Network Architect at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
2022-12-04T17:36:00Z
Dec 4, 2022
It helps to identify and control shadow IT apps. In terms of its impact on our organization's security, it has been like a sword with two edges. Sometimes, it has proved to be helpful in securing workloads, and sometimes, especially when there are modifications to App-IDs pushed through the content database, we find some things messed up. We've come to a point where we have our ways of managing these things, but all in all, App-ID has been very helpful, especially in detecting tunneled applications. At the end of the day, it's simply an operational thing. Sometimes, you have these notifications sent out about changes in App-IDs, modifications in App-IDs, or even the introduction of entirely new App-IDs to replace. Sometimes, the recommendations are followed, but even then, when the package is installed on the firewall, it gets messed up. I remember a particular one was with Tableau, and suddenly, people weren't able to use Tableau, which is an analytics tool for business. So, it can get messed up, but it doesn't happen often.
Deputy Manager at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
Real User
2022-10-10T05:01:00Z
Oct 10, 2022
The frequency of updates could be reduced. The updates are necessary, but they occur too frequently. The updates require devices to be rebooted, so there's downtime in the production environment. It's difficult to ask for downtime in a critical production environment every time there is an update. The software versions should be stable for longer durations. For example, six months or a year.
Senior Service Delivery Engineer at Netdata Innovation Center
Real User
2022-06-06T22:11:00Z
Jun 6, 2022
They can add some new characteristics. For example, when an incident triggers, they can automatically send a template for a particular match that is related to the policy. We don't have that right now. It is something to improve. There could be more automation for certain actions. For example, for a particular group, it can send an administrator alert to their manager. It was one of the concerns of our customers. You have three types of rules in SaaS Security API. You have the asset policies. You have the user activity policies, and you have the security control rules. Asset policies are more general, and they are more focused on the general behavior of an asset, which is a file. The user activity rules control or alert about unusual user activity or compliance violations, such as when a user uploads a large number of files. It would be good if you can put User IDs for the asset rules. In the asset rules, you can use the Azure AD group, but you cannot use the User ID. That would be a good improvement. Palo Alto has a lot of different solutions, and it would be good if the DLP part can be integrated with other solutions as well.
Senior Engineer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
Real User
2022-03-24T19:29:05Z
Mar 24, 2022
Palo Alto does a great job on managing updates to their products. It can be difficult managing all the subscription updates, especially if they are manual. There should be a process in place. One area of challenge is for them to stay on top of current CVEs on their platform. Anything in the lines of compliance should be current from potential attacks. They have a URL link where customers can make recommendations to map to specific compliance frameworks or standards. That's great, but instead of having the customer identify those, they should make sure they're using the most recent version. The NIST SP 800-53 Rev. 4, should be mapped to NIST SP 800-53 Rev. 5 current version. Many people are unaware of this change. Should use the most current version, unless you have an exception for legacy systems.
Senior Security Engineer at a manufacturing company with 501-1,000 employees
Real User
2021-10-31T20:47:00Z
Oct 31, 2021
Prisma would be a stronger solution if it could aggregate resources by project or by application. So say we have an application we've developed in AWS and five applications we've developed in Azure. The platform will group it according to those applications, but it's based on the tags we use in Azure, which means I have to rely on development teams to tag resources properly. If they don't do that, it doesn't group them properly in the platform. It would be nice if we could group the application according to the platform itself instead of relying on the development team to tag correctly in the cloud environment. My development team for one project might be different from the development team in another project. If I see a resource that needs to be fixed or changed, I need to know what project that resource is associated with. Ideally, I don't want to have to go into Azure and try to figure that out. So if I could tag it using the platform itself rather than relying on the tags that the development team uses in Azure, that would be extremely helpful. I wouldn't say Prisma is particularly useful for protecting data. It's hard to say. We're not looking at the data of the resources, so to speak, using Prisma. It's more like the resources that hold the data.
Consultant at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees
Reseller
2021-06-05T14:55:44Z
Jun 5, 2021
I would like to see a hybrid model which has API plus in-line security, where the user's data is controlled via an API call and also controlled in-line.
Learn what your peers think about Prisma Access by Palo Alto Networks. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: April 2025.
DevOps Engineer at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
Real User
2021-04-10T09:28:11Z
Apr 10, 2021
We are using the SaaS offering. We use our applications for microservices. We use Twistlock to scan containers, and it displays these results in Prisma, which is a good feature because we can see vulnerabilities with respect to these containers. We can see everything in a very detailed manner. However, when you have different environments for a single application, such as DEV, QA, PROD, and TEST, all these environments run multiple containers, which can lead to a very high number of containers. In such a scenario, it shows you the alerts for all those containers that have vulnerabilities. If you show the results of all the containers that share the same image, it is not going to add any value. Therefore, they should narrow down the alerts based on a container. It should show information for a single container. Otherwise, the person who is looking at the results gets the impression that he has to fix all these issues. This is something that they can improve.
Overall it is actually very good. I haven't yet had any issue at all. One thing that would help is if we could get a guide. With Cisco, for example, you can just type the problem regarding your Cisco product and you will easily get your solution. In Palo Alto, however, it's not easy to find the solutions.
Senior Director at a logistics company with 501-1,000 employees
Real User
2019-05-16T06:50:00Z
May 16, 2019
They automatically update and they should give us time to fully understand what they're updating so that we can make sure it doesn't impact production.
Architect - Cloud Serviced at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Top 20
2019-05-15T05:16:00Z
May 15, 2019
There are a lot of cloud-based applications that are supported, such as Box, Skype, Google Drive, and SharePoint, but there are many more than have not been totally integrated. They cannot use in-house apps because they are not generic services. I would like to see support for custom applications. There are also certain storage services that are not integrated, like AWS S3. If the services are created by the customer then it would be very nice to have those protected too. Right now, this is a data at rest CASB, but it would be nice if it included features such as forward proxy or reverse proxy. It would be able to provide the OTP to those gateways and anyone who can integrate with Aperture can send the data to have it authenticated, via Aperture to the cloud, rather than just scanned. Essentially, if it can be made to act as an auth server, to automatically handle the forward proxy CASB, it would be good.
Prisma Access by Palo Alto Networks provides consistent security for all users and applications across your remote networks. Prisma Access grants users safe access to the cloud and data center applications and the internet as well. In addition, the solution combines all of your security and networking capabilities into a single cloud-delivered platform, enabling flexible hybrid workforces.
Prisma Access can be managed two ways:
Cloud Managed
Panorama Managed
Prisma Access delivers both...
It helps to identify and control shadow IT apps. In terms of its impact on our organization's security, it has been like a sword with two edges. Sometimes, it has proved to be helpful in securing workloads, and sometimes, especially when there are modifications to App-IDs pushed through the content database, we find some things messed up. We've come to a point where we have our ways of managing these things, but all in all, App-ID has been very helpful, especially in detecting tunneled applications. At the end of the day, it's simply an operational thing. Sometimes, you have these notifications sent out about changes in App-IDs, modifications in App-IDs, or even the introduction of entirely new App-IDs to replace. Sometimes, the recommendations are followed, but even then, when the package is installed on the firewall, it gets messed up. I remember a particular one was with Tableau, and suddenly, people weren't able to use Tableau, which is an analytics tool for business. So, it can get messed up, but it doesn't happen often.
The frequency of updates could be reduced. The updates are necessary, but they occur too frequently. The updates require devices to be rebooted, so there's downtime in the production environment. It's difficult to ask for downtime in a critical production environment every time there is an update. The software versions should be stable for longer durations. For example, six months or a year.
They can add some new characteristics. For example, when an incident triggers, they can automatically send a template for a particular match that is related to the policy. We don't have that right now. It is something to improve. There could be more automation for certain actions. For example, for a particular group, it can send an administrator alert to their manager. It was one of the concerns of our customers. You have three types of rules in SaaS Security API. You have the asset policies. You have the user activity policies, and you have the security control rules. Asset policies are more general, and they are more focused on the general behavior of an asset, which is a file. The user activity rules control or alert about unusual user activity or compliance violations, such as when a user uploads a large number of files. It would be good if you can put User IDs for the asset rules. In the asset rules, you can use the Azure AD group, but you cannot use the User ID. That would be a good improvement. Palo Alto has a lot of different solutions, and it would be good if the DLP part can be integrated with other solutions as well.
Palo Alto does a great job on managing updates to their products. It can be difficult managing all the subscription updates, especially if they are manual. There should be a process in place. One area of challenge is for them to stay on top of current CVEs on their platform. Anything in the lines of compliance should be current from potential attacks. They have a URL link where customers can make recommendations to map to specific compliance frameworks or standards. That's great, but instead of having the customer identify those, they should make sure they're using the most recent version. The NIST SP 800-53 Rev. 4, should be mapped to NIST SP 800-53 Rev. 5 current version. Many people are unaware of this change. Should use the most current version, unless you have an exception for legacy systems.
Prisma would be a stronger solution if it could aggregate resources by project or by application. So say we have an application we've developed in AWS and five applications we've developed in Azure. The platform will group it according to those applications, but it's based on the tags we use in Azure, which means I have to rely on development teams to tag resources properly. If they don't do that, it doesn't group them properly in the platform. It would be nice if we could group the application according to the platform itself instead of relying on the development team to tag correctly in the cloud environment. My development team for one project might be different from the development team in another project. If I see a resource that needs to be fixed or changed, I need to know what project that resource is associated with. Ideally, I don't want to have to go into Azure and try to figure that out. So if I could tag it using the platform itself rather than relying on the tags that the development team uses in Azure, that would be extremely helpful. I wouldn't say Prisma is particularly useful for protecting data. It's hard to say. We're not looking at the data of the resources, so to speak, using Prisma. It's more like the resources that hold the data.
I would like to see a hybrid model which has API plus in-line security, where the user's data is controlled via an API call and also controlled in-line.
We are using the SaaS offering. We use our applications for microservices. We use Twistlock to scan containers, and it displays these results in Prisma, which is a good feature because we can see vulnerabilities with respect to these containers. We can see everything in a very detailed manner. However, when you have different environments for a single application, such as DEV, QA, PROD, and TEST, all these environments run multiple containers, which can lead to a very high number of containers. In such a scenario, it shows you the alerts for all those containers that have vulnerabilities. If you show the results of all the containers that share the same image, it is not going to add any value. Therefore, they should narrow down the alerts based on a container. It should show information for a single container. Otherwise, the person who is looking at the results gets the impression that he has to fix all these issues. This is something that they can improve.
My clients would like to see a more feature-rich product.
The price can be reduced to make it more competitive.
Overall it is actually very good. I haven't yet had any issue at all. One thing that would help is if we could get a guide. With Cisco, for example, you can just type the problem regarding your Cisco product and you will easily get your solution. In Palo Alto, however, it's not easy to find the solutions.
They automatically update and they should give us time to fully understand what they're updating so that we can make sure it doesn't impact production.
There are a lot of cloud-based applications that are supported, such as Box, Skype, Google Drive, and SharePoint, but there are many more than have not been totally integrated. They cannot use in-house apps because they are not generic services. I would like to see support for custom applications. There are also certain storage services that are not integrated, like AWS S3. If the services are created by the customer then it would be very nice to have those protected too. Right now, this is a data at rest CASB, but it would be nice if it included features such as forward proxy or reverse proxy. It would be able to provide the OTP to those gateways and anyone who can integrate with Aperture can send the data to have it authenticated, via Aperture to the cloud, rather than just scanned. Essentially, if it can be made to act as an auth server, to automatically handle the forward proxy CASB, it would be good.