Prisma Access by Palo Alto Networks Reviews

We use Prisma Compute for container monitoring and Prisma Cloud for cloud monitoring. Compute looks at workload security, and we use it for container security, build security, and assessments. Cloud looks at our AWS account and gives us input on any security issues with our AWS workload.

We now know if there's any vulnerabilities during runtime, which is not something we had before. We didn't used to have visibility into our cloud infrastructure or our container space once the containers were running but we do have that visibility now. We also have visibility into how the different pieces of our solution talk to each other, so we know which services talk to each other, and then we are able to pick up anomalies. For example, when service A is talking to service B and there's no reason why they should be talking to each other. That's been a real help.

The solution is pretty comprehensive across all three tenets of build, run, and software. This has improved our operations because, for example, at build time if there is an inability within dependencies or within the Docker images we're going to use, we are able to stop, build, and remediate at that point. Within our registries where we keep our containers, we are still able to look back and see how vulnerabilities were corrected over time. Sometimes you build images in a repository, so a vulnerability might get discovered on the internet and it's good to know whether you're still safe before you run your images. Also, once you are running, it's helpful to know that you are still running secure environments.

A feature I've found very helpful is run time security because most of the products on the market will look at security during the build time, and they don't really look at what happens once you're going into production. 

It's a perfect solution for protecting the full stack native cloud. There's been a lot of development over time, so it's gotten better during the time we've been using it. 

The solution provides visibility and it's pretty simple to use. The dashboard is very intuitive. The solution makes it easy because we can look at one screen and see vulnerabilities across the infrastructure.

There is room for improvement in the multi-environment visibility, especially around containers. The product easily gets confused if you have, for example, similar Docker images that are running in different environments. It does not have a way of isolating that even though it's the same image, it's running in a different environment. It just consolidates that reporting and makes it difficult to figure out how far your plus range is.

I don't think the solution has a preventative approach. I think most of it is really more fighting. I guess you could use what it finds to predict what might happen in the future, but I haven't seen any features that are preventative.

I've been using this solution for three years now. 

The solution is very stable. I think in the last year we've done around four upgrades and it's never missed a beat, even through those.

The solution scales quite easily. We've thrown a lot at it and it's still standing. Everything that we run goes through Prisma. 

I think the support has a lot to improve on. Sometimes it's very difficult to get context around tickets, especially if they get keep on getting switched around, and then there are many issues. Not issues per se, but there are times when you need help and the person who is running the ticket is not able to service your ticket and then they have to push it on to engineering and that takes forever. I would rate the customer service as a five out of ten. 

Neutral

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. The product has very good documentation that is very easy to follow. Deployment took about a day. Rolling it out took longer, but that was because of internal challenges, not the product itself. 

We handled it all in-house. I actually did the deployment myself, and it went good. We used Terraform for deploying, and ran it in ECS, in our container environment. Our services are all running in AWS ECS, so we used their ECS module to plug our content environments into Prisma, and then we used their standalone agent for the rest of our systems that are not running container services.

We have seen an ROI because now it takes less time to identify vulnerabilities and fix them. When vulnerabilities are detected, the responsible teams are notified immediately, as opposed to having security go around once a week.

The pricing is very friendly and that's the reason why we renewed this solution. It was really just based on pricing, and the licensing is also pretty understandable. It's not confusing to figure out your workload and how much you'd be paying for the solution. 

We chose a mixed infrastructure where we have a bit on-prem and then also a direct cloud version. If you're running it on-prem, you have to meet infrastructure costs for the solution to run on your server in addition to standard licensing costs.

Before we did our last renewal we looked at a couple of other products. We chose to renew because of the pricing and licensing of this solution. 

The crux of why we're using the product is because of the automations. We are very confident that the product will keep us secure at all times. 

We are able to inject Prisma into our build jobs without it really affecting our build times or the developers.

The solution has reduced alerts investigation times by 60-70%.

I would rate this product as a nine out of ten. 

Our primary use case of Prisma Access is to provide secure Internet access for users regardless of their location. 

It is also used for secure access to internal applications and secure SaaS applications, ensuring the same level of security whether users are working from home, the office, or any other location.

Prisma Access has allowed us to reduce the number of agents from multiple to just one single agent. It integrates several components, such as IPS, DLP, remote VPN, and SWG, into a single console, which has helped reduce costs and improve the return on investment.

The most valuable feature of Prisma Access is its ability to provide enterprise-class security for both Internet and internal application access. Unlike other OEMs that can only secure Internet access, Prisma Access can secure both internal and Internet-based application access.

The Prisma Access could improve in terms of adding more machine learning and AI capabilities to automate tasks such as incident response. This would enhance the overall security posture by enabling better and faster management of security threats.

I have been working with Prisma Access for the last five-plus years.

In terms of scalability, Prisma Access has adapted well to our organization's growth needs. Most customers are either planning to move to SASE solutions or have already moved, making Prisma Access an excellent choice for scalability.

I would rate their technical support a nine out of ten.

Positive

Before using Prisma Access, we used multiple products for remote VPN, SWG from vendors like McAfee and Forcepoint Proxy, and other VPN clients from vendors like Pulse Secure VPN, Fortinet, and Palo Alto. We switched to Prisma Access for its integrated approach.

Prisma Access has significantly improved our ROI by combining multiple technologies into one single solution. It reduces the need for multiple agents and products, which brings down the overall cost for our customers.

The licensing cost of Prisma Access is calculated per unique user, with each user being able to connect up to eight devices. If a user is no longer active after thirty days, that license becomes free. There is flexibility in terms of exceeding the license count, as it operates on a trust-based license model.

Prisma Access is best suited for enterprise and mid-level customers. It may not be the best fit for the SMB market due to higher pricing. I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

We are a partner of Palo Alto. We focus on healthcare customers, and we help them onboard and manage different Palo Alto solutions, including Prisma SaaS.

It gives you visibility and an understanding of what you have in your environment. A couple of years ago, all the information that you had in your SaaS environment was kind of a black box. You didn't have any information about what you or your employees had there. So, visibility is one use case, and another very important use case is the ability to review the way the files and information are shared. You can see if a confidential file is being shared. Having this information and awareness is important for the administrators of Office 365 and other environments so that they can make corrections.

With the use of the Data Loss Prevention (DLP) module, the scanning process scans all the files that you have in there and classifies them through the DLP engine. So, when you get your results, you would have files with the matching results, such as with credit card numbers or phone numbers. There are also data profiles or policies, such as PCI, PII, or GDPR compliance. Palo Alto is working on adding more profiles, such as HIPAA, based on different compliance standards in the industry.

It is a SaaS solution, and we are using its most recent version.

You get the control and visibility into what you have in your SaaS applications. It helps you to know what you have in your environment and then meet your compliance needs. You get to know whether all of them are on a single platform. You also get an understanding of what type of information you have and how it is disposed of. Based on the results that you get from the scanning process, you can accomplish goals, such as PCI compliance or GDPR compliance. Most of the customers are governed by their security information team and have an obligation to be compliant with different industry standards, such as PCI, PII, or GDPR. With this platform, you are a step ahead in knowing what you have in your environment and accomplishing the compliance goals.

You have the ability to create your own expressions for your data. Palo Alto understands that DLP is not the same for all consumers. You might have a particular need to fulfill, and they give you the opportunity to create a custom expression to match the specific format that you have. For a confidential file property that you have in your files, you can add a metadata field. It gives you that opportunity to create that.

Another thing that I really like is the Azure AD integration. You can integrate with Azure AD in order to apply what they call the groups in Azure AD. You can apply groups, and you can have different characteristics, but the most important thing for me is that you can select groups and put the groups into your policies because your DLP or the things that you want to catch may be different for different departments. Your requirements would be different for your HR department versus your development team. For the HR department, it would be more useful to have PII information because they are trying to work with new employees and information. So, it should be different. With Azure AD, you can make a differentiation between these two departments. I found that very useful.

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.

I've been working with Prisma SaaS for two years.

In general, it is good, but everything could be a little bit better. For example, they are working on including more data to catch or trying to reduce the gaps between the matches. It is DLP, but it is not perfect. We're going to have a false positive. They are working on closing that gap and being more accurate, but in general, it gives you accurate and reliable information.

You can onboard certain applications, and if you add more and more files, it's going to continue scanning those files. If you take a business decision to purchase a new SaaS application for your team, such as Slack, you can onboard that new application. You don't have a particular limitation on that. So, if you want to grow and have more business applications, your only concern should be whether they are supported by SaaS Security API. That's because not all the applications work the same way or have the same characteristics, but it gives you an opportunity to grow.

We have had environments with 200 to 2,000 users. It depends on a customer's SaaS environment, and if they want to apply to all of it or a part of it. There was a requirement from a customer to be notified when there is a file share with certain domains, which were their competitor's domains. That way they would get to know when someone from inside the company is sharing information with the competitors. Another common requirement is to be notified or create an incident when I share a public file in my Office 365 account. 

It is gaining more popularity among different customers in the last year. Palo Alto is trying to focus and combine it with other types of solutions related to DLP in order to secure not only your SaaS environment but all of your perimeter. Palo Alto is going to be very focused on that, and its usage is going to increase. In the past, it was not something that a lot of customers required. Palo Alto is working on improving the platform and making it more attractive to meet customers' needs. The market is changing continuously, and Palo Alto is focused on having DLP in different environments.

I didn't use their support that much, but it is fine. Palo Alto has different teams that are focused on different types of solutions. They have a SaaS team for the SaaS API problems that can come. They are good, but sometimes, it would be good to have a quicker response from their side because you want to resolve an issue as fast as you can. They have a lot of companies, and it is kind of hard. You would find this problem with most of their partners, but they always come to you with a good disposition and try to solve it in the shortest time possible. So, overall, their support is good. I would rate them a four out of five.

Positive

I didn't use any similar solution previously. The company that I have been working for is very focused on Palo Alto solutions, and I didn't have the opportunity to work with other tools that are on the market.

In most cases, it is easy, but it depends on the application that the customers want to onboard. For example, if you want to onboard Office 365, Microsoft Teams, and Exchange, the onboarding is easy because you can use the same user account for these three solutions. The challenging part is that you need to create an account with the specific rights for communication and gathering the appropriate information. That's more complex. In some cases, the companies are not completely controlling their Office 365 environment. They have a leader company that gives you the rights, which can take a bit longer.

It could be challenging when you try to use the S3 bucket because you have to work with the IAM to get the exact privilege access to the bucket. That's a more complex part, but if you know what you are doing, it's not that hard.

For me, its implementation is very straightforward. I would rate it a four out of five in terms of ease. Its duration varies because it depends on the information that you have in your SaaS applications because it's going to communicate with your applications through API.  It depends on a lot of things, but in my experience, one week to one and a half weeks is generally enough time. It is not something set in stone. It can take less or more, but you obtain a lot of information once that is finished.

It is not necessary to have a consultant from Palo Alto. The activation part is straightforward. They send you a magic link to have access and configure it. It takes about 20 to 30 minutes to generate the tenant, if I am not wrong. After that, it's very straightforward. There is documentation about each application that you want to onboard.

Before implementing it, it is very important to have a conversation with the customer about the applications they want to onboard, and inside those applications, what type of information they want to catch. For example, a pharmaceutical company might not be as aware of all the compliances for HIPAA or PII. It is important to have that information in order to understand what they want to catch. You can have that covered with predefined ones. We might also have to create custom ones, but it is not that necessary to have someone from Palo Alto if you have a correct partner who knows about the platform.

After onboarding applications, we recommend testing the rules on specific owner files to verify that the results that you are obtaining are accurate and as expected. If they are good, you can go ahead and apply the rules for all. Because a rule is already tested, you don't have to modify it a lot later. If you have a new need, you can create a new rule. After that, the knowledge transfer with the customer is very important. It is not a complex application to manage for the customer, but they really need to understand what it's doing. This knowledge transfer is really important, and it is something that we care about a lot in the company.

After rebranding, its name now is SaaS Security API. My experience with the product is mostly good. Before going for this solution, it's very important to understand what the customer is looking for. In terms of visibility, it's very good because it's an opportunity to have a lot of visibility about the applications that you onboard. For example, you have all that information centralized, and you can apply policies for them. It is very good for that purpose, but it's communication through an API. So, it's not something like a firewall where you can block something instantaneously. It requires a different approach. You need to have an understanding and the objective to obtain visibility and gain more results.

You need to be very clear about what you are looking for and what type of information or compliance you want. Focus on not using it as an individual solution. It's a platform that generates more value when working together with other solutions. 

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We use it to monitor our cloud environments to get a real-time inventory of what's being stood up, what's being torn down, vulnerability management, risk management, and all of our cloud resources across all AWS, Azure, and GCP.

If somebody configures something in a way that's vulnerable, we know instantly. We'll get an alert and address it so that it's remediated and not left open. For example, if somebody stands up a new storage container and inadvertently makes it publicly accessible, that's something we'd want to know right away to prevent a breach. We could automate it to prevent it from being stood up with public access. 

We can prevent specifically forbidden configurations automatically by using this tool to never allow a resource storage container to be stood up and made publicly accessible. Automation is key there, and I'd say that would be an example of how Palo Alto has improved my organization.

Prisma SaaS helps us keep pace with SaaS growth in our organization. Everything's going to the cloud, and containers are being used more and more. As security professionals, we don't live in the development world, so we need to know what's going on in that realm, and the platform will help us identify those things and make sure that they're stood up securely. 

If there's something new, a new vulnerability, or a new standard, we'll be alerted about it. That's important because we don't speak developer language, and we, as security folks, consume the data. We must understand what's being stood up and how, and the platform will help us identify that and explain why it's vulnerable and needs to be fixed.

Prisma's most valuable feature would be its ability to identify bad or risky configurations. People stand up stuff in the cloud all the time, and as security professionals, we're not always aware of it. Prisma is critical for flagging real-time inventory and configuration risks, general vulnerabilities, and also issues in Kubernetes. Prisma is very effective for securing new SaaS applications. The code used to configure new SaaS applications is critical for identifying what we want as our security standards and confirming that they're being practiced.

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've been working with Prisma SaaS for about five years.

I'd say Prisma is extremely stable. We haven't had any issues there.

Prisma is highly scalable. It's a cloud solution, so it automatically updates when new resources come out. We don't have to do anything. It just sees it and adjusts accordingly. I recently started a new role at a company, and we're planning on implementing it and using it more. Where I came from, we used it extensively and relied on it to monitor and manage our cloud environment.

I rate Palo Alto tech support seven out of 10. The technical support used to be a lot better when they were a smaller company. Back when they were called Evident.io and then RedLock, they were more personable and provided good one-on-one technical support. Their support structure changed about a year and a half ago. Now, they're more like group support, and I don't think it's as thorough, but it's still okay. 

Neutral

I would say the cloud SaaS part was extremely straightforward to set up. We had no problems there. Then there is the container compute area called Compute in Prisma. It's almost like a product within a product. You have to deploy the container section on an agent to your container host. That's a little more complicated because we have to rely on development teams to deploy the agent, but tying the platform to your cloud subscriptions was straightforward and took only 30 minutes to an hour. 

It is a little more involved to set up the Kubernetes containers and deploy the agent. That could take up to a day because you have to collaborate with other teams to get that deployed and make sure it's pulling the right data. Then again, it depends on how receptive your development team is to deploying the agents. That part usually takes around three hours. It takes one or two security engineers to deploy and maintain. 

We did it in-house with some help from Palo Alto that we purchased through a support license.

I don't have specific metrics, but I will say that it helps us know what we don't know, and that's ideal from a security perspective—seeing things that we didn't realize were an issue. The return on that investment is significant because you can't secure what you don't know is there. Prisma accomplishes that pretty easily without having to be on the platform constantly responding to alerts.

Prisma integrates pretty nicely even if you aren't using other Palo Alto products. It's very effective for a CSP solution, and the time to value is almost instant. As soon as you stand it up, it shows value by telling you all the vulnerabilities or risks in that environment. I feel like Prisma is one of those things that is essential. If you have resources in the cloud, you're going to need something to monitor it, and it's not ridiculously priced. I'm not too involved in the budget, so it's one of those things that's a necessary evil. I feel like it's a reasonably priced necessary evil.

Prisma is in the middle of the road. It's not the most expensive, but it's not the cheapest. There aren't any additional costs, to my knowledge. I know they have some extra modules, but we didn't use them. 

I'd say the price fits the solution. Prisma is capable of many other things, but Palo Alto doesn't charge you extra for those things, unlike other companies. You can use them or not. Because your environment grows, you may not use it now, you may not need it now, but you may in the future. Those capabilities are there without an additional cost for a different module where other companies will break it out, where you have to pay for those things.

We evaluated a few, including Sysdig, Threat Stack, and Lacework. The deciding factor was the ease of use. It's critical to understand what you're looking at and for the platform to provide value with reports. The data presentation in Prisma was more straightforward.

I rate Prisma SaaS nine out of 10. Ideally, you want a platform that will save you time by giving you the information quickly so you can understand it and act on it. Many platforms have loads of colorful graphs or bells and whistles, but they don't help you get to the bottom of what you're looking at. I feel that Prisma does that. You can get so much information directly from the platform without the need to reach out to other teams or go into the cloud to understand what you're seeing.

We use Prisma Access, not only for our remote users, in a distributed workforce, but for our offices as well. Right now, because of COVID, there is a very limited footprint on the office side of it. But we would like to cover our offices so that when people are working in them and trying to access resources, whether those resources are hosted on public cloud, private cloud, in data centers, or on-prem, Prisma Access is involved.

Prisma Access is completely hosted on Google Cloud Platform. Palo Alto Panorama, which is the centralized management tool, is also hosted on a public cloud environment. So the entire solution lies in the cloud.

The fact that Prisma Access provides millions of security updates per day is really important because it takes care of the equivalent of preparing patches and pushing them to your environment, without the headaches of managing and maintaining those processes for your infrastructure. If you get security intelligence from different verticals and different alliances, or through some sort of open API integration where vulnerabilities arise at different times, it's going to be difficult to keep up. Subscribing to this service and having it take care of that is really phenomenal.

And the best part is that you know that you are part of a bigger ecosystem where this learning about security issues is happening, and things are made available to you on a scheduled basis every day. It automatically strengthens your security posture. We are quite happy with this feature and feel very confident that the Palo Alto security stack takes care of all of these things automatically. That is one of the salient features and was one of our evaluation parameters for choosing a solution.

Another benefit is that before, if we had to set up a restricted environment for a given project, the lead time was about a day to get everything functioning correctly and to get the go-ahead from the security team. Now, setting up these environments can literally happen in less than five minutes. It is already segmented. All you need to do is ensure the people who are part of the project are included in a single access-control list, which these days is based on GCP Identity-Aware. Based on that, it provides the right privileges required to access certain things. That is the building block of any SasS solution with zero cross-network access. And it is very easy now.

The Prisma Access remote side is pretty good with respect to the footprint that it covers. Because it is built on the Google platform, using the Google Premium Tier network, it is almost everywhere geographically. From wherever we initiate a connection, it connects with the nearest point of presence, which minimizes the latency. And we can access applications wherever they are hosted.

It protects all app traffic so that users can gain access to all apps. Unlike other solutions that only work from ports 80 and 443, which are predominantly for web traffic, Prisma Access covers all protocols and works on all traffic patterns. It is not only confined to web traffic. This is important because security is something that should always be baked in, rather than being an afterthought. The most sophisticated attacks can arise from sources that are not behind 80/443. They could come through bit-torrent traffic, which uses a non-standard port, altogether. We want to cover off those possibilities. We were very sure, from the start of our deployment when conducting PoCs, that the solution we picked should have coverage for all ports and protocols.

The fact that it secures not just web-based apps, but non-web apps as well, is important because the threat landscape is quite big. It not only includes public-facing applications that are accessible via web protocols, but it also includes many attacks that are being generated through non-standard protocols, like DNS tunneling and newly-registered domain control names. There are also a lot of critical applications being accessed on a point-to-point basis, and they might be vulnerable if those ports and protocols are not being inspected. You need to have the right security controls so that your data remains protected all the time.

In terms of the solution's ease-of-use, once you understand the way the various components stitch together, and once the effort of the initial configuration, setup, and rollout are done and you have set up the policies correctly, you're just monitoring certain things and you do not have to touch a lot of components. That makes it easy to manage a distributed workforce like ours in which there are 10,000-plus users. With all those users, we only have a handful of people, five to seven individuals, who are able to gracefully manage it, because the platform is easy to use. It does take considerable effort to get up to speed in configuring things during the initial deployment, but thereafter it is just a case of monitoring and it's very easy to manage.

In addition, whether traffic is destined for a public cloud environment, or for a private data center, or you are accessing east-west traffic, you can apply the same security policies and posture, and maintain the same sort of segmentation. Prisma Cloud offers threat prevention, URL filtering, and DNS protection, and east-west traffic segmentation. These features are the foundation of any security stack. There are two primary purposes for this kind of solution, in the big picture. One of them is handling the performance piece, providing ease of access for end-users, and the second is that it should handle security. All of these components are foundational to the security piece, not only to protect against insider threats but to protect things from the outside as well.

Prisma Access offers security on all ports and protocols. It covers the stack pretty well, leaving no stones unturned. The same unified protection is applied, irrespective of where you access things from or what you access. That also makes it a very compelling solution.

There are definitely a number of things that could be improved. 

One of them is geographic coverage. China is still an issue because the solution does not operate there properly due to government regulations. I believe Palo Alto is trying pretty hard to get into partnerships with Alibaba and other cloud providers, but they do not have the same compelling offering in China that they have in the rest of the world. Businesses that are operating within China have to be very sure to evaluate the solution before making a buying decision. It is not an issue with Palo Alto, rather it is predominantly the result of government rules, but it's something that Palo Alto needs to work on.

There is also room for improvement when it comes to latency in a couple of regions, including India and South America. They might have to increase their presence in those locations and come up with more modern cloud architectures.

The third area is that, while Palo Alto has understood the essence of building capabilities around cloud technology and have come up with a CASB offering, that is a very new product. There are other companies that have better offerings for understanding cloud applications and have more graceful controls. That's something that Palo Alto needs to work on.

I've been using Prisma Access by Palo Alto for two to three years. We started deploying Palo Alto gear back in 2015 and, along the way we have looked into multiple tools from them and invested them.

On a scale of one to 10, I would give the stability a seven. There are a couple of reasons for that score. One is that when we make certain changes to configs, it takes about 14 to 15 minutes to populate. And there have been scenarios where it has taken about 45 minutes for the config changes to happen. When you sell a product by saying that it's cloud-native and that users can make all configuration changes on-the-fly, when those changes are made they should happen within a minute. They should not take that much time.

It might be that Palo Alto is still using a certain type of infrastructure in the backend that is causing these delays. If they pile on the cloud technologies, and work towards a more microservices-based architecture, I'm hopeful that they can bring this delay down to less than a minute.

Going from one user to 10,000 or 15,000 users, we haven't faced a lot of problems. However, for companies that are considering investing in this solution, if they have more than 50,000 end-users, a config change could take 10 to 15 minutes. In an environment where 50,000 people are expecting certain things to work, those things might not work for them. Such companies have to look at the solution very thoroughly in terms of the cloud piece, the integration piece. But from one to 15,000 or 20,000 end-users, it is flawless. We don't tend to see a lot of issues. But beyond, say, 25,000, I would suggest doing a deeper analysis before purchasing the product, because there are some glitches.

Initially, Palo Alto technical support was okay around sales discussions and getting up to speed on doing a PoC. But one once we deployed and then raised queries, those lead times increased quite a bit. Unless you take their premium support, where there is an SLA associated with every issue that you raise, it becomes very difficult to get hold of engineers to work on a Prisma Access case. If you just take some sort of partner support, you cannot expect the same level of support on your day-to-day issues that you would get with premium support.

Fundamentally, when a company sells a product, whether you are taking the premium support or some other level of support, the support metrics should be more or less the same, because you are trying to address problems that people are facing. Their response should be more prompt. And if they can't join a call, they should at least be prompt in replying via email or chat or some other medium, so that the customer feels more comfortable about the product and the support. If it takes time to resolve certain problems, post business hours, it can be very difficult for people to justify why they have deployed this product.

Neutral

COVID was a surprise for us, just like for everyone else in the world. We had a solution from Palo Alto, but it was not a scalable one. We configured things in a more manual way because our requirements were not that high in terms of remote use cases. Post-COVID, the situation has completely changed for us and we have to think about a hybrid situation where we can still gracefully allow access to end-users in a more secure fashion. That led us to evaluate this solution from Palo Alto.

The initial setup is not so straightforward. There is a learning curve involved because you need to understand which component fits where, with all of these modern, edge infrastructure secure-access services. You need to do capacity planning well, as well as a budgetary plan. You need to know the right elements for your business. Once you set that up, it is very simple to manage.

It took us about two to three months to deploy because we have a lot of geographical constraints. Different regions have different requirements. Accounting for all of those needs is why it took us that amount of time to set everything up.

We have to do an apples-to-apples comparison. If you had a very small set of people who had to create a dedicated setup like Prisma Access, and manage the infrastructure piece and the upgrading piece and the security piece, it would be a nightmare. Prisma Access offers that ease and flexibility so that even a handful of people, with the right knowledge, are still able to manage the configuration piece of it, because the infrastructure and other things are handled by Prisma Access. If you had to build that whole thing versus buying it, obviously Prisma offers a good ROI.

It all depends on your requirements. If your requirements enable you to do those things on a much smaller scale, then you need to be very cautious about which components of Prisma you actually pick for your use case. If you get all the components, you might not be getting the right ROI.

For our use case, we feel we are getting a return on investment, but it could be better.

The most pricey solution is Zscaler, followed by Prisma Access, and then Netskope.

The initial prices of Prisma Access were okay. But as soon as you start deploying Palo Alto gear, the support prices and the recurring prices, which are the major operational costs, tend to increase over time. For example, if you go ahead with a one-year subscription, just for testing purposes to see how the whole solution works, and you plan to renew for the next two or three years, you tend to see that the solution gets really costly.

We understand that when you purchase a hardware component, the cost goes up because you have a physical asset that depreciates over time. But when you are getting a subscription-based service, the cost should tend to be reduced over time. With Prisma Access, the cost is increasing and that is something beyond any kind of logic. This is something that Palo Alto needs to work on if they want to be competitive in the market.

We evaluated other options like Zscaler and Netskope. Prisma Access has more coverage for ports and protocols. It doesn't only inspect web protocols but all ports and protocols, and that's an advantage. Other solutions are still relying on web protocols.

The positive side of these other solutions, because they came along a little later, is that they have understood the demerits of a solution like Prisma Access. They are using more cloud-native components and microservices architectures. That makes these solutions faster. As I said, some config changes in Prisma Access take 14 to 15 minutes, but these other solutions literally take a minute to make the same config changes happen.

It's a constant race.

Put your business requirements up against the solution to see how it pans out. Look at the stability of the product, and at how much time it takes to make configurations and apply them in practice. And if you have a distributed workforce, like us, try to run this solution in southern countries where there is a latency issue or known issues with ISPs. You may not get the same set results that you tend to get in northern countries around the world.

We don't have a subscription to Prisma Access' Autonomous Digital Experience Management features, but we have done some testing of it. It's pretty good because it can help ease the work of an office helpdesk person who constantly gets tickets but has no visibility for monitoring things. With everybody conducting their work from home, it gets very difficult to know the setup of the internal environment and how people are accessing things and where the bottlenecks are. The ADEM tools are going to help immensely in that regard, because without having knowledge of the underlying infrastructure at every individual's home location, you can still identify whether a problem is specific to their home office or to the application the user is accessing or to the network that is causing the problem. That information is absolutely at your fingertips. Analyzing those types of things becomes really easy. 

ADEM will also help with the efficacy of troubleshooting and providing support to end-users. If there are certain applications that are critical to an organization, you could easily define a metric to see, out of all the people who are accessing those applications every day, how many of them are facing a problem. And if they're facing a problem, what the parameters of the problem are. Avoiding the problem could turn out to be something that people need to be educated about, or maybe there is something we can proactively tell users so that they can take precautionary measures to get a better experience. It is certainly going to help in enhancing the end-user experience.

Palo Alto's building blocks clearly illustrate an app-based model. It analyzes things based on an application so that we know what the controls are within an application. For example, if you want to block Facebook's chat but continue to allow basic Facebook to be browsed, that kind of understanding of the application would allow you to do so. That is way more graceful than completely blocking the end-user. It's not something that is specific to Palo Alto Prisma Access but it is a core component of Palo Alto.

Prisma Access is a solution for remote and mobile users. Following the pandemic, many employees now work from home, meaning many companies have extended remote locations. We use the product to secure the networks of our remote and mobile users, so they can safely access our company's intranet and network.

Panorama provides centralized management capabilities for all our firewalls and locations so that we can manage different data centers through a single device, a very valuable feature. We don't have to log into various devices to oversee them individually.

The solution's ease of use is excellent; the GUI is fantastic, well-designed, and easy to use, even for non-technical staff. The different tabs are clearly visible and straightforward to understand.  

The platform protects all app traffic; when we enable GlobalProtect on the cloud and user device, it provides a secure, private connection for users to access applications. That's very useful.  

Prisma Access secures not just web-based apps but non-web apps, which is very important to us. We can also secure URLs, API-based solutions, and API browser interfaces. 

The fact that the solution secures web and non-web-based apps reduces the risk of a data breach to an extent. When we make apps accessible only through a private network, the risk is reduced. 

The product provides traffic analysis, threat prevention, URL filtering, and segmentation; these features are essential for troubleshooting. The logs showing the traffic passing through Prisma Access show us what's getting blocked and allowed, while the threat prevention alerts us to any suspicious or malicious items. This gives us insight if there's a data breach and if traffic we want to be blocked is still hitting our devices.   

Overall, the security provided by Prisma Access is excellent; the chances of a data breach are minimal. It's a great product.   

We would like to see improvements in the licensing; currently, Palo Alto provides 500 to 1000 licenses for users, and we want to see 1500 to 2000 licenses for one version.

We have been using the solution for one year. 

Prisma Access is a stable product. 

We can scale the tool well, add devices as soon as our user count grows, and scale in line with our company growth.

Regarding users, we have 30 staff managing Prisma Access, and GlobalProtect is installed on every machine in the company. 

We contacted the Palo Alto support team on many occasions. The one issue is it can take a long time to connect, and they can be challenging to reach when we need immediate help. They're accommodating if we send them a planning notice within 24 hours. Once the ticket gets assigned and we get through to a support staff member, the service is excellent. The only issue is with immediate assistance; it can be difficult to get through to someone.

Positive

We previously used Zscaler and switched for two reasons: firstly, the cost, and secondly, Prisma Access offers additional features in one device. It also has simplified architecture and reduced MPLS lines.

The initial setup was complex, and only our network admin could install it. Once the solution is set up, it's straightforward, but the setup is arduous. We completed the deployment in a day. Our implementation strategy was to determine the number of users and ensure they all had the necessary information regarding the solution and GlobalProtect. Then, we deployed accordingly.

We have a team of 30 responsible for managing and maintaining the solution. 

The solution is definitely worth the money we pay for it. 

Prisma Access is one of the best compared to other products on the market. The cost is favorable, and Palo Alto provides a simple architecture, so I recommend the solution to anyone using a different product. There are no hidden costs besides the license; what you see is what you get. 

I rate the solution nine out of ten. 

It's important to us that Prisma Access provides all its capabilities in a single, cloud-delivered platform. We previously used different firewalls with a Zscaler proxy for particular purposes, but now we don't have to purchase dedicated hardware. Prisma offers most of the features we need in one solution, so it's like getting three or four products in one; we don't have to go for extra tools to secure our apps or get a VPN because it's already provided.  

That Prisma Access provides millions of security updates daily is significant for us; there are new challenges and threats every day. Palo Alto Networks must keep its security up to date to protect against new and developing threats, as this security is essential to our operation. 

We don't use the solution's Autonomous Digital Experience Management (ADEM) features, and it doesn't allow us to deliver better applications; instead, it makes our applications more secure.

The biggest lesson I've learned from using Prisma Access is how easy management becomes; we don't have to log into multiple devices, and everything is accessible from one GUI.

The product comes with a helpful guide, and I recommend reading that before using Prisma Access. It's pretty simple.

We use the product to access resources from outside networks.

They could add more flexibility and improve product performance.

I've been using Prisma Access by Palo Alto Networks for about one or two years.

The technical support services are good, and they provide faster responses. However, there is room for improvement regarding the support for local languages.

Neutral

Competitors' advantages for the product lie in their ability to cover different security aspects, such as DDoS protection, DNS security, and WAF.

The setup is relatively straightforward. Typically, distributors or partners handle the implementation process.

Palo Alto products are expensive, but they offer efficient features. We have to pay additional costs for maintenance and support services.

I typically recommend Prisma Access to private companies, especially small or medium-sized ones.

Integrating the product with other tools is easy as it offers APIs. I rate it a seven out of ten.

I use the solution in my company to work with the remote access VPN. With the tool, users connect their office network and data center networks with the infrastructure from outside places, like home and other sites, so our company can use the remote access of the tool.

The most valuable features of the solution are in the areas of the secure remote access it provides while also being user-friendly.

From any improvement perspective, the product's compatibility issues with Linux need to be resolved.

The response from the support team needs to be made faster.

I have been using Prisma Access by Palo Alto Networks for three years. In my previous organization, I used the solution for two years.

The stability of the product is good. Stability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

The scalability features of the product are available in a package. GlobalProtect will serve even if you purchase a device with a capacity of two hundred users. You can't increase the capacity above two hundred users. Basically, with the device capabilities, you can include 200 users in GlobalProtect, so it all depends on your hardware model.

In my previous company, there were around 150 users of the tool with Linux. I feel that there were almost 200 users of the product.

The technical support for the solution is good, but it is not like Cisco's support services. Sometimes, there is a delay in response from the support team's end, but during emergency cases, it is okay.

The product's initial setup phase is neither straightforward nor complex, making it a process that lies in the middle. I will say that it is very easy to deploy.

The tool's configuration can be done in one day. In my previous organization, my colleague and I were the two people who deployed the product, tested it, and found the results, and then we delivered it to our clients.

As per my previous experience, after I gave the solution to the company's customer, I took care of one custom configuration for a particular purpose. I read the tool's documentation to see how to configure it and how to set up GlobalProtect on the client machines, after which I made a documentation explaining the way to deploy it and install GlobalProtect.

For deployment and maintenance purposes, one or two people are enough.

In terms of the ROI, the tool is secure for official data. If someone wants security, GlobalProtect SSL VPN is something that I would recommend. With the tool, it is not possible to count how much revenue it helped generate since it basically protects your data from home to your office network and communicates with lots of data. The tool is secure. From a security perspective, GlobalProtect is good.

In comparison with GlobalProtect, there could be FortiClient. If some users cannot afford Palo Alto Networks, then they can choose FortiClient.

My company didn't receive any support from Palo Alto to connect securely to our organization's branch offices. The tool is very easy to deploy. Another co-engineer and I in my company completed the deployment task for the solution. The deployment is not very difficult, especially if you have Palo Alto's Next-Generation Firewalls since with it, you can really get the VPN connection for Windows and other operating systems, but my company had faced some challenges with Linux, so we had to purchase another license only for it. For Windows and Mac devices, the tool is free. If I purchase Palo Alto's Next-Generation Firewalls, it is free for Windows and Mac, but a license is required to use Prisma Access on Linux.

I haven't used the cloud-based nature of Palo Alto Networks to simplify our company's network security management. I have only used the on-premises version in our company's infrastructure for GlobalProtect. I don't have any idea about the cloud Security in the product.

The performance and reliability of the product are good.

For the integration process, you first have to configure the firewall with the default management port IP, or alternatively, users can configure it through the console, which includes the CLI mode and GUI mode. Okay. After logging into the firewall from the CLI or GUI, you can configure GlobalProtect by taking into consideration the outside and inside zones, which we want to give access to via the tool. I am experienced with the tool's GUI mode. I configured it through the GUI mode. The first thing you have to learn about Palo Alto GUI mode is how to configure GlobalProtect.

In general, I rate the tool an eight and a half to nine out of ten.