Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks Reviews

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.

We use Prisma Cloud primarily for clients with a multi-cloud environment who require all these posture checks to be done uniformly from a single pane of glass to ensure they are in compliance. They have regulatory policies that require integration with the SIEM to generate alerts and reports. That's the primary use case for a CSPM solution. For cloud workload protection, we need vulnerability management, runtime defense, as well as image, container,  and registry scanning.

In terms of modules, we started with Redlock, the cloud security posture management component, and followed with Twistlock for cloud workload protection. Lately, I've been using Aporeto for identity-based micro-segmentation and BridgeCrew for cloud security.

Identity-based micro-segmentation allows you to create microparameters across workloads on the cloud and on-premises. You can enforce a pure wireless model through whitelisting flows in various workloads. Cloud security is primarily for core security, including SaaS and PaaS tools for scanning container images and core infrastructure. We have Terraforms, which we need to scan if we forget to remove any passwords or if there is some consideration drift between what you've configured in the IaC and what has materialized into the cloud infrastructure. 

I don't think we have had more than four or five admins for any project. We provide read-only access to the monitoring guys and custom authentication authorization privileges to a couple of users. The number of authorized users varies from plan to plan. Lots of people don't need to have access to the solution. 

Prisma Cloud helped us with compliance. Most of my deployments have been greenfield, so I don't have a benchmark to compare how the security posture has improved. I've always used this from day zero of the configuration. However, I can say that the compliance checks for PCI, DSS, HIPAA, etc., made my life simpler. I don't need to look at each of these standards and compare the rules I have in place.

It also enabled us to adopt a preventative approach to security. It gives us an option to monitor and remediate, so I don't think there is any challenge. If we see something going wrong, the solution offers a way to implement preventative controls. 

You can incorporate Prisma into DevSecOps and put it into any of the pipelines, like Jenkins and Azure DevOps. I don't think there are any challenges. You have all the ready-made plugins on these CI/CD tools, so you don't need to do or write a custom script plugin or anything. It's already available. It takes care of your end-to-end security from build to deployment and runs.

The cloud workload protection module Twistlock has ready-made plugins. Still, I don't think there was a plunging for identity-based micro-segmentation sites in the past, so we had to build a pipeline manually, I think they released a plugin for IBMS, but I never worked on it.

Prisma provides a single pane of glass for all our cloud resources to control all these different functionalities from various menus. It also helps us assess risk at runtime and throughout the whole pipeline. I have never compared Prisma with other tools, like Qualys or Tenable, so I cannot say which gives better results regarding runtime. However, I get a lot of actionable insights and suggestions from the tool about the next steps to follow.

The solution provides excellent security coverage of multi-cloud and hybrid environments. Without it, I would need to create a manual playbook for each cloud. There is a lot to maintain for each cloud, and you can't monitor from a single pane of glass. That's an administrative nightmare because you can't pull compatible reports. If I identify some compliance issues on AWS, I don't have a similar set of parameters to compare those for Google Cloud or Microsoft Azure. I definitely need this for a multi-cloud environment. 

I can get a relatively good amount of end-to-end security within the cloud. All these pieces fit together to address all my cloud needs. Of course, I don't think any vendors target security within the microservices, analytics, or data warehouse. I'm unsure because I haven't done it, but I don't think anything is missing.

It gives developers the tools they need to correct issues so they do not have to write their own scripts. Sometimes, I need an administrator to work with these developers, so it's not fully automated. Maybe I didn't find the best way to do it. Perhaps I need to find a linter or something, but there were many instances where I needed to involve someone to work with the developer. I don't think we are doing everything from the developer's end. 

Prisma also substantially reduced alert investigation times because we previously did everything by hand. We used to scan it manually, so it depended on the periodicity of scans. Earlier, we used to run scans for a couple of customers about every 15 days, and then we did the remediation. Now, all these scans run every minute or 15 minutes, so it's faster.  

Prisma's identity-based micro-segmentation is better than all its competitors. I've already evaluated Guardicore and Illumio, but Prisma stands out for the ease of configuring rules and how seamlessly it works with your cloud workloads and container environments. I used it for Kubernetes as well as K3s. I prefer Prisma's identity-based micro-segmentation. I can't think of any competitors doing this as well as Prisma Cloud.

We integrated this solution as a part of DevSecOps, so we have a dedicated pipeline for cloud workload protection. That works brilliantly. You don't need to log in to the control unless you want to do some management or full reports. I can bake in all these functionalities within the pipeline, and I can do the same for IBMS. 

As part of application security or whatever my developers are working on, I can have them bake all the configurations they need to do, like listening and patching remediation. I think it's relatively automatic, but I would consider it to be more of a DevSecOps functionality.

Prisma is the result of multiple Palo Alto acquisitions, like CWPP, Twistlock, and Aporeto. Though they are part of a single pane of glass, there is no correlation between the solutions. I don't see vulnerability scans done for tools that have been micro-segmented. 

A better correlation between the multiple products Prisma Cloud contains would be crucial. It would reduce the time spent looking at reports and enable you to get all the actionable insights across products. I think that Palo Alto is working on it, but they need to work faster because it doesn't make sense to have all these products in a single pane of glass without any correlation between them. 

At some point, things get a bit unwieldy when working with complex environments, but I don't think that challenge is unique to Prisma Cloud. It's an issue for any solution deployed in massive and complex environments. Let's say you have an enterprise with 30,000 workloads in the cloud, so it's unwieldy to have it configured for a single instance of Prisma Cloud. In that case, it would be better to segregate it across multiple tenants.

In the future, I'd like to see Palo Alto create a single consolidated agent software for workload production and identity-based micro-segmentation. Currently, I need to install two agents for the same platform to get two different functionalities. The second is maybe ease of licensing. That would also be helpful.

I have been using Prisma Cloud for nearly three and a half years.

I never faced any challenges because of internal hardware issues or the agent. Because I've always worked on the cloud-managed version, we have never faced any problems with the functionality. We did have a couple of hangups with the user and administrator onboarding and privileges, but I don't think that affects the functionality of the overall product.

The product itself is scalable, but it can become unwieldy from the administrative side of things. I can push Prisma Cloud out for 10,000 workloads, but the reporting and management would be a bit difficult. I prefer to have it segmented across multiple tenants, but it's somewhat complicated. 

I rate Palo Alto support a nine out of ten. My company is a CPSP partner with premium support, so I can't speak to the typical support experience. Even if we don't raise a ticket, we have an internal account manager to take care of all this. 

Positive

Redlock was the original company doing CSPM, so I got into Prisma Cloud because they acquired Redlock. I previously used  Qualys and Tenable for vulnerability management. I thought putting the CSPM and cloud workload protection pieces of Prisma Cloud under one roof would simplify my life.

Also, all these are cloud-managed and take care of the end-to-end requirements for cloud workloads. Qualys and Tenable have all these vulnerability management capabilities, but they might lack some native remediation capabilities. It's not that the other products are falling short, but I need that consolidated single pane of glass for cloud security. 

Setting up Prisma Cloud is straightforward. You get an activation email and deploy a couple of scripts. I work for a consulting firm that is a CPSP partner. All I needed to do is email Palo Alto with a bill of material describing our environment and the components, and then we get the activation email. After that, I followed the self-service enrollment steps, and it's running. Depending on your environment, you need to install all these applications. It's a seamless onboarding experience.

The total deployment time varies depending on the client because some of them have restrictions. One mid-sized company with around 700 workloads took less than three weeks. However, we needed to do a step-by-step approach for some, moving from the on-premises environment to the cloud and from dev to production. Those deployments took a couple of months.

Usually, the deployment requires no more than two or three people, but it depends on the approach. One should be enough if it's a batch approach. I've been doing this alone for a lot of my clients. In some situations, if you may need some help troubleshooting an app that isn't working, or the client may need someone with specialized expertise. It also depends on the client's size. At most, you'll need a half-dozen.

It's a costly solution, so we spend a lot on the licenses. At the same time, we can perform compliance checks, external audits, etc., faster because we have all the right pieces in place. That definitely helped, but I've never calculated the total cost of ownership or return on investment.

Prisma Cloud Enterprise is a costly solution. You need a license for all the components. At the same time, you have everything under one roof, so I think it's still justified. 

I rate Prisma Cloud an eight out of ten. I deduct a couple of points because I would still like to see all the products in the platform correlated. They should also do away with the need to install multiple agents for various functionalities or burn it all down into a single agent that takes care of it.

My advice is to start early if you are moving from on-premises to a hybrid or cloud environment. Implement Prisma Cloud as soon as possible, especially for greenfield deployments. This isn't a problem with Prisma Access, but it's usually a challenge. You need time to customize your rules and tailor them to your setup. 

The second recommendation I have is for Prisma Cloud Compute, the cloud workload protection piece. It's available in self-managed and cloud versions. You should opt for the cloud-managed version because you can get two single-cloud platforms. 

Our enterprise customers tend to use it for compliance. 

A big drive towards Prisma Cloud came during COVID-19 when many organizations were moving away from traditional VPNs. There was a drive to facilitate people working from home, and traditional VPNs were not the right solution for large customers who had a huge amount of staff working from home. Prisma Cloud offered multiple solutions that facilitated the ability to work securely from anywhere. That was one of the big things, and that continues to be a big thing today.

Prisma Cloud provides security spanning multi- and hybrid-cloud environments. That is what its big strength is.

It is one of the most comprehensive solutions available. If you compare it with the likes of Netskope and Skyhigh, Prisma Cloud is fairly similar in terms of features and depths of features. Automation capability is built in. It has got extensive logging. Automation is there, but it is not extensive. You can combine it with other tools like XO. The integration capability is already strong. That itself makes it a good contender.

Prisma Cloud takes away a lot of manual work for our clients. It has reduced costs by not having to work with pre-COVID-19 traditional networking scenarios. It has given them the ability to have staff working securely from anywhere on the globe. I do not have the metrics for cost savings, but all customers who bought the solution from us say that it has reduced their costs. Over the last three years, we have not had a customer who has not renewed, and it is based on the reduced costs.

As long as it is set up correctly and it is integrated correctly with the SOAR and the SIEM components, it provides very good visibility. It is a very good enterprise solution. No one toolset or platform can protect every single cloud resource, but it can cover a lot of cloud resources.

They claim to secure the entire cloud-native development lifecycle, across build, deploy, and run, but I am not 100% sure. It probably can do 80% of the job.

Visibility is a key feature. Integration with other technologies across the board, whether they are Palo Alto technologies, Windows technologies, or cloud technologies, is probably the biggest thing.

They can improve the integrations into the SDLC lifecycle.

Their support is good. I would rate the Palo Alto technical team an 8 out of 10.

Positive

It is not easy, and it has to be well-planned. You need good skills to deploy any of these tools, but that is the same for many solutions. These platforms are complex, and it is important to understand exactly what outcome you want when you are deploying any tool like this. 

The deployment duration depends on the size of the environment. It can take anywhere from two weeks to four or five months depending on the size of the environment and the complexity of the environment. Some customers have a very simple setup in Azure only or in AWS only. It is very quick to deploy. Other customers have complex hardware environments where they are in the process of migrating to the cloud. Those implementations typically take much longer. It depends on how many global offices they have.

It is an expensive tool. It is not cheap technology. It is a serious investment for any customer. Customers typically buy it together with services. In my experience, customers buying Prisma Cloud are prepared to pay for the implementation and the tool itself.

Overall, I would rate Prisma Cloud an 8 out of 10.

The solution is integrated with cloud environments such as Azure, Alibaba, and Oracle. After integrating, we do check the network logs, including what are the config logs or configuration issues clients are facing. We see what their cloud requirements are. There are email use cases specific to the modules, and we do have visibility over the entire cloud environment. We handle vulnerability management and can block according to the rules and policies. 

We can manage identities as well, right down to a particular machine. 

We've been able to solve various problems. It's helped with cloud security. It problem solves for threat detection and compliance. 

It's helped clients with cloud security. When it comes to the financial aspect, we have clear visibility into what is going on, and we have a clear idea of how we can inspect and prevent issues. 

It offers full visibility.

There is auto-remediation capability with this solution. 

It offers threat detection across multi-cloud environments. Many clients are using hybrid setups and different clouds in India. When it integrates, it's helpful in gaining visibility across the entire environment.

It is comprehensive. It's very easy to define rules and auto-remediation. It's basically one click. It's great for protecting the full cloud-native stack. 

The security automation capabilities are very good. It's played an important role with auto-remediation, which is important to the automation process. We can decide how we want to respond as well. We can arrange logs and alerts. All of this can be automated. 

It allows us to take a preventative approach to security. When I started with Prisma, we had sessions about how we could work with the capabilities. We have a lot of features in Prisma Cloud. The UI has improved and helped us gather information about vulnerabilities and compliance issues.

The build, deploy, and run lifecycle is good. We have particular pipelines, and we have out-of-the-box policies defined. We can see what is going on. We can move faster within the environment with it. 

It provides complete microservices that we can check on a micro level. The solution provides visibility and control regardless of how complex or distributed our cloud environments become.

The solution enabled us to enter our CI/CD pipeline and touchpoints into existing processes. It provides us with a good backbone. 

We are provided with a single tool to protect all of our cloud resources and applications without having to manage and reconcile compliance reports. It can fetch the reports for us. We have APIs and pretty refined plugins to get the reports. We can get it all from the console. We can also schedule reporting. The third-party integrations are very helpful.

The runtime policy is very helpful. We can define runtime rules and go through alerts or blockages. It's one of the best parts of the solution. It's reduced the number of alerts, sometimes by 80% to 90%, depending on the situation.

With the amount of visibility we get, we've been able to reduce alert investigation times. We can investigate if we need to, or we can make custom answers to specific alerts. Depending on your level of expertise in the tool, it barely takes any time at all. If you understand the case, if you already know the type of answer, you can put it in. With Prisma, we've been able to reduce investigation times by 80%.

While, as a cloud security engineer, I can't say how much money it saves, I can see the credit, and it looks like less money is spent.

When there are updates, whether daily, weekly, or monthly, it needs configuration or permission adjustments. There is no automation for that, which is too bad. 

I've been using the solution for two years. 

This is a very stable product. 

Prisma users are increasing day by day. We have a team of around 12 people using the solution. We have a variety of clients coming onto Prisma, and we work to help them become more compliant using the solution. 

It's very scalable and very easy to use. 

We used technical support during deployment, and they were very good. Technical support is awesome. 

Positive

I haven't really worked with other tools. I started with Prisma Cloud.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. We had good support to help with learning and the capabilities of the solution. 

The training took two to three weeks. The deployment would take around two to three days. 

There isn't too much maintenance. There are updates. There's nothing other than that. 

Prisma's support helped with the deployment. 

We are a Palo Alto partner.

After using the solution for about two years, I would rate it nine out of ten so far. 

Financial companies want to restrict user access, which means the users need to go through a subnet to access their services. When the user connects to the internet via the Prisma Cloud VPN, they can use different types of IP addresses globally. The changing IP addresses can be pretty complex. It costs a lot for the application site to apply for access.  

We negotiated with Palo Alto to get 20 servers, and the customers will be added to those 20 subnets. On the Spectrum Access side, we only need a white list of those twenty subnets, and we won't have issues in the future. 

The solution is managed by Palo Alto. We're using Panorama, a popular management tool, for managing the connection between the physical portal, firewall, and VPN, as well as Prisma Cloud.

The user experience is better than our previous solution. It gives us visibility into all the traffic. 

The most valuable feature is the closed VPN connection, which provides better performance than traditional VPN boxes. For example,  let's say a user in New York State normally connects in the East, but if they travel to the UK, they can connect to the same portal, which automatically redirects to any VPN gateway. We can control traffic based on Active Directory groups instead of the user's IP. That means a user in New York can access his application based on his user ID and AD group access when he travels to the UK or anywhere else.

Prisma Cloud can provide decent security across cloud environments, depending on how each company sets security policies. Prisma Cloud makes adding new users and managing access more flexible.  

I like Palo Alto's automated tool for migrating user data from other systems. We previously did this manually most of the time, but now we can update twice hourly automatically. 

During deployment, we created a tunnel from the cloud to our gateway in the data center because the users need some way to connect with the resources there, but all other traffic goes directly to the Palo Alto cloud. When the traffic goes to the Internet, sometimes it will come up with different IPs, causing some financial websites to be blocked. We needed to work with Palo Alto closely to solve this problem. 

Sometimes, when you assign subnets to regions, the IP address will jump from one location to another because it will automatically change substantially. Then, we need to add those IP subnets to our firewall for existing access. The need to update those subnets potentially causes maintenance or access issues. So far, we can only provide bigger customers with six subnets, and a small company may not be able to access those services. 

I rate Palo Alto customer service 10 out of 10. 

Positive

The migration takes time because we're typically not starting from scratch. We need to migrate everything from the existing VPN. I've used Prisma Cloud for a large financial enterprise with a complex infrastructure, and we worked on that for almost two years. It's less complicated for a mid-sized company, but the migration might take six to nine months.

It's hard to tell if there is an ROI in the short term. It may take a long time before you realize a return because there is a substantial initial investment. You can see a significant improvement in performance, but it may not necessarily save money. However, you'll ultimately improve service.

I rate Prisma Cloud nine out of 10. We would recommend it to any large global enterprise because it improves performance and offers a better user experience. It also gives you application-level control instead of regular IP address control. The latest version has many new features. So they can use the in-app Application ID and point to MAC applications instead of regular TCP/IP ports.

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.

Our environment consisted of a cloud-native stack, including Kubernetes, OpenStack, and OpenShift, running alongside additional virtualizations. This hybrid setup required securing both the cloud-native components and the virtualized instances. To address this challenge, we implemented a comprehensive CI/CD pipeline with cloud security in mind. Following vendor code pushes to our environment, we use rigorous scanning and verification procedures to ensure the code's safety before onboarding. Once onboarded, Prisma Cloud provides continuous posture management and security monitoring.

Our current Prisma Cloud deployment utilizes the Registry Scan, Runtime Protection, CI/CD Integration, and Vulnerability Management modules. While we have opted for the Complete Edition, it does not include Posture Management, a feature frequently inquired about by our customers. Currently, Posture Management is only available in the SaaS model, and we are utilizing the on-premise edition, also known as the Complete Version.

We are a system integrator for the telecom sector.

Clients utilizing cloud-native environments often face challenges in scanning and securing their containerized solutions and clusters. Prisma Cloud offers a comprehensive solution, providing end-to-end protection for these clients. 

Prisma Cloud is a crucial component of our clients' security, particularly for their billing environments.

It offers comprehensive security across multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments. This is particularly valuable for hybrid environments because it unifies all security needs under one platform, simplifying management and providing a more consistent approach.

It helps us take a preventative approach to cloud security. It is a comprehensive solution with a lot of features.

We have improved our clients' organizations by offering unified monitoring that directly connects their SIEM, SOAR, EDR, and XDR within their environment. The benefits are usually seen within six to eight months.

The Prisma Cloud SaaS version's comprehensiveness secures the entire cloud-native development life cycle.

Prisma Cloud delivers comprehensive visibility and control over our client's cloud environment, regardless of complexity or distribution. It provides a complete map of the environment, visualizing traffic flow for enhanced understanding.

The touchpoints in the DevOps process are seamless. We can integrate them with our registry and the CD platform, so there are no challenges during automation.

Integrating with a CI/CD pipeline and incorporating a vulnerability assessment process are highly effective features, especially when combined with runtime protection. This synergy provides a comprehensive view of how our application is performing while it's running, which is immensely valuable.

Prisma Cloud's Complete edition is not a complete suit. Only the SaaS version includes posture management and IDE integration.

The visibility on the SIEM needs to be streamlined so we can get the data without any issues. 

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

Prisma Cloud is stable.

Prisma Cloud scales well. In addition to our main site, we recently added Prisma Cloud to our disaster recovery site.

We acquired the services of their technical support several times which was helpful.

Positive

I have experience with Trend Micro Cloud One as well. The pricing is what differentiates Trend Micro Cloud One from Prisma Cloud. 

Initially, we deployed Prisma Cloud quickly, focusing solely on the containerized environment. The remaining deployment across the entire environment took two months to complete. From the solution's perspective, the deployment is straightforward. Some customers have complex environments but that has nothing to do with the solution itself.

Three people were required for the deployment.

Prisma Cloud licensing works on credits.

I would rate Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks a seven out of ten.

Maintaining Prisma Cloud is generally straightforward.

We have Prisma Cloud deployed in a single department used for the billing system in our hybrid cloud environment. We have eight users.

While Prisma Cloud Complete offers runtime protection, organizations seeking a comprehensive cloud security solution should implement Prisma Cloud SaaS.