Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks Reviews

We are using the CSPM, CWP, and Code Security modules across our team. We are using the CSPM for our compliance system and the CWP for container security.

We are using multiple cloud accounts and the solution helps us with posture management. We have identified things that have optimized our posture across those accounts. We now have a single tool to protect all of our cloud resources.

We have also been able to integrate security into the CI/CD pipeline with touchpoints into existing DevOps processes. At runtime, it gives us risk clarity; the modules are really good and we have seen a decrease in alert investigation times.

Integration is very easy. And because it supports security that spans multi- and hybrid-cloud environments, it's very easy to use.

It's also a very good tool for helping us take a preventive approach to cloud security. The CSPM part is very easy.

It's pretty good when it comes to protecting the full cloud-native stack, but it depends on how you configure it and the kinds of rules you implement.

When it comes to compliance, the issue is that when we are exporting the reports, there is only a single compliance option. If I need to report on multiple compliance requirements, that feature isn't available. For example, I made a single report for ISO 27000 but I can't correlate it with GDPR.

Also, for the different modules we have to set up different policies. There should be a single console where we can implement and define all the rules in one go.

It provides visibility and control across our distributed cloud environments, apart from network segmentation. The network segmentation modules have very limited functionality.

And onboarding multiple Unix platforms is a little complex.

I have been using Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks for one and a half years.

Overall, it's stable.

It's scalable.

The initial setup was slightly complex, when it came to integrating everything.

Almost all the CSPM tools are pretty expensive. I also explored Orca but it is also pretty expensive.

As of now, we are going to continue with this product. But we are also exploring. New tools are coming into the market so we have to keep up with all the tools and technologies. We are exploring what other kinds of features are available in the market.

From the security automation point of view, it's a fairly good tool, but it still needs some enhancements. Sometimes, it becomes somewhat complex to implement everything.

Overall, Prisma Cloud is a pretty good tool. The only part that stands out for improvement is the reporting.

We use it for visibility, compliance, and governance. It is the official CSPM solution for our bank.

The only module we are using is the compliance module.

In Prisma Cloud, we were able to create frameworks using the RQL language, frameworks that are modeled after our Archer security baselines. Archer is the tool that we used to track all exceptions and security baselines. With Prisma Cloud we have been able to create custom baselines, based on the Archer framework that we have, and not just go off of CIS or NIST frameworks. 

We have also been able to generate reports for teams using the automated scripting tools that Prisma Cloud provides. On a weekly basis, we share those reports with the teams that are impacted. They go back and remediate their findings as needed, or we fine-tune the Prisma Cloud compliance language as needed if there is any ambiguity in there. 

Over the course of a few weeks, the teams remediate these issues and our compliance percentage goes up. Our compliance percentage for production environments was 95 percent. We then made some new acquisitions and they were at 40 or 50 percent, which was very bad. When we brought them under our company's umbrella, we gave them these reports, and they improved their compliance percentage. That has been helping us hugely.

Also, it does a good job of providing a view of our overall posture. Our confidence in our security and compliance posture was what I would describe as a "head in the sand" type of situation before. People would say, "Ah, we should be okay." But once we started digging into stuff and started putting our Archer baselines into the Prisma Cloud queries, that's when we realized that things looked poorer than we had imagined or assumed. This has been a wake-up call for our organization, and everybody has taken notice that we really have a hard job ahead of us.

In addition, with this solution we are seeing a single pane of glass to protect all of our cloud resources and appliances. We are seeing multiple occurrences with multiple platforms under one roof. That has really helped to simplify things.

Prisma Cloud does have some good investigation built into it. When an alert is generated, it does a good job at correlation, not the greatest in the world, but it gives you a good starting point. So it has helped us work on those alerts or investigate them more easily. It reduces our investigation time by 40 to 50 percent because it does all the initial investigation and puts all the findings together. You don't have to manually log into a lot of different accounts or tools to find out that information.

Financially, the only way I can think of that the solution has improved things is in our compliance structure. We spend less time after audits by putting in the effort beforehand. Recently, we have had a lot of good wins where audits have not been able to find a lot of issues. In the past, they used to find 15 or 16 findings, and now, they're able to find only one or two. When you have fewer audit findings, you have fewer man-hours dedicated to dealing with them. We are able to move those man-hours into our actual work rather than just audit work. We have been able to achieve some productivity there. I would estimate it has saved us 5 to 10 percent, in terms of money.

The most valuable feature is the option to add custom queries using the RQL language that they supply so that we can customize the compliance frameworks to what we need to look for.

The comprehensive view that it offers, the compliance percentage based on a framework for a particular account or a particular environment, is extremely useful. We can give those reports to the individual application teams so that they can remediate the findings. It also helps that we can give them read-only access, so we don't even get involved. They log in on their own and can pull a report, based on our instructions, and then do the remediation themselves. It helps us not be the middleman and not waste our time just generating reports for the application teams.

Also, Prisma Cloud provides security for multi and hybrid-cloud environments. We started off using it for our AWS environments, but now Azure and GCP are starting to come into play. We haven't started using those yet, we have just started initial discussions with them, but it has already been decided that Prisma Cloud would be the CSPM even for our Azure and GCP environments.

One definite area for improvement is the auto-remediation or the CWP area. 

The second one is the RQL language. It is still not very flexible and does not cover a lot of use cases. The RQL language could be dramatically improved to add more options. The cloud is adding more and more complexity in terms of number of services or the number of options for each service, especially when it comes to security options like encryption at rest and encryption in transit. And there is the issue of the interlinking of these services. One cloud service uses another cloud service, like CloudFront in front of a load balancer. These interactions are creating numerous new combinations and the RQL language really needs enhancement to handle those queries. 

We ourselves have put in a lot of enhancement requests to Palo Alto, looking at these corner cases, so they can look into those and improve them.

I have been using Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks for about two years.

Prisma Cloud is a little slow, but it is fairly stable.

It is a scalable solution. No matter how many accounts you add, it still can scale. Even the reports that we set up run pretty quickly. They have done a good job of making their platform scalable.

We have been acquiring companies quite a bit recently so we will be using Prisma Cloud heavily. This is our only company-approved CSPM tool. Even though we have some of the native tools in use, like Security Hub from AWS, or Azure Security Center, now called Defender for Cloud in Azure, the official CSPM is Prisma Cloud. It is the center of attraction for us so it is being used by everybody. In the future, we will be adding more accounts as needed until a decision is made on Wiz. We still have a good amount of time left in our Prisma Cloud contract, so we are not looking to switch to Wiz anytime soon.

Technical support is excellent. We have a dedicated account manager from Prisma Cloud who has an office hours session every Monday, and he also attends our standup calls. If Prisma Cloud has any new improvements or any updates that we might be interested in, he brings them up on those calls. We also have a weekly knowledge-sharing session where Prisma Cloud's personnel come in and make a 30-minute presentation and address the enhancement requests that we put in. They'll tell us what updates have happened, what improvements have happened, et cetera.

Positive

The initial setup was straightforward. It was done by one of our team leads, who is a cloud security fellow. He used to be a senior cyber security engineer. It took him three months of full-time work to set up those compliance frameworks, the custom RQL queries based on our Archer baseline, and then, import all the accounts. The importing of the accounts is pretty straightforward. They provide an API or you can even import manually. That's not at all a problem.

We have 10 to 15 users in the solution. Four or five of us are from cloud security proper, and we have administrative rights. Our cloud operations team, seven or eight people, looks at the alerts and investigates and resolves them. They engage us if they need any assistance because they're not very cloud aware yet. And we have a few pilot users who are from the application teams, and they have a read-only role. They generate a report for themselves. Many people still want spoon-feeding and say, "Can you generate a report for us or give us a screenshot of this and that?" We do that occasionally, but we are trying to move away from that process.

For maintenance, there are only two of us, and one of us is doing it full-time, more or less. The other one is more of a standby. We are documenting the procedures. We do weekly maintenance in Prisma Cloud, where we make sure the users are onboarded, there are no stale users, and take care of the general upkeep of the tool. The idea is that, in the future, we'll probably get a junior engineer for that role, while the senior engineer can perform enhancements or more advanced configurations.

When it comes to protecting the full cloud-native stack, Prisma Cloud is fairly okay. Compared to other tools out there, I don't think it is an extremely good product, but it's a reasonably okay product to work with. I've used Wiz in the past, and Wiz does a better job on full native-cloud security.

For example, there is the auto-remediation feature in Wiz, which Prisma Cloud eventually caught up to. Wiz also has agentless scanning that Prisma Cloud is, again, catching up to. There is also Terraform code scanning for CI/CD pipelines that Wiz came up with, ISC code scanning, et cetera. Those are some of the excellent features of Wiz.

Wiz also offers granular compliance frameworks in the sense that you could write your own compliance queries and make them part of a framework. Prisma Cloud's RQL is not that flexible. We are still running into some issues in some corner cases where there are no RQL queries available.

Prisma Cloud's security automation capabilities are very basic. Prisma Cloud is primarily a CSPM, not a CWPP. Even Wiz does not offer that many automation capabilities; they were coming out just at the end of the last year. But compared to other products that I have worked with, which are purely CWPP, Prisma Cloud would not even come close.

I would rate Prisma Cloud at about six out of 10 for helping to take a preventative approach to cloud security. It gets the job done. Our company has invested money in it, so we can't move away from it for another two or three years. But we are already piloting Wiz to see if we like it. Once the contract with Prisma Cloud is up, we will probably jump to Wiz. That's the idea within the company.

If I were to rate Prisma Cloud from one to 10, I would maybe rate it at six, while Wiz would be a nine.

We have started using some of the modules for securing the entire cloud-native development cycle across build, deploy, and run, but we have not really operationalized them. They're in the initial phases. It's not the maturity of Prisma Cloud that's in question, it's about the maturity of our company as a whole. Our company was not really tuned to CI/CD, secure DevOps, and the like, so we are slowly starting to integrate that. We haven't seen the results yet, but I would say it's very promising on that front at this time.

My advice would be to compare other products and understand what you want to do before you purchase or implement it.

Prisma Cloud has multiple components. We are already using RedLock, and it has Twistlock included in it. It also has PureSec, which should be pretty useful for our cloud security.

One of the most valuable features is the compliance of RedLock, which we are using for any issues with security. It flags them and that's the primary objective of that feature. We are still working on implementing the other features that were integrated into Prisma Cloud from Twistlock and PureSec.

The feedback that we have given to the Palo Alto Networks team is that the UI can be improved. When you press the "back" button on your browser from the Investigate tab, the query that you're working on just disappears. It won't keep the query on the "back" button.

Also, the way the policies are structured and the alerts are created could be better. It requires a lot of manual work to search through the policies when creating an alert.

These are minute nuances. They are not major issues and are more about convenience than they are product bugs.

We are still working with the Palo Alto Networks representatives to implement our rollout.

Because we are already using Palo Alto Networks firewall, we expect Prisma Cloud should be pretty stable.

It's a team effort and multiple people will be involved.

It's definitely a good product. If a company is heavily into the public cloud environment, they must look to use a product like this to gain good visibility into their security. It will also help with the compliance of how they are doing things in the cloud. It's definitely a good, must-have tool.

We provide our customers with a secure cloud platform. The client uses this solution for their architecture and we check the reports once a month and provide them with guidance on how to improve their cloud operation.

Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks provides a security span in multiple cloud and hybrid cloud environments. This is an important step to be able to have visibility of all the cloud environments.

The solution has helped me to take a preventative approach to cloud security. This technology is what is going to be used predominantly in the future. The newest standards are being used in this solution technology providing us with a preventive approach.

This solution benefits organizations because it uses the newest technology to provide a safe cloud environment.

We do not have a very complex environment but for our usage, the solution provides us visibility and control.

The solution provides us with a single tool that protects all our cloud resources without having to manage and reconcile security compliance reports.

The most valuable feature of Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks is the CSPM, which we use the most. Additionally, the investigation and alerts are useful, and the creation of queries.

The solution is improved frequently, approximately twice a month.

Support is an area that needs improvement.

I have been using Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks for approximately two years.

Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks has been a stable solution.

We have approximately six engineers using this solution in my organization.

The scalability of Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks is good. If we want to scale, we only need to purchase another license.

The technical support is not good at responding to questions compared to other companies. They can be slow to respond and not professional enough. There are times when we have a question and they give us a general answer that is not helpful.

The initial setup of Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks is easy.

The solution has saved us money.

The pricing structure is easy to understand. Depending on the use case the pricing of the solution can be different. There are not any additional costs to the standard living fees.

I rate Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks an eight out of ten.

Our client needed a solution which would be a true implementation of the concept "Trust, but verify," and Aporeto fulfills that notion as it decouples security from network and infrastructure. It services microservices in a nifty and seamless way.

Aporeto has accelerated our client's expansion to the cloud. With Aporeto, they have secured their Linux workloads on any infrastructure with end-to-end encryption and have a path for modernizing with a security layer that is future-proofed.

The dynamic workload identity creation, attestation, and assignment is the best feature. In addition, the application dependency map across heterogeneous environments for compliance is a striking feature.

It integrates quite well with the AWS products as it uniquely fingerprints each workload. Aporeto is designed to combine metadata from the orchestration layer, the container, the operating system, and the AWS instance identity document. By combining these information sources, along with dynamic attributes such as image scanner inputs, Aporeto is designed to create a strong cryptographic identity for each workload. It authenticates and authorizes all network communications within a virtual private cloud (VPC), across VPCs independent of their region or availability zone, and across cloud environments.

More documentation with real-world use cases would be helpful. Another useful feature would be greater transparency and visibility into the security checks being implemented.

In AWS, it scales with the cloud and we have found no issues at all with the stability.

Aporeto is now available in AWS where it efficiently deploys, manages, and secures applications at scale on various platforms including Kubernetes, Docker, Linux, and Mesos, among others.

The purchasing process was easy and quick. It is a very economical solution.

We chose to procure this solution via AWS Marketplace because that's where we get all other solutions and to make sure it's supported by AWS.

I would rate it as a nine out of ten, due to its cloud-facing features which fit in nicely with the whole cloud ecosystem.

When we migrated our workloads from the on-prem to the cloud, we used Prisma Cloud to tell us whether our workloads were PCI compliant.

Prisma Cloud ensures that our organization is PCI compliant.

The most valuable feature is its cloud security posture management. Prisma Cloud is very easy to use and gives us daily reports.

The user interface should be improved and made easier.

We have been using Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks for five years.

The stability is good.

The scalability is good.

Prisma Cloud’s customer support is good.

We have seen an ROI with respect to time and metrics.

Regarding Prisma Cloud's pricing, we started small, and then we just kept on growing.

Before choosing Prisma Cloud, we evaluated SolarWinds as an option. We chose Prisma Cloud because SolarWinds wasn't an enterprise-level software.

The solution has a moderate level of ease of use. Prisma Cloud has helped free 50% of our staff's time to work on other projects. Many tasks were done manually before, but now things are faster with Prisma Cloud.

We are trying to learn about new cybersecurity issues and what other solutions are available to combat them.

Overall, I rate Prisma Cloud an eight out of ten.

We use the Bridgecrew, IaC, and CSPM domains.

Prisma Cloud has given us a good approach to view our security loopholes. Container security has also helped us.

CSPM is very useful because it gives us good policies and violation alerts. The solution is very good for IaC too.

The reporting should be much more refined.

They need to improve the API gateway.

I have been using Prisma Cloud for three years.

The stability is improving.

The scalability is good. We can extend it to many cloud vendors.

Palo Alto's support is good.

Positive

The solution is good. It is easy to use, but Prisma keeps on releasing new features. So the console becomes a little bit typical. Auto-remediation is time-efficient.

The RSA conference is valuable to my organization. The conference has an impact on our organization's cybersecurity purchases sometimes. Overall, I would rate Prisma Cloud an eight out of ten.

When we did a POC, we realized that this product was able to give us insights into how consumers or services are activated. We could tell if, in certain cases, there was any kind of manual issues such as a misconfiguration. The solution is used to help us to reconfigure items and figure out what reconfiguration needs to be done, et cetera. Our target was to enhance the security portion of our AWS cloud.

The security features are quite good. 

The monitoring part is excellent. It is able to completely monitor our users in order to see what the users are doing at what time and if the users are currently logged in from India, and after five minutes of seeing a user if they are then trying to log in from Singapore, for example. Of course, this would not be possible, and so we would know something was wrong. It can pick up questionable behavior that may have been missed.

The reporting is great.

It's very user-friendly. You can easily make customized dashboards as well. 

We can easily restrict the users if we need to. We can even restrict them from accessing certain applications or services.

If anything tries to come in from a malicious IP, it will block it.

The initial setup is easy. 

We've found the solution to be stable and reliable. 

The solution does offer pretty good integration options.

Technical support is quite helpful.

The remediation part could be better. It should be able to automatically remediate on the basis of its artificial intelligence. If there are alerts, it should directly act and surround the malicious threat with a container or something. Instead of waiting on approval, it should immediately act. There should be no need for manual input when there is a threat on hand.

The ability to scale is limited as it is a SAS product. 

The licensing is a bit confusing.

We've used the solution for a while. Previously, it was RedLock Solutions and we were using it since it was known as RedLock. That's around let's say two years now. Then, Palo Alto bought it, and we now use it under the new name.

The stability and reliability are excellent. There are no bugs or glitches. It does not crash or freeze. it's great.

The scalability isn't infinite. It's limited.

That said, we haven't really tested it as we haven't added any users or anything into the solution yet.

We have found the technical support to be helpful and responsive. Originally, when we needed assistance with integrating it into our AWS cloud, we contact them and they helped us immediately. It was a very positive experience. We were very satisfied. 

The initial setup is very easy. It's not overly complex. A company should be able to handle it without any issues. 

We pay a licensing fee on a yearly basis.

It is not costly. However, the way it is priced is based on the number of incentives. The problem is, what is the number of incentives? We don't know. They seem to do it by the number of workloads, however, we're unclear as to what defines a workload. They need to improve on the licensing front. They need to be more clear about the whole thing.

I've never evaluated any other services.

We are Palo Alto partners.

I'd advise that companies that get big and have a lot of servers or critical applications in their cloud invest in this solution.

I would rate the solution at a nine out of ten.