing threat protection, global protection, threat intelligence, and zero-trust architecture.

Prisma Cloud's security automation capabilities are effective. It utilizes AI-powered cloud-based technology to analyze unknown files and identify potential threats.

Prisma Cloud employs a combination of features to safeguard against both known and unknown threats, including IPS and threat intelligence integration.

Prisma Cloud has benefited our organization by providing URL filtering, facilitating secure customer connections, implementing endpoint security with a zero-trust architecture, and enabling user identification.

Prisma Cloud safeguards our entire cloud-native development lifecycle. Palo Alto's architecture encompasses multiple engines, each with distinct functionalities. These engines include the SP3 engine, application visibility control engine, URL filtering engine, Wildfire, intelligent saving, zero trust, threat prevention, and content infection. Together, these engines enhance security, reliability, and threat monitoring.

Prisma Cloud provides visibility and control of our web traffic at the URL level and across other technologies.

Prisma Cloud's visibility improves our confidence in our security compliance posture.

Prisma Cloud effectively integrates security into our CI/CD pipeline and seamlessly harmonizes with existing DevOps processes.

Prisma Cloud provides a single monitoring tool. The single point of monitoring makes our company more secure.

Prisma Cloud provides up-to-date information about real-world threats at runtime and across the entire pipeline, through communications, community, and mail.

Prisma Cloud reduces the number of runtime alerts. The extent to which alerts are reduced depends on the appliance and the number of throughputs purchased.

Prisma Cloud has saved our organization money. 

What I like most about Prisma Cloud is its zero-day signatures, maximum security, minimal downtime, cloud visibility, control, and ease of deployment.

Firewalls can identify application and user activity within network traffic. This includes information such as, what applications are being used, what URLs are being accessed, how frequently applications are being accessed, and how much time users are spending on particular applications.

The Palo Alto support needs to improve. Their response time is not good.

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

Prisma Cloud is stable.

Prisma Cloud is scalable.

The technical support is slow to respond.

Neutral

We previously used Fortinet, CheckPoint, and Cisco. Palo Alto Prisma Cloud is more efficient in single scans.

The initial deployment was straightforward. Using a basic configuration, we can deploy within six hours. I completed the deployment myself.

Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks carries a higher cost, but its enhanced security measures justify the expense.

I would rate Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks nine out of ten. Its architecture is well-designed, more reliable, and more secure.

We have Prisma Cloud deployed in multiple locations across the globe.

The maintenance is done on the cloud.

I recommend Prisma Cloud to others.

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.

I work with Palo Alto products, including their firewalls, VM-Series, CM-Series, hardware, and Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks. I recommend Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks primarily for financial services, FSI, and energy companies.

The threat detection feature in Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks integrates with cloud-native controls like AWS GuardDuty and similar services on Azure and GCP. It also brings its own threat intelligence from Unit 42 and supports external intel feeds like VirusTotal. Multi-cloud compliance monitoring leads to a normalized view and can reduce workforce requirements.

The cost of Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks is too high. I would also appreciate the addition of NLP to reduce the learning curve and make configuring queries more user-friendly.

I have been working with Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks since it was called RedLock in 2019.

The initial setup is straightforward. Day zero involves cloud integration following an admin guide. Day one involves policy tuning, customization, and configuring compliance policies like GDPR.

The ROI is challenging to quantify. While there is tangible reduction in workforce needed, exact cost savings cannot be easily measured.

Pricing and licensing are expensive. There are different experiences with ROI, and exact cost benefits are hard to quantify.

If you have a multi-cloud environment, Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks is essential for reducing costs and normalizing outputs. In a single-cloud, limited setup with good automation, you might not need it. I rate the overall solution at seven to seven and a half.

I have mostly used the CSPM and CWP side of things. 

For one of our clients, we used the self-hosted version that we had deployed on IBM Cloud and the SaaS version hosted by Prisma itself. For the CWP side, we used it for securing applications of our clients, doing the runtime checks, and servicing the runtime events and plug-in vulnerabilities.

For the CSPM side, the use case was more heavily for compliance on the cloud. We had Google and AWS environments.

Its main benefit was that it made it easier to monitor our clients. It just made everything more efficient. There was efficiency.

Prisma Cloud provides security spanning multi-cloud environments. I have not worked with a hybrid cloud environment.

I never did anything with the automated features other than being able to click and have it do the relearn process when it comes to the runtime events. If I see that an application is creating a bunch of false positive runtime events, I can put it in an automatic relearn state. It will relearn what that application does so it is not firing off a bunch of false positives. That is the only automation I have used other than the Helm option provided at the time of deployment. It does some automation when it comes to deployment. That is about it. I am not sure about the savings money-wise, but I know that every time we deploy by Helm, it saves us time. It is hard to judge the time savings because I never deployed it in a manual way.

Prisma Cloud is pretty good for helping us take a preventative approach to cloud security. We can have lock-in controls where a developer cannot deploy vulnerabilities that are critical. We can prevent them from doing it that way. It is excellent in that regard. I also like the preventive controls on the runtime side. If you see a runtime event, you could put options in place to prevent that specific command from running, or you can shut down the console, container pod, etc. It is hard to measure the time savings. However, it can take us an hour if we have to reach out to the proper team to get a pod shut down. It would also depend on how responsive they are. Having something in place to automatically shut something down does save a lot of time.

When we first started deploying it, our team was new. We had done some training, but it did take us a little while to fully grasp all the benefits of Prisma Cloud itself. It could have taken a couple of weeks to a month before we really got a good grasp of everything. I would not say that this is the case with everyone. None of us in the team had done the cloud before, so it took us longer to understand and realize the benefits compared to others.

Prisma Cloud is pretty comprehensive. On the CSPM side of things, the SaaS-hosted version seems to have a lot more capability than the self-hosted version. The SaaS-hosted version is more comprehensive than the self-hosted version.

The visibility and control that Prisma Cloud provides affect confidence in the security and compliance postures. A great thing about it is that we can set up whatever specific compliance needs the clients have. It has a lot of features already built into it. It is a simple toggle action to enable the compliance that they need to follow. It lays out what is failing. It gives you all the information that you need to work with clients to get everything compliant. It also offers some options if you want to make custom policies and things like that. If the compliance policies that clients follow are not available nationally, they can have their own compliance policies. They can put those in. It is great.

Prisma Cloud provides a single tool to protect all of the cloud resources and applications, and then there are other tools that you can download from the console, such as the twistcli tool. It is all in there, but there are different tools that you can use as well.

Prisma Cloud saves a lot of time and probably a lot of money too. That is because you can log in to one specific tool. The CSPM SaaS side of it even has more, so being able to log in on that one tool helps. You do not have to worry about different tools to take care of different security aspects. Everything built into one saves a lot of time.

We were able to reduce runtime alerts as we worked with our clients to get to that security posture maturity. There were some clients that were getting probably 25 or more different alerts a day, and we were able to bring that down by more than half. We were on the way to getting even fewer alerts than that. It was quite a bit of a reduction. It is a slow process of getting the runtime alerts knocked down depending on how big the environment is, but it definitely helps.

When it comes to the vulnerability side of things, it has built-in top ten features or top ten vulnerabilities. We can look at them and say that these vulnerabilities are being ranked by Prisma Cloud as our top ten. These are the ones that we should be focusing on. We can work with our clients to help them determine which things should be knocked out first and so on.

Runtime protection and the ability to set up policies and controls are valuable.

The thing that I like the most is that when it comes to runtime events, whenever we see an event, we are able to look through the logs. It is pretty easy to look back through everything that took place. I also like the Radar screen for seeing how everything is connected.

While you can find everything, sometimes, it is a bit difficult. I have always had a little bit of an issue or struggle using the Resource Query Language that we can use to look through and find different things. I wish it was a little bit easier. It might be just my failings in that regard, but it can be a little bit difficult to find everything. You can find everything, but it is difficult sometimes.

If there is a way for auto Defender upgrades, that would be great. They started to implement it, but I do not know if they have done it yet. Having auto Defender upgrades so that we do not have to upgrade Defender manually would be helpful. If there is a way to push the upgrades from the console, that would be one way to improve it. I had created a couple of other requests for improvements, but I do not remember them at this point in time. I know that was one of them.

I started using it back in 2020 although I did a little bit of training a little bit before that around the end of 2019. It was originally Twistlock. I am not sure if Palo Alto had bought it out when I first started training with it.

I would rate it an eight out of ten for stability. Sometimes, on the SaaS version, the console would not load. It was a glitch on their end that they had to fix. We had issues with the GUI at a couple of points. We had issues whenever we were downloading the vulnerability report. It did not include all the information. Once they got some bugs worked out, it was pretty stable, but there were some issues.

It is very scalable. I would rate it a ten out of ten for scalability.

We had a couple of Fortune 500 clients. I do not know if we had anything that was small. A lot of them were big organizations, but some of the environments were small.

We had a client that had the SaaS version that had hundreds of different endpoints, if not more. Most of our clients were on the self-hosted version. Some of them only had four or eight different endpoints or hosts. One of them had about 50 different hosts, give or take. It was a wide array depending on the client we were working with.

When we started, there were three of us working with Prisma Cloud. There were about six of us by the time I left.

They are pretty good, but sometimes, it does take them a little bit longer to move from level 1 support to a higher-up level when it is a technical issue that they have not dealt with before. Overall, it is pretty good.

Positive

We also used a product called Aqua Security. We were using Aqua Security back when we were using the self-hosted version of Prisma and not the SaaS version of Prisma. We had not worked on the SaaS version yet, so I do not know if it is a completely fair comparison, but I did feel that at that point in time, Aqua Security had more features and a better layout. I do not know how that compares today. It has been a little over a year since I last touched Aqua Security, so I am not sure what updates and changes they have made.

We had a deployment team handling the initial deployments. We worked on the upgrades after the initial deployment, which were pretty straightforward, but I am not sure about the initial deployment. It seems to be pretty straightforward, but I have never done an initial deployment.

In terms of maintenance, it is just doing the upgrades. That is really about it. It seems that they push out a patch pretty close to every month. You can upgrade to the minor versions at the very least or security patches.

I would recommend Prisma Cloud to others. It does take a good bit of work to learn it and fully understand the complexity of it and all the features. There are still features in there that I do not even know about or have not even touched, but it is great for protecting the environment. It is easy to get into and understand some of it, but it requires a lot of learning to understand the whole complexity of it.

Its learning curve depends on what you need to do with it. I had taken a week-long class with it, and then there were other training sessions. It could take weeks, if not months, if you want to try to do all the different training they offer.

With my limited use of other platforms, I would rate Prisma Cloud a ten out of ten. This is the one that I have used the most. It is the best of the ones that I have used.