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Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks vs VMware Aria Automation comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 8, 2024
 

Categories and Ranking

Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto N...
Ranking in Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
108
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (5th), Container Security (1st), Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) (1st), Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP) (1st), Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) (1st)
VMware Aria Automation
Ranking in Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)
17th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
169
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Management (1st), Configuration Management (7th), Network Automation (3rd), Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) (5th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of December 2024, in the Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) category, the mindshare of Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks is 19.5%, down from 21.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Aria Automation is 0.3%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)
 

Featured Reviews

Mohammad Qaw - PeerSpot reviewer
It gives you one console to see all of your assets, review their configurations, and build your processes
Most customers use Prisma Cloud for visibility and compliance. Prisma has so many features, but many organizations do not use them. They primarily use the visibility part to connect all their cloud accounts and hosts for visibility to see if they are missing any security controls or if they have any misconfigurations. You can connect it to cloud environments such as Azure, AWS, Oracle Cloud, Alibaba, etc., or to an on-prem data center. Prisma Cloud gives you so many options to automate processes related to your daily operations. When it comes to cybersecurity, you can automate things with their existing APIs. They also have out-of-the-box integrations with many solutions. I have not seen any limitations. Everything is customizable. You can do whatever you want, defining the reporting and custom use cases. They recently updated the UI, so it's much better than before.
NiteshKumar1 - PeerSpot reviewer
Good stability, supports a hybrid model and easy to use
There is an area of improvement. For example, you are migrating from a customer's existing data center to a new target data center. To facilitate this transition, you'll initially need to evaluate the customer's aging hardware hosting VMware, which is nearing the end of its operational life. The customer expresses the intention to upgrade to a newer version, necessitating an overhaul of everything in the new data center. As a Systems Integrator (SI), consultant, or architect, your recommendation would be to acquire the latest hardware with a specified configuration and then install VMware on top of it. However, there's a crucial aspect related to the infrastructure requirements for VMware to run seamlessly on that hardware. If there's an opportunity to potentially reduce these infrastructure prerequisites, it would be highly beneficial. This is because a higher number of VMware licenses requires more infrastructure capacity from Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) or Colocation partners. Consequently, when discussing the operation of this virtualized environment from VMware over a contractual period of five years, the overall cost to the customer is influenced by the infrastructure requirements. If there's a feasible way to decrease these prerequisites for the infrastructure supporting the virtualization layer, it would be advantageous in terms of cost for the customer. Any customer in today's world exists or wants to exist in a hybrid model, so in future releases, we would like to see this. So, going forward, if this virtualized environment would exist, it has to be a combination of on-premise plus public cloud Azure/AWS. It should be more seamless when your interface or when you are interacting with workloads running on-premise VMware/AWS VMware. So it is only there in some capacity and space, and I'm aware of it. And Azure and VMware already have a tie-up on the same lines, but at the same time, if it is more seamless, if it is more interchangeable, if you could move your workloads, or if you can access your workloads or your virtual machines irrespective of whatever platform it is running, whether it is on-premises, or cloud or public cloud, it'll be a lot more comfortable for a user than the user to consume that infrastructure. Firstly, it needs to have a combination of deployment and be more seamless for the customers. Secondly, more software-defined features, more in terms of managing the infrastructure pool in a software-defined way. Managing the infrastructure pool in a more optimized fashion is going to be the key in the upcoming times. It's not just on-premise, but at the same time, it should also be the public cloud as well. Probably because when I meet my customers, this is one thing that I always tell them. I have seen people moving from on-premise public cloud only to realize at the end of the month that they end up paying a higher bill compared to what they were paying when they were running their business on-premise. The reason is that they do not understand or do not realize the full potential of the public cloud, and the way it should be consumed, the way it should be used, and the way it should be scheduled to ensure that the billing at the end of the month is very optimal. You pay for what exactly you need, not everything that you have from the cloud. That's not a way to use the cloud, whether it is on-premise or from the cloud. For example, an enterprise has over 100 applications. Out of that 100 applications, only 25 applications are running the production instances, and the remaining 75 are running non-production instances. It can be a development environment, a test environment, a sandbox, etc. In this case, you need to run only the 25 applications on the public cloud 24/7. You do not need to run your remaining 75 applications 24/7. Because, eventually, your developers, testers, quality managers, and whoever will use the non-production environment only when they're in the office and working on those applications. Then why do we need to have those applications, which are non-production in nature, lower environments? So we're running on the public cloud all the time because, for a cloud provider, it is a virtual machine; whether you are consuming it for production work or non-production work, it is going to charge you the same bill. And if you are not optimizing, if you're not scheduling workloads, you are actually wasting money. You're wasting your money, and your bills, which you are going to pay with the public cloud provider provided, are going to be bad. It's going to be crazy. And then customers do not know what to do in this situation. And you cannot fight with the public cloud provider because they would say, "I had given you all the possibilities, all the opportunities to learn about it, the way you should be functioning it, the way you should be utilizing it. If you are not using it the way it should be used, That's not my problem."

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"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."
"Prisma Cloud offers robust runtime scanning capabilities, which is beneficial for security teams."
"It supports the multi-cloud environment beautifully."
"I've been really pleasantly surprised with how Prisma Cloud is, over time, covering more and more of the topics I care about, and listening to customer feedback and growing the product in the right directions."
"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."
"It has helped us understand the dynamic topology of our containers, and manage security through the application of policies that our pipelines apply straight from Git."
"Cloud security posture management is the preferred feature among other vendors."
"I find the CSPM area to be a more valuable and flexible feature."
"Even with the virtualization, it would take us at least three or four days to create a VM. With vRA we have brought that down to seven minutes. The solution has helped increase infrastructure, agility, speed of provisioning, time to market, application agility. Everything got super fast."
"The most valuable features are the metrics and reporting aspects. The historical data and extraction enable us to tell where the trends are and where contentions may exist in the future."
"I like its capacity, the self-service portal, and operational automation. The most beneficial feature is that it saves time when creating new virtual machines, deploying security measures, and writing infrastructure code, making things easier and faster. We have a standard we follow, reducing the time spent repeatedly rewriting everything."
"vRA helps automate deployment for developers. We do a lot of orchestration or customization within our environment so it will suit each of our customers. So, we have different business units who have their own templates."
"We had a lot of config drift before, and this really helps us keep it on track. Speed to provision is probably our biggest, significant gain."
"The setup was complex in many ways. The first reason is that we have many teams who work on it so it gets complicated gathering all of the people. The second reason is that it can be complicated to install it quickly, within a reasonable amount of time."
"I want to build automation that is intelligent, part of the fabric of our environment, and is somewhat self-sustaining. I think SaltStack can help me do this."
"It allows some of the tenants to self-provision their machines, so they don't have to wait for us to create the machine for them."
 

Cons

"One of the requests is that Prisma Defender for the ECS solution is only supported for Linux. It does not support Windows."
"It's not really on par with, or catering to, what other products are looking at in terms of SAST and DAST capabilities. For those, you'd probably go to the market and look at something like Veracode or WhiteHat."
"It would be ideal if they could somehow reduce the deployment time."
"Sometimes, on the Azure side, there are issues. Some errors aren't being found on Prisma Cloud."
"When it comes to compliance, the issue is that when we are exporting the reports, there is only a single compliance option. If I need to report on multiple compliance requirements, that feature isn't available. For example, I made a single report for ISO 27000 but I can't correlate it with GDPR."
"I would like Prisma Cloud to improve its mapping feature to increase usability."
"We would like to have the detections be more contemporaneous. For example, we've seen detections of an overprivileged user or whatever it might be in any of the hundreds of Prisma policies, where there are 50 minutes of latency between the event and the alert."
"Prisma Cloud's enterprise reporting needs significant improvement."
"One of the features that's a struggle today is some of the public cloud extensibility. Some of the plugins that are native to vRA and vRO, I'd like to see them come out earlier for vRO. I understand that in vRA, the plugins are a little bit more polished because the VRA is the GUI. But we'd like to see them released earlier in vRO, prior to a GUI being released. Azure, for example, is a public cloud provider but we have some instability issues with the plugin in vRO. It's okay for us if we separate the vRA from vRO plugin releases. So I'd like to see some increased stability in some of those public cloud plugins."
"It does go down from time to time. We have some issues with the appliances sometimes and we have to do reboots in the middle of the day. That affects the ability for them to deploy."
"It is too broad scale and complicated. It takes too many clicks to do things."
"This solution could be integrated with more hardware for an improved offering."
"In terms of usability, It has had its challenges. It requires a lot of custom code to integrate into our environment. It can take a little while to get it to do what we want, takes some code instead of having built-in functionality. Part it is how we use it. It would be a lot easier to use in a greenfield scenario versus brownfield, which is the way we using it."
"It has some limitations for scalability, especially for remote data center management. For some components, everything need to be centralized."
"Technical support could be improved. I definitely feel that the product is accelerating faster than the support engineers are able to keep up with the knowledge needed to know what's going on. The developers maintaining vRealize Automation are doing a great job improving it, but VMware is not doing a great job of training the people who we call to get support for it."
"Upgrades are always a pain."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing and licensing are expensive compared to the other offerings that we considered."
"Prisma Cloud is more expensive than some other solutions, but when we consider all of its use cases, the cost averages out."
"The cost was not on the higher side. Overall, the cost gets recovered with its implementation."
"Prisma Cloud is remarkably expensive."
"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."
"Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks is a highly expensive solution."
"The pricing is competitive. From what I have seen in the past, it is on par with the others."
"I find the pricing to be expensive."
"SaltStack is an open-source product."
"I'm very interested in the integration with Puppet. However, my organization doesn't have the funding for something like Puppet right now. If VMware would integrate that feature set (Puppet) into vRA. That would be very awesome."
"So much can be done with the Open Source side, and especially for smaller shops. I personally think the pricing for Enterprise is hard to justify."
"The tool is expensive since it is an enterprise product."
"Better pricing is always handy, but I feel it's at the right price point."
"The pricing for this solution is roughly 20% lower than the competitive products in the market."
"As far as value is concerned, it has been essential to our environment. We have been able to deploy VMs quickly and the developers have their own sandbox, so they can spin up and destroy VMs at their own will."
"We do plan to see ROI with any new implementation of new technologies being implemented within our environment."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
17%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What is your primary use case for Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks ?
Prisma Cloud helps support DevSecOps methodologies, making those responsibilities easier to manage.
What Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform do you recommend?
We like Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks, since it offers us incredible visibility into our entire cloud system. We are able to easily see where our container vulnerabilities lie and and where cl...
What do you think of Aqua Security vs Prisma Cloud?
Aqua Security is easy to use and very manageable. Its main focus is on Kubernetes and Docker. Security is a very valuable feature and their speed of integration is very good. The initial setup was ...
What's the difference between VMware vRA (automation) and vROps (operations)?
vROP is a virtualization management solution from VMWare. It is efficient and easy to manage. You can find anything you need from the software interface. It provides complete visibility over applic...
Is there any way to try VMware Aria Automation for free?
When it comes to VMware Aria Automation, you have three choices for free runs: Hands-on Lab (HOL) Advanced lab A free trial I cannot describe in detail the second and third options as my company ...
Which sectors can benefit the most from VMware Aria Automation?
I was looking at VMware Aria Automation case studies recently and I got the impression that three main kinds of companies were using it most often: Social organizations Financial institutions and ...
 

Also Known As

Palo Alto Networks Prisma Cloud, Prisma Public Cloud, RedLock Cloud 360, RedLock, Twistlock, Aporeto
VMware vRealize Automation, vRA, VMware DynamicOps Cloud Suite, SaltStack
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Amgen, Genpact, Western Asset, Zipongo, Proofpoint, NerdWallet, Axfood, 21st Century Fox, Veeva Systems, Reinsurance Group of America
Rent-a-Center, Amway, Vistra Energy, Liberty Mutual
Find out what your peers are saying about Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks vs. VMware Aria Automation and other solutions. Updated: December 2024.
824,053 professionals have used our research since 2012.