Prisma Access by Palo Alto Networks Reviews

One of the main advantages we have found of Prisma Access is that it has gateways across multiple continents. Due to that, many users can connect from different parts of the world will be able to access everything very fast. Also, internet access through VPN has become much simpler in getting the traffic to our on-prem data center.

The main example is my particular client that has employees working from different parts of the world - Malaysia, Singapore, India, Europe, and even the Middle East. The use of multiple continental gateways has helped us a lot. The users who are working in different parts of India can connect to different gateways. There are four gateways, including in India itself, the Middle East, and Europe as well.

The WildFire Analysis is one of the good features we observed. Due to the fact that the traffic from the user to the internet is not passing under our on-prem, there is generally less control over it. With the help of WildFire Analysis, we are able to make sure the users are not downloading or accessing any malicious sites or any malware or anything.

The use of Microsoft Teams from a VPN used to give some issues earlier, however, with the Prisma Cloud, that has improved quite a lot. Even if you're tunneling the traffic of MS Teams through this Prisma terminal, there has been no issues yet. The VPN access it allows for is great.

The stability of the solution is very good.

The scalability of the solution is excellent.

Our security team had a concern that they are not able to filter out a few things. There is some particular traffic that the security team wants to filter out and apply their own policies and they cannot. Earlier, we used our on-prem solution for that, however, when it is in the cloud, the problem is that it has to be done manually. When we do changes on the on-prem, it will not automatically sync to the cloud. Therefore, manually, the admin has to do changes on the on-prem for spam filtering and at the same time on the cloud as well.

We actually faced some a problem with using the failure of authentication. Our primary authentication happens through a RADIUS server, to a non-IP solution, so that there is a double-factor authentication. In that double-factor authentication, we are using three different RADIUS servers. Apart from that our requirement was that if all our RADIUS servers failed, we wanted the authentication of users to fall back to LDAR.

The problem we faced is that each RADIUS server was consuming 40 seconds each for the timeout, and then only will it go to LDAR. However, the total timeout of the global product timeout, we are not able to adjust. If you take an on-prem Palo Alto device, you can adjust or increase the Global Protect time out value from 30 seconds to up to 125 seconds or 150 seconds. Later, we were able to resolve this by reducing the timeout value for each RADIUS server.

Technical support could be a lot better.

We have deployed the Prisma solution and environment almost six months ago and we have been using it for the last six months.

The solution is very stable. It doesn't have bugs and glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze.

So far, we haven't observed any such issues. We have been closely monitoring for the last six months but there have been no issues with latency or anything. The only thing we are worried about is that what if something goes from the cloud if the cloud set up as an issue. So far, we haven't encountered such an issue yet, however, the client is always worried about that point as all these things are happening externally to our own firm. That said, so far it hasn't given any trouble.

Scalability-wise it's a very good solution as we will be able to increase the number of users or decrease the number of users or even the bandwidth. Scalability-wise it's a perfect solution.

This solution is used by little over 8,000 users in our intranet and the user roles span from high-level management up to the contacts and their employees who are supporting the calls and the suppliers for the telecom. It is being used by a lot of different variety of users, management, IT, admin, business users, call center users, everyone.

When we decode, we decode it for 10,000 users. So far, we haven't increased it yet. In the future, if our number of user accounts increases or if the Work from Home situation due to COVID continues, then maybe our client will think about increasing it.

Technical support for this solution is via one of our third-party vendors. One problem is that the third-party vendor is not able to resolve all the issues. They will have to go to Palo Alto technical support via their exclusive support. One problem is ASP. Palo Alto is taking a lot of time for coming online and supporting that could be for a minor issue or a major issue. The time taken by Palo Alto Support to get online and support us has been a pain area. We're not really that satisfied.

Before Prisma, we were using the Palo Alto on-prem solution, Global Protect Solution. We had Palo Alto firewalls in our on-prem which we were using for VPN and before that, we used a few VPN solutions.

The initial setup was a mix of difficult and straightforward. We did the deployment in phases for users across different continents. By the time we finished the deployment, which took nearly six months, it was in our case a stable solution and simple to use as well. However, it took a while as we were working on different continents and moving from one to the other in a particular order.

The team was a combination. The team was a combination of one of the vendors in Malaysia and my team, who's from a client end. So there was a total of seven members in the team.

Our implementation strategy was as follows: we already had one Palo Alto Global Protect Retail Solution, so it was not big trouble for us to migrate it to a cloud. We started implementing, planning the redundancy for such two different sites. We established the IP set terminals with our two different sites, which will terminate from the cloud to Palo Alto VPN Box on our on-prem. Then, we gradually migrated the users from on-prem to the cloud.

In terms of maintenance, first of all, we have to keep on monitoring it. If there is something wrong with the cloud, we will have to get the alert and act accordingly. Maintenance-wise so far we have increased the bandwidth for internet links. At that time we had set up redundancy and there was no trouble with that. Apart from that, so far, no other maintenance has been done.

We had a vendor assist us a bit during the implementation.

I can't speak to the licensing costs. We had a two-year license, which we are still on.

We're just customers and end-users.

We are using a SaaS version of the solution.

I will definitely recommend implementing this product as it has a very good scalable solution. Considering this work from home scenario in COVID, it is one of the best solutions one can implement. However, my advice would be to make sure you have enough internet bandwidth while implementing and also make sure there is site-level redundancy at your end. If you are a client then you won't implement it. Make sure there are two separate IP set terminals published from the client to your end. That way, if something goes wrong, your internet goes down or something, the VPN will be accessible.

One good lesson I have learned is that earlier in my thought process related to VPN was very narrow. I never thought that you can put it across multiple continental gateways and allow users to access it so fast. 

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

Our use case started with the pandemic. Before the pandemic, our users worked in our office, but when the pandemic started our users were at home. They wanted to have the same kind of access that they had on-premises. We deployed a network and mobile services for them so that they could have the same experience sitting at home and access all the infra in the office. We use mobile access to connect to Prisma Access, and from Prisma Access we built a site-to-site VPN to connect to the office network so that they would have the same kind of access.

It is very helpful because it is protecting the applications that are behind it. It has so many components that we can use to secure our applications.

Prisma Access has all the features from Palo Alto. But the visibility perspective is pretty cool. If I want to know how much data is being used for a specific project, I can look at how much data has been used, from which region, and which users have been connected. That visibility is very good so that I can see how many licenses we have and how many are used. It gives a great view of what is happening, of everyone who is connected. That is one of the things I like.

It provides traffic analysis, threat prevention, and URL filtering, although I'm not sure if it provides segmentation. These features are very important. We wanted to filter traffic according to our standards. The URL filtering helps to filter the traffic so that we only send the traffic we want to on-premises or the internet. Without this, it would be very tough.

Also, it protects all your app traffic. It's like a next-generation firewall. It does everything.

For a non-technical guy, the reporting of Prisma Access is very easy. You need to know the navigation tabs, but it only has so many of them and you can do many things in the tabs. It is pretty easy because there aren't that many pages or options.

And the updates, like URL updates, IPS, IDS, and any WildFire subscription updates are very helpful for protecting our infra.

There should be a dedicated portal or SASE-based solution. They're trying to add a plugin but it needs a dedicated portal because it is now an enterprise solution for multiple organizations. People should be able to directly log in to a dedicated page for Prisma Access, rather than going into a Panorama plugin, and always having to update the plugin. An administrator should be able to look at it from a configuration perspective and not the management and maintenance perspectives.

We started using Prisma Access by Palo Alto Networks with the pandemic in 2019, so I have been using it for over three years.

Initially, they were coming up with a new plugin every one or two months, and you would have to download it. But now, I don't see that. Their team continues to work on it, but as a customer, I see it as stable. 

They're using the resources of GCP so if GCP in a specific region has some issues, it will impact Prisma Access. They have to look at some kind of backup.

I don't see it as a scalable solution because it is running on top of VMs. They say it is scalable, but we didn't see it working that way for one or two incidents that we had. But later, they had more firewalls in the cloud and kept them on standby. Since then, I haven't seen that issue.

I have implemented the solution for 100,000-plus users, and most of them are connecting from home. It reduces the load on our on-premises firewall, handling posturing and VPN. It is a dedicated project, meaning everyone, all of our employees, uses the same solution to connect to the infra.

When I started working with their support, the product was new for them as well so they were not all that familiar with it. They need to improve the technical support staff.

Positive

We were using Cisco AnyConnect but we replaced it, in part, with Zscaler and mostly with Prisma Access.

Prisma Access works on Panorama which we have on a virtual machine on GCP. As with anything, if you don't know it, it is complicated, but once you understand it, it is very easy. If I look at it as a combination of before and after, the setup is of average difficulty. You can learn things very fast. It's not that difficult or complicated, but you should know the purpose of each part. Then it is easy.

When I did my initial deployment of Prisma Access in 2019, it took around five days. But by the time I had done two or three deployments, it was taking me 20 minutes to deploy.

The implementation strategy is totally dependent on the requirements. Some customers say they want the same feeling at home that they have in the office. Some customers say they want Prisma Access to reduce the burden on the existing on-premises firewall. The posture checks have to be done on Prisma Access and, once done, the traffic is forwarded.

Once you understand the product, two to three guys should be able to handle it for configuration, and then they can move on. But for operations, you need a team.

We evaluated Zscaler Private Access and multiple other cloud solutions.

Compared to Zscaler and other services, the advantage of Prisma Access is that it supports both data and voice. The other vendors don't support voice. With Prisma Access, we don't need to look for any other services or solutions. It supports your data and voice services as well and that is one of our most important requirements.

At the end of the day, Prisma Access is nothing but a firewall that is hosted in the cloud. It depends on your capacity, the users that are connecting, and the VM you are running in the backend. It has all the capabilities and subscriptions that we were using on-premises. I don't see any challenges in terms of security. It is secure. They haven't compromised on anything with Prisma Access. It tries to protect us as much as possible.

It's crucial for us and is helping us a lot if you look at it from a business perspective.

We can do a lot with it and use it for eight to nine use cases. It supports your data and voice and, as I noted, I haven't seen any other product support both. Prisma Access is the best product. It depends on what you're looking for. But if you have a lot of requirements, you should go with Prisma Access.

We are a small team of ITOps Engineers. With Prisma, we can manage all our Edge Network Infrastructure (Mobile Users, Remote Networks, and Data Centers) in one location.

We also decommissioned our  legacy MPLS connections and moved to VPN. If we need to expand to more offices, different countries, and different regions, it would be much simpler to do it with Prisma Access because the only things required are an internet connection and a pair of firewalls. 

On our IT team, we now have a single interface (using Palo Alto Panorama) where we can monitor our whole infrastructure. The office and Data Center Firewalls, as well as, the Remote User VPN, forward all the traffic to the Prisma Access Infrastructure. There we can apply deep packet inspection and allow or deny traffic, and also apply additional security features like threat prevention, DNS security, malware and anti-virus protection etc.

For remote users, the VPN connection is more secure and much faster than the legacy solutions. Some of our users are located in different European countries. Now they can pick their closest location and connect to a VPN "concentrator" near their region. Whereas before, they needed to connect with one of our data centers in the UK. 

Since everything is connected to Prisma, now we are able to be more proactive, detect end-user or site connectivity issues much faster. Before we were running multiple applications (NMS, Syslog, Netflow) that required a lot of engineering overhead to manage those, but also to extract the information needed. Now a lot of those tasks can be picked by the Service Desk team. 

In addition, similarly to any other Cloud "Platform" the administrative tasks have been dramatically decreased. The upgrade process is very simple compared with any on-premise solution.

I don't think we have actually fully utilised all the functions of Prisma yet. The main concept of Prisma Access is what really help us to transition our infrastructure from a legacy and complex approach to a more simple and easy to manage and maintain one.

Prisma Access has three major components / connections: 

- Remote connections: The links to the Remote Offices 

- Mobile Users 

- Service Connections : The links to the Data Centers. 

You connect everything by establishing VPN tunnels with the Prisma Access Infrastructure. Prisma is now the “brain” of the infrastructure. All edge devices send all traffic to Prisma and Prisma has the knowledge to route the traffic to the correct destination. In addition you can also apply all the additional security features a NGFW can offer. 

Since this is a cloud platform you can easily scale up adding more mobile users or new remote offices. Prisma will simple auto-run (if needed) additional instances in the cloud to support your load 

Also,  because everything's on the cloud, we don't have to worry about patching; we get all the new features as they come in. One of the biggest problems for us used to be to upgrade our VPN application. Now, it can be done with a click of a button. The administrative overhead has been reduced, and we are able to focus on things that actually matter.

The only drawback at the moment is that a “Cloud” solution like Prisma Access requires Palo Alto Panorama, which is normally a VM that sits in your DataCenter. Panorama is used for monitoring and mainly for configuring the different components of Prisma Access.

For the configuration part, Palo Alto has recently introduced an equivalent cloud application, but not all features are available yet. Also at this moment if you enable Prisma Access with Panorama you cannot migrate to the Cloud version.

I've been working with the Palo Alto team since the beginning of the year (2021), when we started the initial setup. It took us around 2 months (multiple weekly sessions) to complete the setup. And the last 2 months we are fully utilising the Prisma components (Remote Networks, Service Connections and Mobile Users)

We have utilised Prisma Access for the late couple of months. Now we are in the process of migrating all our Remote users from the on premise Firewalls to the Prisma Access VPN as a Service solution. 

Over this period we haven't faced any connectivity issues. Prisma Access underlying infrastructure is high available and scalable. 

As any major Cloud Vendors line Google or AWS we may face outages in the future, but we havent experience any problems yet. 

As with any infrastructure where the managent plane is in the cloud, we can know schedule an upgrade and the Prisma will take care the rest. No more complicated upgrade processes that could lead to outages and downtimes. 

A few days ago the Prisma Access dataplane was upgraded. We had zero downtime and the auto-procwss went smoothly (as expected).

As for scalability, you can easily bring more users to the platform; you would just need to buy additional licenses.

There is no need for purchasing new and more powerful hardware. Palo Alto will scale your platform up to support your infrastructure.

Simple integration with LDAP, SAML can help us to provision 100s of users quickly and onboard more users are the company is getting out of the pandemic freeze period.

I think Palo Alto has great technical support in terms of the time of response and the efficiency of response.

Over the past few months we raised multiple tickets (P2-P4). On all of them the responses were quick within the SLA timelines. All the support Engineers had deep knowledge of the product, and always went above and beyond not only by fixing our issues, but also by trying to explain us why was misconfigured or what actually went wrong. Everyone had great communication skills, they were patient and listening our needs and requirements.

We used local Cisco ASA Firewalls that were located in our two UK offices.Normally we had around 10-15 % of our users working remotely. During the pandemic we had to setup around 500 users to connect to the VPN. Unfortunately our ASAs had limited capabilities (250 max users for the 5515-X and 100 for the 5508-X). Our temporary solution was to use the AWS VPN solution for the remaining users. 

At that point we realised that we need a flexible and scalable solution. In addition the company has embraced the cloud first approach a few years back by moving all our servers to the cloud, so utilising a VPN as a Service (offered by Prisma Access) was an expected next  step. 

In my team there are Cisco certified engineers and we have been using Cisco products for many years, but for my opinion when it comes to security and NGFWs, but they haven't reached the level of Prisma Access by Palo Alto Networks. I believe Palo Alto is the key player in the market. 

We had a mixture of different applications and vendors, and we wanted to merge everything under Prisma Access. The terminology is a bit different between Palo Alto and Cisco ASA, and between their local firewalls and the Prisma Access firewalls. It took us about a month to wrap our heads around it and understand how things worked. Once we did that, it was easy to implement. We have gradually migrated all our services. We did our MPLS and the connection to AWS, and now, we're slowly migrating the users. No one has noticed, so it has been seamless.

We don't have a big infrastructure and did the migration piece by piece, and it was really easy and seamless.

To set up the infrastructure with the team, it took us less than a week. The gradual migration took us three weeks, but the basic setup takes less than a week.

We used the Palo Alto professional services, which mainly help us though multiple Zoom sessions to understand all the Prisma components and also to configure the core Prisma setup. The fine tuning was done by the in-house team. 

We had a great experience. All the Palo Alto consultants had a great knowledge of the product and they were very helpful, making it very simple for us to understand this new Platform. They were never leaving any questions unanswered and they were always providing accurate documentation and references for my team to get the required knowledge and to understand / follow up during the Setup.

I think the ROI has been good. We no longer need people to maintain the whole infrastructure, and we do not need to spend money on different services that we no longer use like MPLS or other kinds of support.

Also, the fact that we can quickly scale up without worrying about buying additional licensing is great for us.

The price has been good for the ROI during these difficult times for the cruise industry. With Prisma, you need three types of licenses

- Palo Alto support

- Number of Remote Users that are connected to VPN (concurrent connections)

- Total Bandwidth between Remote Sites offices and Prisma. If you have three or fewer DCs then you don't have to purchase additional connections or bandwidth.

There are no hidden costs; what the product offers is what you get.

We didn't run any PoC with other vendors. Before we were introduced to Prisma Access we were thinking of moving also our Firewalls to Meraki (as we will do with our switches). I believe no other vendor can offer what Palo Alto with Prisma provides, at least at this moment.

In my experience, Prisma Access is a great platform. However, since SASE is a new fairly new concept, it was a bit confusing to understand all the  different components and how all of them work together. On top of that if you are not very familiar with Palo Alto firewalls and especially Palo Alto Panorama, additional training would be recommended. Of course the same concepts of a NGFW from any other vendor are applied. 

 Once you grasp how Prisma Access works, then it's really a piece of cake to set everything up.

For example, we are a small team of three people, and I'm the senior network engineer. My VPN knowledge was not good because we've mainly had MPLS. Still, it was very easy to set everything up.

You setup everything through the web GUI (Palo Alto Panorama). You don't need to know a lot about CLI. With Cisco devices, you have to be an expert in CLI to set up a few things.

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate Prisma Access by Palo Alto Networks at ten because it's an innovative product. They “invented” the whole concept (SASE), and they're way ahead of other competitors.

It made VPN easy with the ability to build distributed VPN gateways. The cost of IT deployment is a bit less because you just need a VPN-capable device at the branch, as against the full stack, before leveraging the firewall service feature. There is also better latency for the clients in terms of talking to resources back at the data center.

It's Panorama-managed. Using Panorama makes it easy for me in terms of pulling policies and doing things on the fly.

It's pretty similar to the native physical firewalls. The only difference is that with SaaS security, we're able to get a little more detail about shadow IT SaaS applications and properly categorize them, which is helpful to decide what we need to do with those applications. It affects which applications we would want to see running over the network and which applications we need to restrict from users.

Similarly, in terms of protecting data and preventing zero-day threats, it's the same thing that I get with my physical firewalls. The data is sent to Wildfire. All the features are all pulled from the same intelligence sensors. The only difference is that this is in the cloud.

Prisma SaaS helps to keep pace with SaaS growth in our organization, but it's not a big deal for us. Mostly, we're looking through or sifting through identified SaaS applications, and it's a good thing to have that visibility. That's what we're enjoying right now, and then probably with time, we might be relying on it to make decisions in terms of setting restrictions to some SaaS applications, especially those that are not sanctioned by IT.

It's hard for me to pinpoint a certain feature against the other. The product makes more sense as a whole. Overall, the cost savings, ease of deployment, and better VPN user experience and performance are valuable.

It helps to identify and control shadow IT apps. In terms of its impact on our organization's security, it has been like a sword with two edges. Sometimes, it has proved to be helpful in securing workloads, and sometimes, especially when there are modifications to App-IDs pushed through the content database, we find some things messed up. We've come to a point where we have our ways of managing these things, but all in all, App-ID has been very helpful, especially in detecting tunneled applications.

At the end of the day, it's simply an operational thing. Sometimes, you have these notifications sent out about changes in App-IDs, modifications in App-IDs, or even the introduction of entirely new App-IDs to replace. Sometimes, the recommendations are followed, but even then, when the package is installed on the firewall, it gets messed up. I remember a particular one was with Tableau, and suddenly, people weren't able to use Tableau, which is an analytics tool for business. So, it can get messed up, but it doesn't happen often.

I have been using it for about two years.

So far, it has been stable. We get all those notifications around changes. I haven't seen a lot of IT changes that need some kind of manual effort. 

Being on the global license package and being able to spin up a VPN gateway just like that has been a huge benefit. If I have new users in Berlin, I can make life better and just spin up something close to Berlin for them to connect to. If there's an office coming up somewhere in Poland and there are some supply chain issues. If I have a router somewhere there, I can just leverage on that easily without worrying about, "Oh, when am I going to get my stack deployed? How soon can I complete a project so that users are able to start working from that office?" Those are the things that I don't need to bother about anymore because I can easily spin up a complete node close to their location, and I can tunnel between them, do my routing, and they're good. They can talk to whatever resources we need them to talk to remotely and connect to the cloud from there for internally protected cloud workloads. Scalability is obviously a huge factor.

The Cloud App-ID technology is something I am still observing. It takes us back to SaaS security. App-ID is a critical and fundamental part of being able to identify SaaS applications. So far, the applications identified have been true positives. It seems to work so far, but with time, we'll see how it's able to help with identifying SaaS applications better. 

It helped to identify cloud applications that we were unaware that our employees were using. I don't have the metrics, but we do generate reports from time to time just to see what's going on and how we compare with the industry in terms of application usage. Similarly, for risk identification, I don't have metrics. We are just reviewing and sifting through these applications. We don't, or we haven't, put a risk score on them yet. Until that's done, it's almost impossible for me to say if these are bad actors or not. We have visibility now. The SaaS applications that have been used at the moment are not of concern based on the last review we did. As time goes on, we might start considering some as risky or start categorizing the risks in some of these SaaS applications. Currently, it's all open. We mostly have mobile users, and we have another solution for endpoint security and Internet-based applications that go through their home Internet. There are few who do visit the office. Probably less than 10% of the organization goes into the office, so there's no huge concern at the moment because of those very low numbers.

For the parts and the features that I use, which are mostly remote branch and mobile gateway, I would rate it an eight out of ten.

The use case for our clients is that they have branch office locations all over the world. Users can connect over the internet and inspection of their traffic will happen on the Prisma infrastructure. Remote users can also connect to the VPN through Prisma infrastructure, and they can connect their data center with the Prisma infrastructure as well.

It's a cloud solution from Palo Alto Networks. Customers just need to establish an IPSec tunnel from their on-prem device with Palo Alto's closest location, which they have all over the world—100-plus locations.

The benefit of using Prisma Access is that the customer doesn't need to have their own data center. They just need to purchase a Prisma Access license. The customer will save on the labor cost associated with the data center, on the electricity cost, and they will save on the land cost as well. The data center infrastructure is provided by Palo Alto Networks.

Prisma Access is a big change for our customers. Not having to have data centers, and not having to deploy a firewall at each location, makes things simpler.

The solution also enables customers to deliver better applications. It helps them save on costs. It is easy to manage with fewer resources.

It's easy to manage. Our customers do not need to worry about what is happening in the data center. With legacy networks, they have to worry about things like the firewall being down and having to go to the data center to replace it. With Prisma Access, they do not need to worry about that. Palo Alto takes care of it. If something goes down in the infrastructure, the Palo Alto team will take care of it.

Prisma Access protects all app traffic, so that users can gain access to all apps. It is important for our clients that all traffic coming through the firewall is inspected. Prisma inspects all the traffic, and if a customer wants to make an exception for certain traffic, that is also possible.

It also inspects both web-based apps and non web-based apps.

In addition, it's really easy to manage. If customers have Panorama they can use it to manage Prisma Access. There is also a cloud application which provides a single console to manage it. Changes can be made on that console and pushed to the customer's environment, which is another way they make it easy to manage. The customer can opt for Panorama or the cloud management application. The latter is free.

Prisma Access provides traffic analysis, threat prevention, URL filtering, and segmentation, as well as vulnerability protection, DLP, anti-spyware, antivirus, URL filtering, and file blocking. It provides everything. This combination is very important. When a customer wants to block certain URL categories, they can block them. If they want to exclude any entertainment websites from their environment, they can block them. What we implement depends totally on the customer's environment and what they need. We can play with it and modify things.

Another benefit is that if any vulnerability is detected, such as a Zero-day attack, Palo Alto provides an update dynamically. The patch is installed so that the network is not exploited.

The Autonomous Digital Experience Management (ADEM) offered by Palo Alto is a good reporting tool. It gives insights into how things are going within the network. It takes all the data from the users' endpoints and does an analysis, and it suggests changes as well. The ADEM analysis of various tests will give the user feedback such as, "Okay, I'm seeing latency here." We or the customer can then improve on that. If something is blocked that shouldn't be, we can make a change in the policy. It's a good tool to have. It makes the user experience better.

The Cloud Management application has room for improvement. There are a lot of things on the roadmap for that application; things are going to happen soon.

I have been using Palo Alto Networks Prisma Access for around one year, as a consultant. I have deployed the solution for clients all over the world.

The availability of Prisma Access is good. I haven't seen any major issues yet.

It is scalable. We scale the solution based on the customer's requirements, after getting their technical design and discussing how they want to deploy it.

I would rate their customer support at nine out of 10. The one point I have deducted is because it is very hard to get support sometimes. There are times when the customer has to wait a long time in the queue. But once they get an engineer, they get the proper support. The Palo Alto engineers are good. It's just that it's very hard to get the engineer on time, sometimes. I believe this is because the solution has expanded a lot. Users are purchasing it but the support is not keeping pace. They are working on that and the support is going to be increased in the future.

Positive

The deployment is simple.

The time it takes for deployment of Prisma Access depends on how big the environment is. One company may have 120 or 130 branch sites, while another company may have just six or seven. It varies on that number of sites or on the number of data centers they have. If there are only five or six branch office locations, then the deployment can be completed in five or six days.

I'm not involved on the financial side, but I believe the solution is costly.

In the same way a customer manages their on-prem firewalls that are not on Prisma Access, they can manage Prisma Access infrastructure through Panorama. That makes it easy for them. The customer is already familiar with how to manage things with Panorama, so there isn't much that is new. There are little changes but that's it. If a customer is already using Palo Alto, we recommend going with Panorama.

Overall, the security provided by Prisma Access is top-notch. It is the same firewall that Palo Alto provides for a local setup. It's the best firewall, per the industry review ratings.

We are using Prisma SaaS for products. We use many content-based platforms and we were using this product to perform policy detection. If someone is sharing something publicly, externally, from our domain, which is risky. This product allows you to write policies, and those policies will detect content, which captures them in the policy category or in the criteria. You then can add remediation action for protection.

We deploy the solution using their infrastructure and we connected that solution with our applications.

Prisma SaaS has helped the way our organization has functioned. Before the used the solution, we needed to write API calls for every platform to receive data out of it. It's a tedious task because we have 20 products and you need to write 20 application API calls. Once you receive the API calls, you need to massage and manipulate the data, search, and filter it. We need to write the full-fledged application. However, this product does it all, it gives you everything.

Instead of writing applications, we only need to go into one place, one URL, and we are able to do whatever we need to. In terms of hours, it saved us a lot of time and hours to do similar tasks previously, which we used to do using API calls to the product.

This is a one-stop solution. They have multiple features for every product, you don't need to purchase different products for each platform. When you purchase one Prisma SaaS you can connect to 10 different things. You can write different policies, attach different policies, search, and export the data out. There are many capabilities of this solution.

The solution has all its capabilities in a single cloud delivery platform which is great and it provides overall good protection.

If you compare Prisma SaaS against other products, such as Cloud Log, it's a little bit tricky to understand, but it offers different functionality that other products don't have. From a user usability point of view, you need some training for this product, as an admin, you need a couple of demos.

The reports and setting the policies could improve, they are important. Their UI is a little bit confusing when you create the policy section. There are times when it looks like you are in one section, but you're technically in another section and you're saving something else. The need to make it more clear in the UI for policy creation and setup.

I have been using Prisma SaaS for approximately one year.

The stability of the solution is a little bit slow when you do searching. However, I have never seen an error on the application for over one year. It is stable.

The scalability of Prisma SaaS is very good.

We plan to increase the usage of this solution. We are working with the compliance team and we are trying to find more policies and more products where we can use Prisma SaaS. We have recently renewed the solution for three more years.

If we open a private ticket, they're pretty fast. They get back to us in a timely manner and we work with them actively.

I would rate the technical support a seven out of ten.

We have two solutions that we use. We also use CloudLock for a specific product. These products are usually application-based, and if you compare BetterCloud and CloudLock, CloudLock is good for Google. Similarly, BetterCloud is good for Dropbox because their EPA's are more integrated. Prisma SaaS is good for receiving data from OneDrive, Office365, and a lot of other products. We have multiple products depending on the use case.

The initial setup is straightforward. It's a SaaS product, we only need to log in and integrate our apps using our administrative rights.

The full deployment takes a couple of weeks. The deployment is easy, but the scanning takes time. If you connect a product and that product is having a terabyte of data, the scanning will take time. However, deployment connecting to the products, it's fairly easy.

We implement the solution in a sandbox environment and a production environment. The sandbox environment is connected to our sandbox applications, and production is connected to production applications. Whenever we are trying to launch a new policy, we used to try a new sandbox first. If it goes well, we send it to a production environment. We upload a sample of corrupted files to see if the policies are acting as they are supposed to.

We used an integrator and we worked with them directly.

We use approximately 40 hours a week for the maintenance of the solution to get everything done.

The pricing can be difficult because it came to us with another agreement, but it can be negotiated. I highly recommend people to compare this product's performance and pricing against BetterCloud, because I feel BetterCloud is better than Prisma SaaS if they're starting from scratch.

The auditing does not protect all application traffic. It's more content-based. For example, if I uploaded a file and that file has sensitive information, Prisma will detect it. It will tell me where that file has been uploaded, how it's shared, whose current external parties were accessed. Anything which is bound to my user base, I will receive the report, but not the audit log. It won't tell me when users log into the platform, or if they log out. However,  it will tell me if they upload anything and take any action on that content.

We can connect the solution to AWS F3, which you can be considered not web-based because it has both products. From the F3 bucket, you can access it through different mechanisms. We are using it for some products which are not purely web-based.

We use SaaS products. That means infrastructure is not in our control and if you upload something into those platforms, such as Dropbox, any content that is put into the data system, we need to make sure that our data is protected and not shared outside. This product and its processes allow us to monitor it. We can create a policy, and limit the action. A person does not need to wait and then take action. For example, if someone uploaded something critical, a Saas policy gets triggered, and it automatically brings that operation down. If someone shares a file publicly, the policy triggers and detects the file and removes the public sharing. This is how we are protecting our data within our platform using this product.

I have learned from using this solution we should have more policies created as per compliance and security to utilize the features of this product better. If you have this product and if you're not writing a policy, then this product is useless. Right now we have basic policies, four and five, which I feel we have the potential to increase to 15 or 20.

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

We primarily use the solution for mobile users and mainly mobile laptops. In some cases, we use the solution for cloud tenant portals in Azure. We use it to connect those back into the network.

Overall, it's a great solution that works quite well.

The solution's most valuable feature is the posture checking. 

It's great that we can make sure a machine meets the minimum requirements before users are allowed to log in.

The solution needs to be more compatible with other solutions. This is specifically a problem for us when it comes to healthcare applications. They have proprietary connection types and things of that nature that make compatibility a challenge sometimes.

The scaling can be a bit tricky, depending on the setup.

I've probably been using the solution for four years at this point.

The stability is quite good. We haven't had any issues in that sense. It's reliable. There aren't bugs or glitches. It doesn't fail.

The solution is scalable. However, it's more of kind-of piecemeal scalability. I didn't actually deploy it. I just know a lot about it. It depends on how your network is set up. If you have a single egress, it's easy. If you have 70 egresses, it can be very, very difficult. 

You may have those many email egresses because you're geologically spread out and you need people to connect with certain portals based on where they are. Of course, we want users to connect to their closest portal. There's complexity there and the cloud doesn't really solve it because the cloud still has to do load balancing and hand it off to the concentrator.

On average, we have about 8,000 users between IT, finance, HR, and, of course, house and home users. 

I can't speak to the acceptability of technical support. I've never had to contact them.

We were using AnyConnect. It was limited in terms of egresses, so we decided to switch.

For us, the initial setup was not straightforward. It was very complex due to the fact that we're a very large company. That said, I don't mind the complexity.

The deployment was easy. It was just a matter of handling the configuration for different regions and hospitals. We had to figure out what egress they come in on or what device they come in on and things like that and that decide upon what's the most efficient means for them to connect back into the network.

I don't deal with licensing in the company. I'm not sure what the pricing is.

My understanding is that it's a bit more expensive only because it's part of the framework of the Palo Alto solution. It's more sensitive than if we just went and got some free VPN or some ad hoc solution, and so it's a bit more costly.

We're just a customer. We don't have a business relationship with the company.

I'd advise others that the solution is largely based on the complexity of your environment. It's not that deployment's difficult. It's just that you want to put it where it's most efficient. You've got to take the time to figure out where your users are and how they connect and where they're connecting from.

Overall, I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

One of our use cases is that it is used by our internal users, our employees, when they need to work remotely. They'll be out in the field and, wherever they have an internet connection, they run the GlobalProtect client, connect, and they can access our resources as if they're in our building. For example, we have health inspectors who go to different sites.

Of course, we're doing more teleworking like everyone right now. Also, our admins all use it because that's how we get in and do remote work. And, periodically, we have contractors or vendors who need remote access. We'll build an account in AD and either have them download the client and connect to us, or if they currently use the GlobalProtect client for some other VPN connection, we can just provide our gateway and they can use their existing client to connect to the resources that we allow them.

We also have a clientless VPN by Palo Alto. It's a website where you can enter your AD credentials, and it will publish internal web apps that you can access through a browser. We have some users, and a set of contractors, who use that to access some of our internal systems for COVID response.

It's a cloud-based VPN, but it's managed from our Panorama instance, which is on-site. There's the GlobalProtect client that gets installed, that's the VPN client on your laptop, and that automatically updates from the cloud when a new version is available.

Prisma Access is our first cloud-based VPN solution. I like that aspect because I don't have all the traffic hitting my firewall interface directly. Users go to the cloud, wherever they are, and connect to some kind of cloud. It will grab their config, and our firewall doesn't see any extra traffic from that. That's awesome.

Because we are in the health sector, the clientless, web-based VPN that we're using has allowed us to partner with some external companies to do contact tracing for COVID. That means that if someone is positive for COVID, those companies track back to the people they have been in contact with and try to find the source. The fact that the only way a couple of hundred of our employees can access our records at any time is through the web-based VPN has really improved our ability to respond to the pandemic.

I like it because it's very easy to use. You install the client and you have to know your gateway, but that's something we give to our users. Beyond that, it takes about three seconds to train them on how to use it. And it just works well. That's great for us because it means less administrative time.

It's also nice that Prisma Access provides all its capabilities in a single, cloud-delivered platform. 

The thick client secures non-web apps in addition to web-based apps. If you have the client installed on your laptop, it's a completely secure VPN connection and anything you run will be secured by it. The clientless VPN, the web-based one, only allows you to redirect to URLs; it's only web. Being able to access non-web apps is important to us because it's how we get our remote work done. Not everything is web-based. We have to run applications and access Windows shares and the like. 

This ability helps decrease the risk of data breach. Information security is more and more a huge concern for everyone. Knowing that everything's going across an encrypted tunnel, and that we can manage what is accessed by which user, are huge benefits.

Another important aspect is that Prisma Access provides millions of security updates per day, because security has really become our number-one focus lately. That feature is very good.

I've been using Prisma Access by Palo Alto Networks for about two years, maybe a little longer.

It has been very stable. We've had a couple of small outages, but overall it's very trustworthy and stable.

It's cloud-based, so it's infinitely scalable. For us, it has worked fine. We went from a few users at first and we built up to hundreds.

It's our clientless VPN that really builds up our user count. It is consistently between 300 and 400 users. It rises and falls depending on what kind of campaign we're doing. If a new COVID variant is discovered and we have to ramp things up because of CDC guidance, the user count will bump up.

The one thing that I've been a little bit disappointed with is when we have had to open cases with Palo Alto about Prisma Access issues. Versus their other platforms, like their firewalls, where we tend to get really quick responses and very definitive answers, the few tickets I've had to open for Prisma Access have taken them longer to respond to. And they haven't necessarily given me the kind of answer I was looking for, meaning a fix to the problem. Maybe this technology is not as cut and dry as some of their other technologies. But I think they could improve their support offering for Prisma a little bit and put more expertise in place.

Overall, I'm very happy with Palo Alto's support. I'm not saying that their Prisma support is awful. It just hasn't been quite up to par with other support I've seen from them, which has been pretty phenomenal.

Positive

For VPN, we used Cisco AnyConnect. The switch to Prisma Cloud was part of a platform switch from Cisco ASA to Palo Alto firewalls.

We also have other solutions, such as a virtual desktop solution that is available externally. Some of our users use that and others use the VPN.

The setup was medium complex. Because of the way we're doing it through our Panorama, it's a little more complex than it would be on the cloud-only solution. There is definitely some  complexity to it.

I wasn't involved in the initial deployment of it, but our organization worked with a vendor called CompuNet, a company with Palo Alto expertise. I would guess it took one to two days to get through everything and test it. 

The evaluation happened before my time here, but we had people who had worked with Palo Alto previously. They knew its reputation and were happy with it. I think the switch happened directly.

It functions like a lot of other VPN solutions. It's not special in that sense. It just works.

I have spoken with another agency that was looking at Prisma Access. The one thing they weren't aware of was the clientless, web-based VPN that is part of the product. They were pretty excited when I explained to them how we use it. So make sure you review the full feature set that Prisma Access offers. It may be broader than you expected.

We are using it as a hybrid solution where we manage it through our onsite firewall. There is a Prisma Access full-cloud solution where you do all the management there. If we were to start over again today, I would probably go full-cloud. That would ease the management a little bit. People who are using the cloud-only solution probably have fewer hoops to jump through to get certain things accomplished. But we've been fine.

The biggest issue I've run into is that most of the documentation for Prisma Access is based on the full-cloud model, as opposed to our hybrid implementation. It's a little trickier to find out how to implement some of those changes through Panorama. There are also some connectors you have to set up to make sure that your Panorama is talking to the cloud the way it should. Those wouldn't be necessary in the cloud version, and that means it's probably a little easier to sync your AD, set up your users in the cloud, and you're done. Everything is already on the cloud.

Overall, I'm very happy with the security provided by Prisma Access. Palo Alto is a security company and is always working on ways to make things more secure. I feel very confident that our data is safe using the solution, which is the whole point.