Cortex Cloud by Palo Alto Networks Reviews

We use Prisma Cloud for container security, serverless function security, and our Cloud Security Posture Management.

We realized the benefits of Prisma Cloud almost immediately. It can comprehensively secure the entire cloud-native development lifecycle, from build to deploy and run. It has that capability. We are using it in the build and run space, but we aren't using it for secure code review.

We are more dependent on another product for visibility. Prisma Cloud does not have a natural feel, so we use another tool. About 75 to 80 percent of our workloads are connected to one solution, but Prisma Cloud has limitations. It doesn't have agents for them, so we use other tools or other native security tools to protect them. 

When we started, many false positives and mismatched rules were not properly created. We created a more mature ruleset and now have a manageable set of alerts. It's not that much and has reduced over time.

We use different tools to achieve the same result, and consolidating that helps us save money. It has saved us, but it is a costly product. We are also saving some money on projects where there is competition. It's much cheaper, and they have the same or similar features.

We have standardized vendor process management, so we want to reduce multiple vendors. Prisma Cloud is part of Palo Alto. We use Palo Alto firewalls and other solutions. Prisma has many features that intelligently cover cloud security. One solution can cover runtime for EC2 systems, containers, and Fargate. We also have EKS/Kubernetes integration. So, whatever the cloud-native solution in Pfizer, we can use one solution to secure that.

The Fargate security microservice that's running doesn't support blocking features, which would be helpful. Another issue is the lifecycle. It isn't easy to upgrade if we have a console in Fargate. 

We have used Prisma Cloud for nearly two years.

We have had some issues, but they were mainly due to the environment. It did not crash as much after we set up the environment, but we had to build the system twice because of environmental issues. It took us a long time, but we have a learning curve on these deployments.

Prisma scales well if we're deploying on Kubernetes, but it doesn't scale that great on Fargate.

I had an opportunity to work with technical support and presales. The technical support was good. They are deep into the technology, but the presales staff wasn't up to the mark.

Positive

We have Aqua Security and many open-source tools. Prisma Cloud suits our needs, so it's good. 

The deployment had a steep learning curve, and the support wasn't trained enough to work on the product. They were trying it out in their own lab. It's a new technology, so it takes time.

We deployed via a CICD integration, which took us around two months. We have two deployments: production and our lower environment. It took time because there were dependencies in the infrastructure. It took two to three months to get a stable working solution. I deployed it alone. 

We deployed in Fargate, so high availability and other things were not an issue. The issue was the upgrade process, which requires us to streamline the upgrade process in the target deployment. That requires maintenance. If there is a major upgrade, it requires a lot of planning and everything. 

Prisma Cloud's pricing is a little higher than its competitors. It should come down. 

I rate Prisma Cloud seven out of 10. 

We use it to manage multiple AWS accounts within our platform. Our primary focus is on ensuring compliance across all accounts, aligning with specific standards such as GDPR. We conduct regular certifications of AWS accounts to assess the compliance of services and promptly address any non-compliance issues. In cases where services are found to be non-compliant, we notify the responsible teams and work collaboratively to remediate the identified alerts. In addition to code security, we also use Prisma Cloud to protect our workloads, including serverless functions and containers. This comprehensive approach ensures a robust security posture for our cloud infrastructure and applications.

It serves as a comprehensive solution for both proactive vulnerability management and reactive runtime threat detection.

We manage this tool through a designated management account, handling all configurations within a limited account. At times, we find it necessary to customize scripts, such as when we encounter challenges with integrating Splunk. In this instance, the events are not being formatted as desired. To address this, we aim to create a script and Lambda functions to ensure the events are in the preferred format. It enhances our ability to respond effectively, allowing us to prioritize and focus on resolving any real or potential issues impacting system performance.

It offers security scanning capabilities for multi and hybrid-cloud environments. Currently, we support two clients, each with multiple sub-clients. Within these clients, we manage two DNS instances—one in the US region and the other in the UK region.

The comprehensiveness of the security features in Prisma Cloud is highly commendable. Occasionally, like any product, we encounter issues, and during such instances, we receive prompt and quality support from AWS. The collaborative nature of addressing and resolving issues enhances the overall convenience and effectiveness of using Prisma Cloud for our cloud production environment.

To proactively address cloud security, this tool has been instrumental. We've designed it as an offering for our sales department, enhancing our ability to cater to customer needs. Currently, our focus is primarily on container security, encompassing AWS, GCP, and Azure. This tool effectively identifies and manages vulnerabilities and compliance issues related to containers.

It offers the visibility and control we require, adapting seamlessly to the complexity and distribution of our cloud environment. With the Access Controller system, we can define multiple roles, granting specific access to workload environments, vulnerabilities, and compliance information. Leveraging these features, we efficiently manage access across our teams. This includes utilizing group connections to organize and simplify access, reducing the complexity associated with console and account access in our cloud environment.

It provided a strong confidence in the overall security and compliance posture of our workload.

It has empowered us to seamlessly integrate security into our CI/CD pipeline and align it with existing DevOps processes. Within our Jenkins pipeline, we leverage Checkmarx integration to conduct scans on our code repositories and jobs running through the pipeline. The introduction of numerous features with Prisma Cloud has significantly enhanced our security measures. While we haven't fully explored these features in the US region, as they are still in progress, we look forward to utilizing them once they go live in our pipeline.

It provides clear insights into runtime risks throughout the entire pipeline, presenting issues as they are uncovered during the build phase. This dual functionality includes both fixing and addressing runtime concerns. Within our categorized runtime alerts, we receive numerous notifications, acknowledging that some may be false positives. However, this abundance of alerts serves as a proactive measure to identify and investigate any suspicious activities occurring at runtime. We analyze each alert to determine its relevance and, if necessary, proceed with incident response actions. It ensures that legitimate issues are addressed promptly, while also minimizing the risk of overlooking potential threats.

To minimize runtime alerts, we have the flexibility to create custom rules, allowing us to bypass specific alerts that we are confident are expected and should not appear in our console. This customization is crucial for maintaining a streamlined team environment and ensuring our business operations are not unnecessarily disrupted.

It has significantly reduced the time spent on alert investigations, thanks to its built-in investigate feature. It allows us to efficiently query only the relevant alerts, enabling us to filter based on our release criteria. This streamlined approach has resulted in a notable reduction of about twenty to thirty percent in investigation times.

I find the code security feature in Prisma Cloud particularly valuable. It provides insights into potential vulnerabilities in our code, helping us identify and rectify issues before they can be exploited. Additionally, the emphasis on container security is notable, making it a key focal point within Prisma Cloud.

The security automation capabilities of the solution are quite effective. With numerous automated features, such as investigation acquisition, we can utilize queries to analyze our environment and review past activities. The overall automated functionality is impressive—we no longer need to create templates from scratch, as they are already available. It streamlines our processes, making it a notable and beneficial aspect of the product, particularly when a substantial portion of tasks are automated.

The solution's comprehensiveness in securing cloud-native development throughout the entire lifecycle—from build and deploy to run—is noteworthy. Specifically, we leverage the core security features, integrating them with Checkbox, a tool mandated by Prisma Cloud. The integration facilitates Software Composition Analysis scans and checks for license violations.

The standout feature of this tool is its ability to consolidate all the features we typically access from various sources, including AWS. While AWS and other services may require the use of multiple tools, Prisma Cloud excels by offering a comprehensive solution within a single dashboard. This unified approach addresses all our requirements, making it the most advantageous aspect of this tool.

While the code security feature has undergone recent enhancements, there is room for improvement in terms of its cost module. Presently, the pricing structure poses a challenge in convincing our customers to adopt this tool, especially since code security is a critical area of interest for many.

At times, we find certain features missing. In these instances, we engage with our support team, requesting them to submit feature requests on our behalf. Our clients have expressed a need for scanning application vulnerabilities on Windows servers, a feature currently available only for Linux.

We have been working with it for two years.

It provides excellent stability capabilities. I would rate it nine out of ten.

Scalability is a strong aspect; we have never experienced issues with it. It consistently remains highly available. Our clients are large enterprises.

Support is not just good; it's excellent. I find their assistance highly commendable, and I would rate it nine out of ten.

Positive

We previously relied on RapidFile and another tool for vulnerability detection, including analyzing subscription behavior. However, since adopting Prisma Cloud, with its advanced intelligence and machine learning capabilities, we've experienced a significant improvement. It not only efficiently detects vulnerabilities but also provides deep insights into our environment. This proactive understanding of our environment, including its nature, vulnerabilities, and potential threats, has proven to be a valuable aspect of using Prisma Cloud.

We previously used Qualys, a tool known for its diverse features. While Qualys encompassed various functionalities, including container security, I noticed a discrepancy in the vulnerabilities detected by Prisma compared to Qualys. Although Prisma exhibited robust features, there were instances where certain vulnerabilities highlighted by Qualys were not identified by Prisma.

The initial setup was a straightforward process. The team was efficient, accommodating our requests and providing a trial without any cost. The entire process, from requesting the trial to obtaining our tenant, was completed smoothly within a month.

We have a team of around six people in charge of the deployment process. Maintenance is essential. Occasionally, we observe issues with the UI, usually scheduled during weekends. Notifications are provided about the main areas affected, and the tool is temporarily unavailable during this period. Following the maintenance, the tool resumes normal operation.

I find the pricing to be expensive. I would rate it eight out of ten.

I highly recommend this solution, and I suggest anyone interested in it to explore a trial first. Once they see the benefits, they can proceed with full implementation. It enables you to consolidate everything under one control, making it a definite recommendation from my side. Overall, I would rate it nine out of ten.

We used a couple of modules, mostly WAFs. We use it for detection. 

We use it for our modern infrastructure, mostly run on the cloud. We use it to measure the security of cloud-native infrastructure and to calculate the risk of the applications we use and APIs we interact with. We also use it to meet compliance requirements. We have plenty of use cases for this product.

We really wanted to capture all of the information. To make something in-house would be too much engineering work for us. We don't have to bui;d something from scratch; this allows us to use something that is highly accurate.

We're a fintech company and we deal with a bank. Doing certain tasks manually, like logging every node, server, and container, can take six to nine months. However, if you can automate the process, you achieve the same results in a short time span to help ensure product security.

We were using common CBE for general identities.

I personally used the web application API security, WAF for in-line controls. It helps with implementing an additional layer of security to block the attacks and get alerts on vulnerabilities. I am just focusing on that side.

The support is excellent. They'll call us personally and keep us updated. It's some of the best support I've dealt with.

It's great for protecting the full cloud-native stack. Being a security engineer, I have the visibility of the solution on the infrastructure. The tool is doing a good job of automating this process and making it less time-consuming for me. I don't need to handle as many manual tasks.

There are various cloud configurations that can help you gain insights. If a threat is on the portal, it will give you insight into the cloud infrastructure to help you improve the configuration to make it more secure. In terms of threat detection, you can see different kinds of payloads coming to the API. It helps you consider fixes, like adding more validation.

It is very easy for us to generate reports and download the findings while working with the team to resolve issues.

It's good for build, deploy, and run, however, we still need to figure out how to better integrate it. We're still in the early stages of exploring this for CI/CD. 

The solution does provide the visibility and control we need regardless of how complex or distributed your cloud environment becomes. When we were using our core infrastructure previously, we didn't have the visibility, for example, on which APIs we had or were using. Now, there's a better understanding. It's helped us become more confident in our security and compliance posture. If someone comes tomorrow to audit, we can do a fast report and we can pass that over to show to compliance. It would show the risk factors and what we are monitoring. It's the first thing we would go to during an audit, to provide transparency. 

The solution provides a single tool to protect all of our cloud resources and applications without having to manage and reconcile disparate security and compliance details. It's mandatory to have a tool like this to run a fintech in India as we need to have an audit trail in order to be able to submit reports. Operationally, it's helping us stay compliant. 

We are able to enable alerts. We are using it more manually. We can see alerts on Slack. We can configure alerts as we like.

The UI is good, however, they could improve the experience. The animations on the dashboard could be better. They may already be working on an update to improve this.

We'd like to understand better how to automate between the pipeline and CI/CD. There's a bridge needed between DevOps and security. We need to understand the alerts. There seems to be a gap in DevOps that we need to reconcile. 

I've been using the solution for more than six months. 

While running the solution, we have no issues at all. 

We have Prisma installed on Google Cloud, across multiple accounts and environments. We also have data recovery in another region. I'm not sure if that is covered by Prisma. 

It's scalable. It's not difficult. In fact, it's easy. You just need to add agents to the nodes you want. 

Technical support is great. There are two teams. One is always available. Another is creating tickets and looking into issues. Both are quite good. They are eager to support the customer. 

Positive

We were using another product previously. It was called Lacework. The virtual business aspect was a reason we switched. We also wanted to have more functionality and more insight and control into APIs. The visibility was also better with Prisma. 

The deployment was handled by the DevOps team, not the security team, which is the team I am a part of. There was a requirement to install it on every node of the infrastructure. However, my understanding is it did not take too much time. My understanding is that it was easy to install and it was done within 30 minutes to an hour. It was deployed in a very short amount of time. One person was able to deploy it; we didn't need a team. 

There may be some maintenance required. 

I'm not sure of the licensing terms or the exact pricing. 

We did evaluate multiple tools. We knew what we needed the tools to do and we were comparing them all together. We realized that Prisma did a better job and decided to go with them. 

I am a customer and end-user. 

I'm not sure if the product is useful in a multi-cloud environment. I hope it is. We just have the one cloud environment we use it in. That said, we are using it in multiple staging environments. 

We have not enabled the Code Security module. We still need to integrate in that sense with Prisma. We did do the integration with cloud infrastructure. 

For any product you choose, it's good to consider security. I'd recommend Prisma as it offers good security. 

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. There isn't really anything missing in the product. However, there's always scope for improvement. 

I was working with a partner of Palo Alto Networks until around two months ago. I mainly worked with Prisma Cloud in the delivery line of products for projects for clients. For example, we deployed the tool for lifecycle protection for a client in Colombia.

I worked with Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM), cloud workload protection, and the new data security module. About two years ago, for a banking client, we inserted the cloud-native firewall into Prisma Cloud.

Prisma Cloud supports the five major CSPs or Cloud Service Providers. Specifically, in the runtime protection mode, you can protect any workload. They are changing their approach from resource-based to application-based. Prisma Cloud now has the intelligence to understand the context and the relationship between resources and groups. 

I worked with the automation model, specifically on the features of app security, to prevent any issues from being deployed via infrastructure as code into the cloud environments. The auto-remediation feature enabled the developers to remediate issues directly in their visual editor with one click. Prisma Cloud is a good tool because it covers the software lifecycle. For example, you can use Prisma Cloud from your visual editor, such as VS Code or IntelliJ from IDEA. You can use auto-remediation to prevent any issue from being deployed into the cloud. It also provides run-time protection for all workloads. Prisma Cloud has a lot of features and modules. Its licensing model allows you to have more at less cost.

The integration with the entire lifecycle is the biggest benefit. You can use the tool to automate an internal process using the Prisma API. You can use all the data information to make business and technical decisions. It takes some time to realize its benefits. When we deploy the solution for a client, we have to wait about three to six months for it to mature to be able to make useful data database decisions.

Prisma Cloud has a lot of features. It can secure the entire cloud-native development lifecycle, across build, deploy, and run. At every step or phase, you can have specific controls to avoid the deployment of anything that can cause issues.

Prisma Cloud can reduce the risk and run-time alerts if you put the correct control at the correct stage. For one client, there was about a 30% reduction, and for another one, there was about a 50% reduction. Prisma Cloud gave us a table with the high-impact vulnerabilities. By closing one of them, we could reduce about 100 alerts.

It provides some reports, but with API access, you can get all the data to build your own reports or dashboards. The default reports and dashboards are good, but if you need some customized reports or dashboards, you can do that with the API.

The most valuable feature of Prisma Cloud for our clients is CSPM, as it helps clients gain visibility into all the assets with their cloud providers.

Additionally, runtime protection is valuable for protecting runtime environments.

The RQL feature helps to do some queries in the cloud environments.

The data security model needs improvement due to integration issues with certain features and cloud providers. With Palo Alto now utilizing a tool from an Israeli startup in Prisma Cloud, the integration is slow, and some features are blocked or not supported.

In the beginning, with large-scale projects, the platform was down twice, but once the issues were identified, Palo Alto applied the correct solutions to ensure high availability and scalability.

The scalability of Prisma Cloud is good, covering both the front end and the back end. The entire solution is well scalable.

Customer service is good in general. There are three levels of support. I have interacted with levels one and two, where initial contact is made and detailed information is gathered. They can respond with technical documentation or pass on the case to the next level because it requires the development of a new feature or changing a feature due to a bug.

Positive

I have not used any alternative solutions such as Check Point, CrowdStrike, or Aqua Security. 

I worked primarily with SaaS adoption and was in charge of the deployment as part of the delivery team.

The initial setup is straightforward and does not require extensive deployment efforts, except for configuring the solution and deploying agents if necessary.

The maintenance is done directly by Palo Alto. Palo Alto is in charge of deploying new releases and updating the main components. Everything is informed to the client through the status page maintained by Palo Alto.

The pricing for Prisma Cloud is high. Providing a pay-as-you-go model or pricing options tailored for medium and small enterprises could help attract more clients.

In my last job, we compared Prisma Cloud to other tools, and it was ahead of the competition.

For new users, it is important to understand the specific objectives and needs to ensure a successful implementation of the solution. They should also focus on using the data to make data-driven decisions.

I would rate Prisma Cloud a ten out of ten.

We use Prisma Cloud for cloud security management. We use the CSPM and compute modules.

Prisma Cloud provides security spanning multi and hybrid cloud environments, which is moderately essential to our organization.

The security automation capabilities help remediate vulnerabilities, which correlate to cost savings.

After a few months, the benefits of Prisma Cloud became apparent. We have begun integrating the Prisma Cloud alert or inventory module into the computing environment. This is a positive development as it enhances tool interoperability and consolidates a significant amount of previously inaccessible data.

Prisma Cloud can secure 60 to 70 percent of the entire Cloud-native development life cycle.

Prisma Cloud provides the visibility and control we need regardless of how complex or distributed our cloud environment becomes. This improves our compliance posture.

Prisma Cloud provides 70 percent of coverage in a single tool to protect our cloud resources and applications.

It has helped save our organization around 20 percent, protecting our cloud resources and applications.

Prisma Cloud compliance monitoring helps us improve our overall compliance posture.

Prisma Cloud's most valuable features are its ability to detect vulnerabilities as they occur and its CSPM function, which provides a complete inventory of assets.

I like the scanning features provided by Prisma Cloud, including the image scan and source scan.

Prisma Cloud needs to improve its reporting. If they report a Go vulnerability and claim that Prisma Defender hasn't released a patch, it won't help us. However, if they report that Prisma Defender has released a patch, that is beneficial. Reporting the Go vulnerability within Defender is ineffective because I cannot directly fix a Go vulnerability.

The integration with other tools can be improved. It provides all the cloud details but is not entirely linked to the compute model.

There needs to be more transparent communication when they will have downtime.

I have been using Prisma Cloud for over two years.

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

I would rate the scalability of Prisma Cloud five out of ten because it is dependent on vendor resources rather than its own. For example, image scanning is entirely reliant on us.

The technical team requires a lot of information for every ticket we submit, and if there is ever an out-of-the-box issue, they don't respond to us or take a long time to respond.

Neutral

I previously used AWS tools and Tenable products, but we switched to Prisma Cloud because of its real-time vulnerability identification.

Initial deployment is straightforward and takes one to two hours when all required information is available. However, if complete requirements are missing, manual deployment of all agents is necessary, which is a significantly time-consuming process.

Prisma Cloud is affordable.

I would rate Prisma Cloud eight out of ten.

We have over 100 users.

Our environment is complex. Prisma Cloud is deployed across multiple locations using many tools.

Prisma Cloud requires a lot of maintenance for upgrades and Defender.

I would recommend Prisma Cloud to others. The scanning and runtime are one step ahead of the competition.

We are using the solution to manage vulnerabilities in containers. We use it to detect vulnerabilities and remediate vulnerabilities found in containers running in the public cloud, like AWS.

We are using the latest version.

It helps us in detecting our vulnerabilities and protecting our security posture. It also provides automated remedies. We don't see this as a preventative measure, but it helps us in timely detection and remediation of our problems. This means we will not be exploited and made vulnerable to bad actors.

Prisma Cloud provides the visibility and control that we need, regardless of how complex or distributed our cloud environments become, which is very nice. We have an extremely distributed system. Prisma Cloud provides good visibility across the distribution of our system. This definitely adds to our confidence. At any single point of time, we can see our entire cloud posture across our environment, which definitely helps and gives us more confidence to use this product.

It has definitely worked. It has improved the overall collaboration between SecOps and DevOps. Now, instead of asking people to do something, it is a default offering in the CI/CD. There is less manual intervention and more seamless integration. It is why we don't have many dependencies across many teams, which is definitely a better state. 

We have only used two of its features: vulnerability scanning and compliance. We found that the vulnerability scanning has been the most useful feature so far. It has good detection capabilities that we have been able to integrate with our CI/CD pipeline.

The solution provides the following in a single pane of glass: Cloud Workload Protection and Cloud Network Security. These are very important features because they represent some of the basic security requirements that we have to harden our infrastructure. These are non-negotiable requirements. They form some of the basic building blocks for our entire security infrastructure, which is why they are required.

Areas like the deployment of their defenders and their central control need manual intervention. They should focus more on automation. They have a very generic case for small companies. However, for bigger companies to work, we have to do a lot of changes to our system to accommodate it. Therefore, they should change their system or deployment models so it can be easy to integrate into existing architectures.

Prisma Cloud has enabled us to integrate security into our CI/CD pipeline and add touchpoints into existing DevOps processes. It is not 100 percent seamless since we still need to do some manual interventions. Because the way that we have designed our CI/CD for Prisma Cloud, the integration was neither smooth nor was it 100 percent seamless.

I have been using it for a year.

We had some initial hiccups. Wherein, if the number of defenders increased beyond a point, we started seeing some scalable alerts and concerns. Over time they fixed it, and it is better now.

It is scalable only to a particular number. Up to 10,000 defenders connecting to the console for small- to medium-sized companies is the perfect fit.

Prisma Cloud provides security spanning multi- and hybrid-cloud environments. This is very important because we want our solutions to scale with us. We should be able to operate in all public clouds.

We have plans to increase usage. We will be using it extensively.

The service was okay. It was an average experience. I would rate them as seven out of 10.

They respond to our needs on time. Technically, they are sound. 

Neutral

We didn't use another solution previously.

We wanted a non-SaaS, in-house solution.

The initial setup was a bit challenging, but that is typical with any big company. It took some discussions and collaborations to get them at par to onboard us.

The deployment took three to four months.

We followed our standard CI/CD process. Defenders were deployed into the cloud through our public cloud deployment channels using CI/CD. In order to accommodate their containers, we had to make some changes

Our management is happy, so I think that they are happy with what they are paying for it.

Prisma Cloud provides risk clarity across the entire pipeline, showing issues as they are resolved. It has expedited our operations, which are definitely better. We have been able to detect things faster and remedy them faster. 

Investigation time has definitely shortened because we now know things immediately. It has generally increased the detection and alerting time.

We also evaluated Aqua Security.

Focus on operationalizing the service. Don't just keep focusing on features, but also how you will deploy the solution and how it will be part of your entire CI/CD pipeline, then how will you manage all the features and the long-term running of this service. This is where you should start your focus. You can only use the features if you are doing a seamless integration, so focus your requirements on running, maintaining, and continuous use of it.

The comprehensiveness of the solution is good for securing the entire cloud-native development lifecycle, across build, deploy, and run. There is room for improvement, but it is better than other solutions. It is somewhere between seven to eight out of 10, in terms of its comprehensiveness. It doesn't affect our operations that much because we have some long-term goals and we are hoping that this solution will also deliver in that time. For the long term future, we made some changes to our design to accommodate these things.

I would rate the solution as eight out of 10.

We have a console set up in Prisma that scans all the cloud environments and collects data about platform, infrastructure, and app vulnerabilities.

We are responsible for app vulnerabilities, and 90 percent of the vulnerabilities were detected by other products before Prisma scans. Other scanners also do some of the same things. Prisma's ability to consolidate and identify the uniqueness of the vulnerability is a huge help. Based on the different scans, we can determine duplicate vulnerabilities.

Prisma provides visibility regardless of how complex or distributed my cloud environment becomes. It adds value, especially from the infrastructure and platform side. From an application perspective, there were many other challenges.

I wouldn't say we can protect everything with Prisma. It identifies the issue but doesn't resolve it. Protection is something else that we have to do in the cloud environment. 

We use Prisma to scan for vulnerabilities and place them in a centralized repository where they are assigned a severity. Based on that severity, App Runner will get time to fix it after something is already in production. 

One feature we like is the amount of data Prisma gives us. Some infrastructure and platform vulnerabilities in the cloud are hard to detect, and we were unaware of some of these. It's critical to shed light on these. For example, you create virtual machines and forget about them, but when you revisit them, some vulnerabilities may be detected. 

Prisma allows us to adopt a preventative approach. We can scan some containers before they go into cloud production. The only caveat is identifying the cloud environment in a production or non-production environment.

Prisma could improve the data quality. One challenge is that when an application is deployed on multiple virtual machines, we get an alert for each machine, but the biggest challenge is container flapping. When containers go up and down, we get 100 alerts on one day, but it reports 20 the next day. The numbers keep changing, and the app owners tell us, "You reported a hundred vulnerabilities from my app, and today, you report 20. I haven't made any changes in production, is your data correct or not?"

 Containers can go up and down, so it can't tell whether the container is down for good or if it was only down at the time of the scan. That's one of the biggest issues we had. The second is data deduplication because we get vulnerabilities from multiple sources through Prisma scans. A vulnerability is reported by Prisma scan and software composition analysis, SAS, DAST, or BLAST scans. You've got all these different scans reporting the same vulnerability. 

We have used Prisma Cloud for a year and a half.

Often, we don't get the data for a particular console because it's down. While we're working to fix the issue, we get the previous data and all the other stuff.

At my company, we have many resources, and I haven't had any issues with vulnerability. Prisma can scale vertically or horizontally very well.

I can't say whether Prisma has saved us money because that's not the goal. The objective of Prisma is to identify incidents inside the company. Reputation and data security are the two most important things to a financial institution. We spend money to prevent improper data usage or vulnerability exploitation. I don't know whether it can save money, but it protects our data.

I rate Prisma Cloud seven out of 10. It does do a lot of things, but the data reliability and other issues make our lives more difficult. It presents more challenges than just getting the data and porting over.

I work with various modules, including CSCM, CWP, Code Security, and NS.

We use the solution for day-to-day activities, from onboarding accounts to deploying Defender to creating rules to monitoring incidents. It's used for alerts and monitoring of what happens on the workloads. 

Our customers use the solution to try to meet their compliance standards, and for audit purposes. It helps create policies. SmartCloud itself has around 2,000 policies. It can cover compliance standards around banking, for example, around workloads and data. It helps align with governing bodies' compliance standards. We can create custom policies and anyone can create workloads.

There are many modules that have various capabilities. We can look at the misconfiguration of cloud resources, for example. They can help with compliance as well. We get notified and get data alerts and this is automated. However, we can manage items manually as well. 

It's good for monitoring your environment for AWS.

For visibility, we can create one service account.

Regarding the assets, regarding the alerts, we get all the data. It's great for our cloud security posture and management.

It's cloud-native and is used in major cloud environments. With it, we can monitor clouds like AWS, DPP, Azure, Alibaba, and Oracle. This is important. Many customers work with various key cloud providers. They often have their resources across different cloud providers and all resources must be protected and monitored. With this product, we can monitor all the things even if they are on different clouds - and it can be done on one platform. 

The most valuable aspect of the solution is the computing part.

Prisma Cloud makes it easy to host virtual machines and cluster environments like container Kubernetes. It does this while providing a single dashboard, from which we can monitor all of the workloads and perform vulnerability scanning.

It's very good at helping us take a preventative approach to security. Many bans are using it as a cloud security tool based on the level of prevention they offer. 

It supports the multi-cloud environment beautifully. If there is any kind of anomaly, it helps alert you to it. If there are malware or brute force attack attempts, it will report that. We can both monitor and audit the system. They have their own out-of-the-box configurations or we can customize them to create our own monitoring and auditing policies. 

The solution provides us with data sessions to help gain visibility of workloads in various regions. For example, if there is a workload created just in the US region, we can see that. It will give an overview also. It supports all kinds of workloads, from host protection to Kubernetes and container environments. It even provides support for the Oracle Kubernetes environment.

It ensures that nothing impacts operations. It will block vulnerabilities or implement fixes. 

The solution provides the visibility and control you need regardless of how complex or distributed your cloud environments become. It's very easy to see the entire security posture from every angle - region, data, compliance, et cetera.

We can integrate it into our CI/CD pipelines into existing DevOps processes. We can integrate via APIs or code. When a developer is in the code and integrating, if there's a vulnerability present, or a misconfiguration, it will scan and provide data. With Terraform templates, we can create a lot of instances. With one Terraform code, we can create hundreds of instances. 

The solution helps developers go to very specific locations, to exact areas, at which point they can perform fixes. 

Overall, it provides us with a single tool to protect all of our cloud resources and applications. It's got the best features for web applications and ETL security.  By enabling data, we can monitor whatever is deployed on the cluster or on the IT environment. It provides risk clarity across the entire pipeline. For example, the vulnerability explorer gives you a view of the top critical vulnerabilities. That way, developers can see what the priorities are for what needs fixing. 

It reduces runtime alerts. They provide us with a runtime alert console. It's also reduced alert investigation time. By clicking right on the investigation, we get all the data, including the source IP and any kind of suspicious detail in the workload. We can quickly go ahead and block IP as necessary.

We're able to directly integrate alerting to tools like QRadar.

The solution has helped our customers save money. They don't have to go ahead and hire individual experts for different areas like AWS and Azure. Having everything separate can be hectic and expensive. This is centralized. YOu don't need different teams. With its user-friendly interface, you only need one or two resources to monitor the whole cloud environment.  

Prisma Cloud introduced some new permissions so we have to go and manually add that permission. It is a little bit hectic. If someone onboards single accounts they have to go through each account in that IIM role, and they have to manually add that permission. It's a manual job that takes time. It would be ideal if there was some sort of automation involved.

In scanning, it does not provide runtime protection. 

The licensing could be better. You need to deploy an agent and it would be more convenient if it was agentless, which should be possible. With agents, you are consuming the same amount of credit, yet it does not provide the same amount of features. The automation needs to be improved and included in terms of AWS onboarding. For Azure, it's good, however, with AWS it requires manual intervention. 

Sometimes we do get false alerts. That should be improved. 

I've used the solution for around one year.

The solution is stable. There is occasionally some downtime.

The solution has been scalable. 

Technical support is strong. They have different levels of support, critical, high, medium, and low. For issues rated as a high priority, they provide assistance within one to two hours. Lower priorities may take 24 hours. 

Positive

I did work with a different product previously. Often, other solutions do not have as much visibility. AWS native services, for example, are not able to monitor the workload or data of Azure. You'd need another product for that. Similarly, Defender will only monitor an Azure environment. I have not worked with something that moved across clouds like this solution does. 

I've helped deploy the solution for five to six clients. 

In the early stages, it's a bit complex to set up due to the fact that it's new and we need to train. We need to give users a session and a POC or demo. So the complexity comes from the training and onboarding, not necessarily from the product itself.

Typically, we can deploy it in one week, and deploying it to any cloud environment would take one to two hours. After onboarding the new cloud environment, we need to create rules and integrate the ticketing tool. That might take two weeks also. There's a dependency with the cloud team in that sense, since, if you are going to integrate anything you need to schedule a call. If Defender is included, we need to deploy it manually. We'd also decide what is being automated. 

The solution does require some maintenance. On the portal, it would show whenever some maintenance is needed or if they are updating their versions. There may be maintenance downtime. The maintenance is provided by Palo Alto itself. We'd notify the customer if they need to be prepared for some downtime. 

Customers have witnessed a good ROI based on the ability to create and customize multiple policies. It helps them meet compliance and auditing requirements. 

I don't know the exact cost; that's handled by another team. However, my understanding is that the cost is based on consumption. 

It takes a little bit of time to create time to value for the solution. A new customer might not have any idea of a cloud's capability. Some people need training and this might be on a quarterly or monthly basis to get the customer up to speed. Once they are more knowledgeable about the solution, they can utilize its capabilities more fully.

I'd recommend the solution. It's comprehensive for securing the entire cloud-native development life cycle across the build, deploy, and run. It not only provides security protection in the runtime environment - it also covers CI/CD. We can integrate Azure DevOps or any kind of solution like Jenkins. 

For new customers, I'd recommend they take on a demo or POC. They can get a one-month license and try it out. Customers can coordinate with partners and see how it would work in their environment. If a customer has a multi-cloud environment, this is a good choice. 

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.