Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks Reviews

We had an internal debate regarding our firewall solution for the cloud. Initially we had a vendor that suggested we could build a whole environment using the Azure firewall, but we had requirements for Zero Trust architecture. We are essentially like a bank. We were planning to host some PCI services in the cloud and we were planning to create all the zones. When we looked at the feature set of Azure, we were not able to find Layer 7 visibility, which we had on our firewalls, and that is where the debate started. We thought it was better to go with a solution that gives us that level of visibility. Our team was comfortable with Palo Alto as a data center firewall, so we went for Prisma Cloud.

The comprehensiveness of the solution for protecting the full cloud-native stack is pretty good. It is doing a good job in three areas: identification, detection, and the response part is also very clear. We are able to see what is wrong, what is happening, and what we allowed, even for troubleshooting. If something goes bad, we need to check where it went bad and where it started. For example, if there is an issue that seems to be performance-related, we are able to look at the logs and the traffic flow and identify if the issue really is performance-related or if it is a security issue. Because we are new to the cloud, we are using a combination of different features to understand what is going on, if the application owner does not know what is wrong. We use the traffic analysis to find out what it was like yesterday or the day before and what is missing. Perhaps it is an authentication issue. We use it a lot for troubleshooting.

We have implemented Palo Alto's SOAR solution, Demisto, and have automated some of the things that our SOC team identified, related to spam and phishing. Those workflows are working very well. Things that would take an analyst between three and six hours to do can now be achieved in five to eight minutes because of the automation capabilities.

Overall, the Palo Alto solution is extremely good for helping us take a preventative approach to cloud security. One of the problems that we had was that, in the cloud, networking is different from standard networking. Although only a portion of our teams is trained on the cloud part, because we had engineers who were using the platform, they were able to quickly adapt. We were able to use our own engineers who were trained in the data center to very quickly be able to work on Prisma Cloud. But when we initially tried to do that with Azure itself, we had a lot of difficulty because they did not have the background in how Azure cloud works.

Also, when you have a hybrid cloud deployment, you will have something on-prem. Maybe your authentication or certain applications are still running on-prem and you are using your gateway to communicate with the cloud. A lot of troubleshooting happens in both the data centers. When we initially deployed, we had separate people for the cloud and for the local data centers. This is where the complication occurred. Both teams would argue about a lot of things. Having a single solution, we're able to troubleshoot very quickly. The same people who work on our Palo Alto data center firewalls are able to use Prisma Cloud to search and find out what went wrong, even though it's a part of the Azure infrastructure. That has been very good for us. They were easily able to adapt and, without much training, they were able to understand how to use Prisma Cloud to see what is happening, where things are getting blocked, and where we need to troubleshoot.

The solution provides the visibility and control we need, regardless of how complex or distributed the cloud environments become. If you have traffic passing through multiple zones and you have your own data center as well, that is where it does the magic. Using Prisma Cloud, we're able to quickly troubleshoot and identify where the problem is. Suppose that a particular feature in Office 365 is not working. The packet capture capability really helps us. In certain cases, we have seen where Microsoft has had bugs and that is one area where this solution has really helped us. We have been able to use the packet capture capability to find out why it was not working. That would not have been possible in a normal solution. We are using it extensively for troubleshooting. We are capturing the data and then going back to the service provider with the required logs and showing them the expected response and what we are getting. We can show them that the issue is on their side.

When it comes to Zero Trust architecture, it's extremely good for compliance. In our data center, we did a massive project on NSX wherein we had seven PCI requirements. We needed to ensure that all the PCI apps pass through the firewall and that they only communicate with the required resources and that there was no unexpected communication. We used Prisma Cloud to implement Zero Trust architecture in the cloud. Even in between the subnets, there is no communication allowed. Only what we allowed is passing through the firewall. The rest is getting blocked, which is very good for compliance.

If I have to generate a report for the PCI auditor, it is very simple. I can show him that we have the firewall with the vulnerability and IPS capabilities turned on, and very quickly provide evidence to him for the certification part. This is exactly what we wanted and is one of the ways in which the solution is helping us.

Another of the great things about Prisma Cloud is that the management console is hosted. That means we are not managing the backend. We just use Prisma Cloud to find out where an issue is. We can go back in time and it is much faster. If you have an appliance, the administration and support of it are also part of your job. But when you have Prisma Cloud, you don't care about those things. You just focus on the issues and manage the cloud appliances. This is something that is new for us and extremely good. Even though we have a lot of traffic, the search and capabilities are very fast, making them extremely good for troubleshooting.

Because the response is much faster, we're able to quickly find problems, and even things that are not related to networking but that are related to an application. We are able to help the developers by telling them that this is where the reset packet is coming from and what is expected.

We are using the new Prisma Cloud 2.0 Cloud Security Posture Management features. For example, there are some pre-built checklists that we utilize. It really helps us identify things, compared to Panorama, which is the on-prem solution. There are a lot of elements that are way better than Panorama. For instance, it helps us know which things we really need to work on, identifying issues that are of high importance. The dashboards and the console are quite good compared to Panorama.

If one of our teams is talking about slowness, we are able to find out where this slowness is coming from, what is not responding. If there is a lock on the database, and issues are constantly being reported, we are able to know exactly what is causing the issue in the backend application.

The main feature is the management console which gives us a single place to manage all our requirements. We have multiple zones and, using UDR [user-defined routing] we are sending the traffic back to Palo Alto. From there we are defining the rules for each application. What we like about it is the ease of use and the visibility.

The application visibility is amazing. For example, sometimes we don't know what a particular custom port is for and what is running on it. The visibility enables us to identify applications, what the protocol is, and what service is behind it. Within Azure, it is doing a great job of providing visibility. We know exactly what is passing through our network. If there is an issue of any sort we are able to quickly detect it and fix the problem.

The solution provides Cloud Security Posture Management, Cloud Workload Protection, Cloud Network Security, and Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management in a single pane of glass. When it comes to anomaly detection, because we have Layer 7 visibility, if there is something suspicious, even though it is allowed, we are able to identify it using the anomaly detection feature. We also wanted something where we could go back in time, in terms of visibility. Suppose something happened two hours back. Because of the console, we are able to search things like that, two hours back, easily, and see what happened, what change might have happened, and where the traffic was coming from. These features are very good for us in terms of investigation.

In addition, there are some forensic features we are utilizing within the solution, plus data security features. For example, if we have something related to financial information, we can scan it using Prisma Cloud. We are using a mixture of everything it offers, including network traffic analysis, user activity, and vulnerability detection. All these things are in one place, which is something we really like.

Also, if we are not aware of what the port requirements are for an application, which is a huge issue for us, we can put it into learning mode and use the solution to detect what the exact port requirements are. We can then meet to discuss which ones we'll allow and which ones are probably not required.

The only part that is actually tough for us is that we have a professional services resource from Palo Alto working with us on customization. One of the things that we are thinking about is that if we have similar requirements in the future, how can we get his capability in-house? The professional services person is a developer and he takes our requirements and writes the code for the APIs or whatever he needs to access. We will likely be looking for a resource for the Demisto platform.

The automation also took us time, more than we thought it would take. We had some challenges because Demisto was a third-party product. Initially, the engineer who is with us thought that everything was possible, but later on, when he tried to do everything, he was not able to do some things. We had to change the strategy multiple times. But we have now reached a point where we are in a comfort zone and we have been able to achieve what we wanted to do.

Also, getting new guys trained on using the solution requires some thought. If someone is already trained on Palo Alto then he's able to adapt quickly. But, if someone is coming from another platform such as Fortinet, or maybe he's from the system side, that is where we need some help. We need to find out if there is an online track or training that they can go to.

Related to training is the fact that changes made in the solution are reflected directly in the production environment. As of now, we are not aware of any method for creating a demo environment where we can train new people. These are the challenges we have.

We have been using Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks for about eight months.

We have not had many issues with the solution's stability, and whatever challenges we have had have been in the public cloud. But with the solution itself there has only been one issue we got stuck on and that was NAT-ing. It was resolved later. We ran into some issues with our design because public internet access was an issue, and that took us some time. But it was only the NAT-ing part where we got stuck. The rest has all been smooth.

As of now, we have not put a load on the system, so we will only know about how it handles that when we start migrating our services. For now, we've just built the landing zones and only very few services are there. It will take like a year or so before we know how it will handle our load.

This is our main firewall solution. We are not relying on the cloud-based firewall as of now. All our traffic is going through Prisma Cloud. Once we add our workloads, we will be using the full capacity of the solution.

We have not had any issues up to now.

We initially tried to use the Azure firewall and the VPC that is available in Azure, but we had very limited capabilities that way. It was just a packet filtering solution with a lot of limitations and we ended up going back to Palo Alto.

The initial setup was straightforward. There was an engineer who really helped us and we worked with them directly. We did not have any challenges.

The initial deployment took us about 15 days and whatever challenges we had were actually from the design side. We wanted to do certain things in a different way and we made a few changes later on, but from the deployment and onboarding perspectives, it was straightforward.

We have a team of about 12 individuals who are using Prisma Cloud, all from the network side, who are involved in the design. On the security side, three people use it. We want to increase that number, but as I mentioned earlier, there is the issue of how we can train people. For maintenance, we have a 24/7 setup and we have at least six to eight engineers, three per shift. Most of them are from the network security side, senior network security engineers, who mainly handle proxy and firewall.

Our implementation strategy included using a third-party vendor, Crayon, who actually set up the basic design for us. Once the design was ready, we consulted with the Palo Alto team telling them that this was what we wanted to implement: We will have this many zones and these are the subnets. It didn't take much time because we knew exactly what our subnets were but also because the team that was helping us had already had experience with deployment.

Our experience with Crayon went well. Our timeline was extremely short and in the time that was available they did an excellent job. We reached a point where the landing zones were ready and whatever issues we had were resolved.

I can't say much about the pricing because we still have not started using the solution to its full capabilities. As of now, we don't have any issues. Whatever we have asked for has been delivered.

If you pay for three years of Palo Alto, it's better. If you're planning on doing this, it's obviously not going to be for one year, so it's better if you go with a three-year license.

The only challenge we have is with the public cloud vendor pricing. The biggest lesson I have learned is around the issues related to pricing for public cloud. So when you are doing your segmentation and design, it is extremely important that you work with someone who knows and understands what kinds of needs you will have in the future and how what you are doing will affect you in terms of costs. If you have multiple firewalls, the public cloud vendor will also charge you. There are a lot of hidden costs.

Every decision you make will have certain cost implications. It is better that you try to foresee and forecast how these decisions are going to affect you. The more data that passes through, the more the public cloud will charge you. If, right now, you're doing five applications, try to think about what 100 or 250 applications will cost you later.

If we had gone with the regular Azure solution, some of the concerns were the logging, monitoring, and search capabilities. If something was getting blocked how would we detect that? The troubleshooting was very complicated. That is why we went with Prisma Cloud, for the troubleshooting.

Microsoft is not up to where Palo Alto is, right now. Maybe in six months or a year, they will have some comparable capabilities, but as of now, there is no competitor.

Before choosing the Palo Alto product we checked Cisco and Fortinet. In my experience, it seemed that Cisco and Forinet were still building their products. They were not ready. We were lucky that when we went to Palo Alto they already had done some deployments. They already had a solution ready on the marketplace. They were quickly able to provide us the demo license and walk us through the capabilities and our requirements. The other vendors, when we started a year ago, were not ready.

If you have compliance requirements such as PCI or ISO, going with Palo Alto would be a good option. It will make your life much easier. If you do not have Layer 7 visibility requirements and you do not have auditing and related requirements, then you could probably survive by going with a traditional firewall. But if you are a midsize or enterprise company, you will need something that has the capabilities of Prisma Cloud. Otherwise, you will have issues. It is very difficult to work with the typical solution where there is no log and you don't know exactly what happened and there is too much trial and error.

Instead of allowing everything and then trying to limit things from there, if you go with a proper solution, you will know exactly what is blocked, where it is blocked, and what to allow and what not to allow. In terms of visibility, Prisma Cloud is very good.

One thing to be aware of is that we have a debate in our environment wherein some engineers from the cloud division say that if we had an Azure-based product, the same engineer who is handling the cloud, who is the global administrator, would have visibility into where a problem is and could handle that part. But because we are using Palo Alto, which has its own administrators, we still have this discussion going on.

Prisma Cloud also provides security spanning multi- and hybrid-cloud environments, which is very good for us. We do not have hybrid cloud as of now, but we are planning, in the future , to be hosting infrastructure on different cloud providers. As of now we only have Azure.

Because Zero Trust is something new for us, we have actually seen a significant increase in alerts. Previously, we only had intra-zone traffic. Now we have inter-zone traffic. Zero Trust deployments are very different from traditional deployments. It's something we have to work on. However, because of the increased security, we know that a given computer tried to scan something during office hours, or who was trying to make certain changes. So alerts have increased because of the features that we have turned on.

We have a very large public cloud estate. We have nearly 300 public cloud accounts, with almost a million things deployed. It's pretty much impossible to track all of the security and the compliance issues using anything that would remotely be considered homegrown—scripts, or something that isn't fully automated and supported. We don't have the time, or necessarily even the desire, to build these things ourselves. So we use it to track compliance across all of the various accounts and to manage remediation. 

We also have 393 applications in the cloud, all of which are part of various suites, which means there are at least 393 teams or groups of people who need to be held accountable for what they have deployed and what they wish to do. 

It's such a large undertaking that automating it is the only option. To bring it all together, we use it to ensure that we can measure and track and identify the remediation of all of our public cloud issues.

The solution provides risk clarity at runtime and across the entire pipeline, showing issues as they are discovered during the build phases. Our developers are able to correct them using the tools they use to code. It gives our developers a point to work towards. If the information provided by this didn't exist, then we wouldn't be able to give our developers the direction that they need to go and fix the issues. It comes back to ownership. If we can give full ownership of the issues to a team, they will go fix them. Honestly, I don't care how they fix them. I don't really mind what tools they use.

It is reducing run-time alerts. It's still in the process of working on those, but we have already seen a significant decrease, absolutely.

The entire concept is the right thing for us. It's what we need. The application is the feature, so to speak it. What it does is what we want it for: looking across the various cloud estates and providing us with information about what's going on in our cloud, where it is, when it happened. The product is the most valuable feature. It's not a do-all and end-all product. That doesn't exist. But it's a product with a very specific purpose. And we bought it for that very specific purpose.

When it comes to protecting the full cloud native stack—the pure cloud component of the stack—it is very good.

One of the main reasons we like Prisma Cloud so much is that they also provide an API. You can't expect to give someone an account on Prisma Cloud, or on any tool for that matter, and say, "Go find your things and fix them." It doesn't work like that. We've got to be able to clearly identify who owns what in our organization so that we can say, "Here's a report for your things and this is what you must go and fix." We pull down the information from the API that Prisma Cloud provides, which is multi-cloud, multi-account—hundreds and hundreds of different types of alerts graded by severity—and then we can clearly identify that these alerts belong to these people, and they're the people who must remediate them. That's our most important use case, because if you can't identify users, you can't remediate. No user is going to sit there going through over a million deployed things in the public cloud and say, "That one's mine, that one's not, that's mine, that's not." It's both the technology that Prisma Cloud provides and the ability to identify things distinctly, that comprise our use case.

It also provides the visibility and control we need, regardless of how complex or distributed our cloud environments become. It doesn't care about the complexity of our environment. It gives us the visibility we need to have confidence in our compliance. Without it, we would have no confidence at all.

It is also part of our DevOps processes and we have integrated security into our CI/CD pipeline. To be honest, those touchpoints are not as seamless as they could be because our processes do rely on multiple tools and multiple teams. But it is one of the key requirements in our DevOps life cycle for the compliance component to be monitored by this. It's a 100 percent requirement. The teams must use it all the time and be compliant before they move on to the next stage in each release. It is a bit manual for us, but that's because of our environment. It's given our SecOps teams the visibility they need to do their jobs. There's absolutely no chance that those teams would have any visibility, on a normal, day-to-day basis, simply because the SecOps teams are very small, and having to deal with hundreds of other development teams would be impossible for them on a normal basis.

Based on my experience, the customization—especially the interface and some of the product identification components—is not as customizable as it could be. But it makes up for that with the fact that we can access the API and then build our own systems to read the data and then process and parse it and hand it to our teams. At that point, we realized, "Okay, we're not never going to have it fully customizable," because no team can expect a product, off-the-shelf, to fit itself to the needs of any organization. That's just impossible.

So customization from our perspective comes through the API, and that's the best we can do because there is no other sensible way of doing it. The customization is exactly evident inside the API, because that's what you end up using.

In terms of the product having room for improvement, I don't see any product being perfect, so I'm not worried about that aspect. The RedLock team is very responsive to our requirements when we do point out issues, and when we do point out stuff that we would like to see fixed, but the product direction itself is not a big concern for us.

We've been using it since before it was called Prisma Cloud. We're getting on towards two years since we first purchased it.

The stability of Prisma Cloud is very good. I have no complaints along those lines. It seems to fit the requirements and it doesn't go down. Being a SaaS product, I would expect that. I haven't experienced any instability, and that's a good thing.

Again, as a SaaS product, I would expect it to just scale.

We regularly use Palo Alto technical support for the solution. I give it a top rating. They're very good. They have a very good customer success team. We've never had any issues. All our questions have been answered. It has been very positive.

We did not have a previous solution.

The initial setup was very straightforward. It's a SaaS product. All you have to do is configure your end, which isn't very hard. You just have to create a role for the product and, from there on, it just works, as long as the role is created correctly. Everything else you do after that is managed for you.

We have continuously been deploying it on new accounts as we spin them up. Our deployment has been going on since year one, but we've expanded. Two years ago we probably had about 40 or 50 cloud accounts. Now, we have 270 cloud accounts.

We have a team that is dedicated to managing our security tools. Something this big will always require some maintenance from our side: new accounts, and talking to internal teams. But this is as much about management of the actual alerts and issues than it is anything else. It's no longer about whether the tool is being maintained. We don't maintain it. But what we do is maintain our interaction with the tool. We have two people, security engineers, who work with the tool on a regular basis.

It's a non-functional ROI. This isn't a direct-ROI kind of tool. The return is in understanding our security postures. That's incredibly important and that's why we bought it and that's what we need from it. It doesn't create funds; it is a control. But it certainly does stop issues, and how do you quantify that?

Pricing wasn't a big consideration for us. Compared to the work that we do, and the other costs, this was one of the regular costs. We were more interested in the features than we were in the price.

If a competitor came along and said, "We'll give you half the price," that doesn't necessarily mean that's the right answer, at all. We wouldn't necessarily entertain it that way. Does it do what we need it to do? Does it work with the things that we want it to work with? That is the important part for us. Pricing wasn't the big consideration it might be in some organizations. We spend millions on public cloud. In that context, it would not make sense to worry about the small price differences that you get between the products. They all seem to pitch it at roughly the same price.

Before the implementation of Prisma Cloud, there were only two solutions in the market. The other one was Dome9. We did an evaluation and we chose this one, and they were both very new. This is a very new concept. It pretty much didn't exist until Prisma Cloud came along.

The Prisma Cloud solution was chosen because of the way it helped integrate with our operations people, and our operations people were very happy with it. That was one of the main concerns.

Both solutions are very good at what they do. They approach the same problem from different directions. It was this direction that worked for us. Having said that, certain elements of Prisma Cloud were definitely more attractive to us because they matched up with some of our requirements. I'm very loath to say one product is better than the other, because it does depend on your requirements. It does depend on how you intend to use it and what it is, exactly, that you're looking for.

You need to identify how you'll be using it and what your use cases are. If you don't have a mature enough organizational posture, you're not going to use it to actually fix the issues because you won't have the teams ready to consume its information. You need to build that and that needs to be built into the thinking around that product. There's no point having information if you're not going to act on it. So understand who is going to act on it, and how, and then you've got a much better path to understanding your use for this. There's no point in buying a product for the sake of the product. You need the processes and the workflows that go with it and you need to build those. It's not good enough to just hope that they will happen.

The solution doesn't secure the entire spectrum of compute options because there are other Palo Alto products that secure containers, for example. This is very specifically focused on the configuration of the public cloud instances. It doesn't look inside those instances. You would need something else for that. You don't want to be using other products to do this. You don't want to mistake this for something that does everything. It doesn't. It is a very specific product and it is amazingly good at what it does.

We do integrate it with our workflow as part of the process of getting an application onto the internet. It does integrate with our workflow, giving us a posture as part of the workflow. But it is not a workflow tool.

It definitely does multi-cloud. It does the three major ones plus Alibaba Cloud. It doesn't reach into hybrid cloud, in the sense that it doesn't understand anything non-cloud. We don't use it to provide security, although it is very good for that. We already have an advanced security provision posture, because we are a very large organization. We just use it to inform us of security issues that are outside our other controls.

Prisma Cloud doesn't provide us with a single tool to protect all of our cloud resources and applications in terms of security and compliance reports because we have non-cloud-related tools being folded into the reports as well. Even though it works on the cloud, and is excellent at what it does, we integrate it with our Qualys reports, for example, which is the scanning on our hosts. Those hosts are in the cloud, but this doesn't touch them. There's no such thing as a single security tool, frankly. It's basically part of our portfolio and it's part of what every organization needs, in my opinion, to be able to manage their cloud security postures. Otherwise, it would just never work.

We are using it for monitoring our cloud environment and detecting misconfigurations in our hosted accounts in AWS or Azure.

As the security operations team, our job is to monitor for misconfigurations and potential incidents in our environment. This solution does a good job of monitoring those for us and of alerting us to misconfigurations before they become potential security incidents or problems.

We've set the tool up so that it provides feedback directly to the teams responsible for their AWS or cloud accounts. It has been really helpful by getting information directly to the teams. They can see what the problem is and they can fix it without us having to go chase them down and tell them that they have a misconfiguration.

The solution secures the entire spectrum of compute options such as hosts and VMs, containers and Containers as a Service. We are not using the container piece as yet, but that is a functionality that we're looking forward to getting to use. Overall, it gives us fantastic visibility into the cloud environment.

Prisma Cloud also provides the data needed to pinpoint root cause and prevent an issue from occurring again. A lot of that has to do with the policies that are built into the solution and the documentation around those policies. The policy will tell the user what the misconfiguration is, as well as give them remediation steps to fix the misconfiguration. It speeds up our remediation efforts. In some of the cases, when my team, the security team, gets involved, we're not necessarily experts in AWS and wouldn't necessarily know how to remediate the issue that was identified. But because the instructions are included as part of the Prisma Cloud product, we can just cut and paste it and provide it to the team. And when the teams are addressing these directly, they also have access to those remediation instructions and can refer them to figure out what they need to do to remediate the issue and to speed up remediation on misconfigurations. 

In some cases, these capabilities could be saving us hours in remediation work. In other cases, it may not really be of value to the team. For example, if an S3 bucket is public facing, they know how to fix that. But on some of the more complex issues or policies, it might otherwise take a lot more work for somebody to figure out what to do to fix the issue that was identified.

In terms of the solution’s ability to show issues as they are discovered during the build phases, I can only speak to post-deployment because we don't have it integrated earlier in the pipeline. But as far as post-deployment goes, we get notified just about immediately when something comes up that is misconfigured. And when that gets remediated, the alert goes away immediately in the tool. That makes it really easy in a shared platform like this, where we have shared responsibility between the team that's involved and my security operations team. It makes it really easy for us to be able to go into the tool and say, "There was an alert but that alert is now gone and that means that the issue has been resolved," and know we don't have to do any further research.

For the developers, it speeds up their ability to fix things. And for my team, it saves us a ton of time in not having to potentially investigate each one of those misconfigurations to see if it is still a misconfiguration or not, because it's closed out automatically once it has been remediated. On an average day, these abilities in the solution save my team two to three hours, due to the fact that Prisma Cloud is constantly updating the alerts and closing out any alerts that are no longer valid.

The policies that come prepackaged in the tool have been very valuable to us. They're accurate and they provide good guidance as to why the policy was created, as well as how to remediate anything that violates the policy. 

The Inventory functionality, enabling us to identify all of the resources deployed into a single account in either AWS or Azure, or into Prisma Cloud as a whole, has been really useful for us.

And the investigate function that allows us to view the connections between different resources in the cloud is also very useful. It allows us to see the relationship traffic between different entities in our cloud environment.

The integration of the Compute function into the cloud monitoring function—because those are two different tools that are being combined together—could use some more work. It still feels a little bit disjointed.

Also, the permissions modeling around the tool is improving, but is still a little bit rough. The concept of having roles that certain users have to switch between, rather than have a single login that gives them visibility into all of the different pieces, is a little bit confusing for my users. It can take some time out of our day to try to explain to them what they need to do to get to the information they need.

I have been using Palo Alto Prisma Cloud for about a year and a half.

We really have had very few issues with the stability. It's been up, it's been working. We've had, maybe, two or three very minor interruptions of the service and our ability to log in to it. In each case there was a half an hour or an hour, at most, during which we were unable to get into it, and then it was resolved. There was usually information on it in the support portal including the reason for it and the expectation around when they would get it back up.

It seems to scale fine for us. We started out with 10 to 15 accounts in there and we're now up to over 200 accounts and, on our end, seemingly nothing has changed. It's as responsive as it's ever been. We just send off our logs. Everything seems to integrate properly with no complaints on our side.

We have nearly 600 users in the system, and they're broken out into two different levels. There are the full system administrators, like myself and my team and the security team that is responsible for our cloud environment as a whole. We have visibility across the entire environment. And then we have the development teams and they are really limited to accessing their specific accounts that are deployed into Prisma Cloud. They have full control over those accounts.

For our cloud environments, the adoption rate is pretty much 100 percent. A lot of that has to do with that automated deployment we created. A new account gets started and it is automatically added to the tool. All of the monitoring is configured and everything else is set up by default. You can't build a new cloud account in our environment without it getting added in. We have full coverage, and we intend to keep it that way.

Tech support has been very responsive. They are quick to respond to tickets and knowledgeable in their responses. Their turnaround time is usually 24 to 48 hours. It's very rare that we would open anything that would be considered a high-priority ticket or incident. Most of the stuff was lower priority and that turnaround was perfectly acceptable to us.

This is our first tool of this sort.

The initial setup was really straightforward. We then started using the provided APIs to do some automated integration between our cloud environment and Prisma Cloud. That has worked really well for us and has streamlined our deployment by a good deal. However, what we found was that the APIs were changing as we were doing our deployment. We started down the path we created with some of those integrations, and then there were undocumented changes to the APIs which broke our integrations. We then had to go back and fix those integrations.

What may have happened were improvements in the API on the backend and those interfered with what we had been doing. It meant that we had to go back and reconfigure that integration to make it work. My understanding from our team that was responsible for that is that the new integration works better than the old integration did. So the changes Palo Alto made were an improvement and made the environment better, but it was something of a surprise to us, without any obvious documentation or heads-up that that was going to change. That caught us a little bit out and broke the integration until we figured out what had changed and fixed it.

There is only a learning curve on the Compute piece, specifically, and understanding how to pivot between that and the rest of the tool, for users who have access to both. There's definitely a learning curve for that because it's not at all obvious when you get into the tool the first time. There is some documentation on that, but we put together our own internal documentation, which we've shared with the teams to give them more step-by-step instructions on what it is that they need to do to get to the information that they're looking for.

The full deployment took us roughly a month, including the initial deployment of rolling everything out, and then the extended deployment of building it to do automated deployments into new environments, so that every new environment gets added automatically.

Our implementation strategy was to pick up all of the accounts that we knew that we had to do manually, while we were working on building out that automation to speed up the onboarding of the new accounts that we were creating.

We did all of that on our own, just following the API documentation that they had provided. We had a technical manager from Palo Alto with whom we were working as we were doing the deployment, but the automated deployment work that we did was all on our own and all done internally.

At this point, we really don't have anybody dedicated to deployment because we've automated that process. That has vastly simplified our deployment. Maintenance-wise, as it is a SaaS platform, we don't really have anybody who works on it on a regular basis. It's really more ad hoc. If something is down, if we try to connect to it and if we can't get into the portal or whatever the case may be, then somebody will open a ticket with support to see what's going on.

We have seen ROI although it's a little hard to measure because we didn't have anything like this before.

The biggest areas of ROI that we've seen with it have been the uptake by the organization, the ease of deploying the tool—especially since we got that full automation piece created and taken care of—as well as the visibility and the speed at which somebody can start using the tool. I generally give employees about an hour or two of training on the tool and then turn them loose on it, and they're capable of working out of it and getting most of the value. There are some things that take more time to get up to speed on, but for the most part, they're able to get up to speed pretty quickly, which is great.

The pricing and the licensing are both very fair.

There aren't any costs in addition to the standard licensing fees, at this time. My understanding is that at the beginning of 2021 they're not necessarily changing the licensing model, but they're changing how some of the new additions to the tool are going to be licensed, and that those would be an additional cost beyond what we're paying now.

The biggest advice I would give in terms of costs would be to try to understand what the growth is going to look like. That's really been our biggest struggle, that we don't have an idea of what our future growth is going to be on the platform. We go from X number of licenses to Y number of licenses without a plan on how we're going to get from A to B, and a lot of that comes as a bit of a surprise. It can make budgeting a real challenge for it. If an organization knows what it has in place, or can get an idea of what its growth is going to look like, that would really help with the budgeting piece.

We had looked at a number of other tools. I can't tell you off the top of my head what we had looked at, but Prisma Cloud was the tool that we had always decided that we wanted to have. This was the one that we felt would give us the best coverage and the best solution, and I feel that we were correct on that.

The big pro with Prisma Cloud was that we felt it gave us better visibility into the environment and into the connections between entities in the cloud. That visualization piece is fantastic in this tool. We felt like that wasn't really there in some of the other tools. 

Some of the other tools had a little bit better or broader policy base, when we were initially looking at them. I have a feeling that at this point, with the rate that Palo Alto is releasing new policies and putting them into production, that it is probably at parity now. But there was a feeling, at the time, among some of the other members of the team that Palo Alto came up short and didn't have as many policies as some of the other tools that we were looking at.

I would highly recommend automating the process of deploying it. That has made just a huge improvement on the uptake of the tool in our environment and in the ease of integration. There's work involved in getting that done, but if we were trying to do this manually, we would never be able to keep up with the rate that we've been growing our environment.

The biggest lesson I've learned in using this solution is that we were absolutely right that we needed a tool like this in our environment to keep track of our AWS environment. It has identified a number of misconfigurations and it has allowed us to answer a lot of questions about those misconfigurations that would have taken significantly more time to answer if we were trying to do so using native AWS tools.

The tool has an auto-remediation functionality that is attractive to us. It is something that we've discussed, but we're not really comfortable in using it. It would be really useful to be able to auto-remediate security misconfigurations. For example, if somebody were to open something up that should be closed, and that violated one of our policies, we could have Prisma Cloud automatically close that. That would give us better control over the environment without having to have anybody manually remediate some of the issues.

Prisma Cloud also secures the entire development lifecycle from build to deploy to run. We could integrate it closer into our CI/CD pipeline. We just haven't gone down that path at this point. We will be doing that with the Compute functionality and some of the teams are already doing that. The functionality is there but we're just not taking advantage of it. The reason we're not doing so is that it's not how we initially built the tool out. Some of the teams have an interest in doing that and other teams do not. It's up to the individual teams as to whether or not it provides them value to do that sort of an integration.

As for the solution's alerts, we have them identified at different severities, but we do not filter them based on that. We use those as a way of prioritizing things for the teams, to let them know that if it's "high" they need to meet the SLA tied to that, and similarly if it's "medium" or "low." We handle it that way rather than using the filtering. The way we do it does help our teams understand what situations are most critical. We went through all of the policies that we have enabled and set our priority levels on them and categorized them in the way that we think that they needed to be categorized. The idea is that the alerts get to the teams at the right priority so that they know what priority they need to assign to remediating any issues that they have in their environment.

I would rate the solution an eight out of 10. The counts against it would be that the Compute integration still seems to need a little bit of work, as though it's working its way through things. And some of the other administrative pieces can be a little bit difficult. But the visibility is great and I'm pretty happy with everything else.

Previously, we were primarily using Amazon Web Services in a product division. We initially deployed RedLock (Prisma Cloud) as a PoC for that product division. Because it is a large organization, we knew that there were Azure and GCP for other cloud workloads. So, we needed a multi-cloud solution. In my current role, we are primarily running GCP, but we do have some presence in Amazon Web Services as well. So, in both those use cases, the multi-cloud functionality was a big requirement.

We are on the latest version of Prisma Cloud.

It is very important that Prisma Cloud provides security spanning multi-cloud environments, where you have Amazon, Azure, and GCP multiple cloud environments. Being able to centralize all those assets, have visibility, and set some policies and rules within one dashboard when you have multiple cloud accounts is a big advantage.

The comprehensiveness of Prisma Cloud for securing the entire cloud-native development lifecycle was shown when Palo Alto bought Twistlock and integrated in some of the container security pieces, particularly for containers, Docker, and Kubernetes, and building in the Prismic Cloud Compute tab. Having that functionality from Twistlock more focused on Docker and containers filled in some of the space where the original Prisma RedLock piece was a little more focused on just the API, e.g., passive scanning. The integration of Twistlock into Prisma Cloud Compute definitely expanded this functionality into the container and Docker space, which is a big growth area in the cloud as well.

Prisma Cloud has enabled us to take a very strong preventive approach to cloud security. One of the hardest things with cloud is getting visibility into workloads. With Prisma Cloud, you can go in and get that visibility, then set up policies to alert on risky behavior, e.g., if there are security groups or firewall ports open up. So, it is very helpful in preventing configuration errors in the cloud by having visibility. If there are issues, then you can find them and fix them. 

Educates and trains cloud operators on how to better design their different cloud and infrastructure deployments. Prisma Cloud has very good remediation steps built in. So, if you do find an issue, they will give you steps on, "Here is how you go into the Console and make this change to close out this issue, preventing this in the future." So, it is a strong tool for the prevention and protection of the cloud, in general.

We have gone in and done some tuning to remove alerts that were false positives. That reduced some of the alerts. Then, as our team has gone in and fixed issues, we have seen from the metrics and tracking of Prisma Cloud that alerts have been reduced.

The compliance tabs were helpful just to have visibility into the assets as well as the asset management tabs. In the cloud, everything is very dynamic and ephemeral. So, being able to see dynamic asset inventory for what we have in cloud environments was a huge plus. Just to have that visibility in a dashboard instead of having to dump things into a spreadsheet, e.g., you are trying to do asset inventory and spreadsheets, then five minutes later it changes cause the cloud is dynamic. So, the asset inventory and compliance tabs are strong. 

When the cloud team makes a change that may introduce some risk, then we get alerts.

We pretty heavily used the Resource Query Language (RQL) and the investigate tab to find what instances and cloud resources are externally facing and might be higher risk, looking for particular patterns in the resources. 

Prisma Cloud provides the following in a single pane of glass within a dashboard: Cloud Security Posture Management, Cloud Workload Protection, Cloud Network Security, and Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management. It is particularly challenging, especially in a multi-cloud environment, where you would have to log into your Google Cloud, then look for your infrastructure and alerting within Google. In addition, you have to switch over to Amazon and log into an AWS Console to do some work with Amazon. Having that central visibility across multiple cloud environments is definitely important when you have different sources and different dashboards for the cloud, which will still be separate, but you still have some centralization within that dashboard.

The solution’s security automation capabilities are definitely good. We use some of the automation within the alerting, where if Prisma Cloud detected a change and there was a certain threshold, e.g., if it was above a medium or a high risk issue, then we would send off an alert that would go to our infrastructure team/Slack channel, creating a Jira ticket. The automation with Slack and Jira have been very good feature points. 

The Prisma Cloud tool identifies for the security team the resource in the cloud that is the offender, such as, the context, the resource in the cloud, what is the cloud account, and the cloud environment that the resource is in. Then, there is always very good context on remediation, e.g., how do we go in and fix that issue? Do we either go through automation or log into the Cloud Console to do some remediation? The alerts include the context that is needed as well as the risk ranking and severity, whether it is a high, medium, or low issue.

The Prisma Cloud Console always has good remediation steps, whether it is going into the Console, updating a Cloud Formation, or Terraform scripts. The remediation guidance is always very helpful from Prisma Cloud.

Some of the usability within the Compute functionality needs improvement. I think when Palo Alto added on the Twistlock functionality, they added a Compute tab on the left side of the navigation. Some of the navigation is just a little dense. There is a lot of navigation where there is a tab and dropdowns. So, just improving some of the navigation where there is just a very dense amount of buttons and drop-down menus, that is probably the only thing, which comes from having a lot of features. Because there are a lot of buttons, just navigating around the platform can be a little challenging for new users.

They could improve a little bit of the navigation, where I have to kind of look through a lot of the different menus and dropdowns. Part of this just comes from it having so many awesome features. However, the navigation can sometimes be a little bit like, "I can't remember where the tab was," so I have to click and search around. This is not a big negative point, but it is definitely an area for improvement.

I started using this solution when it was still called RedLock. Before Palo Alto bought RedLock, I used RedLock for about a year and then for another year or two once Palo Alto bought them, rebranding them as Prisma Cloud. So, I have been using it for about three or four years.

It is very stable and solid. We haven't really had any issues with the dashboard. The availability is there. The ability to log in and get near real-time data on our cloud environment is very good. Overall, the stability and accessibility has been good.

We use it pretty much daily, several days a week. We are licensed for 200 workloads in Prisma Cloud.

We are definitely still working on maturing some of our operations. We have a pretty small infrastructure team; just two engineers who are focused on infrastructure. We are trying to automate as much as we can, and Prisma Cloud supports most of that. There are still some cases where you have to log into the Console and do some clicking around. However, for the most part, we are trying to automate as much as we can to scale those operations with a very small infrastructure and security team.

Their customer and technical support is very good. They helped us on scoping, getting an estimate for how many workloads and resources that we had. Their support team helped us through some issues on the configuration in the API on the Defender side. We had a couple questions that came up and the customer success and support engineers were very responsive and helpful. 

The sales team was really good. We leveraged some of our relationships, working extensively with some of the leadership at Palo Alto in Unit 42 on their threat team. The sales team gave us a pretty good deal right before the end of the year, last year. So, we were able to get a good discount, so we were able to get the purchase done. Overall, it was a good experience.

This was a new implementation for our company.

Deploying the baseline for Prisma Cloud, its API configuration, was straightforward. To set up the API roles and hook in the API connectivity, we were able to do that within a couple of hours. The Prisma Cloud piece at the API level was very quick. The Defender agents were a bit more complicated because we had to deploy the Compute Defender agents into our containers, Docker, and Kubernetes. That was a little more complex, because we were deploying, not just connecting an API. We were deploying agents within our environment. So, the API side was very simple and fast. The Defender side was a bit more complicated.

We are still working on expanding and deploying some more Defender agents. The API piece was deployed within about a week, which was very fast. On the Defender side, with the infrastructure team's input, it took us several weeks to get the Defender agents deployed.

When we deployed Prisma Cloud, we established some baselines for security and our infrastructure team for what was running in the cloud. They were using some automation and scripting. They thought everything was okay with the script: We just run a script and it deploys this server and infrastructure in the cloud. What we found was that there were some misconfigurations. They had a default script that was opening up some ports that were not needed. So, we worked with the infrastructure team, went back, and said, "Okay, these ports were uncovered with our Prisma Cloud scanning. Is there a business use? Is there any valid reason for these ports to be open?" The team said, "No we don't really need these ports." It was just a default that we need to deploy in Google or AWS. It was just a default that was added in. So, we worked with them to go back and change some of their defaults, then change some of their scripts. Now, in future cases, when they deploy the Terraform script, it would make sure that those ports are automatically closed.

We purchased directly from Palo Alto. We didn't use a system integrator. We purchased directly from them and went through their support team. I have a good relationship with the sales and customer success team at Palo Alto just from past relationships. So, we did a direct purchase.

We will eventually see return on investment just out of the automation and the ability to scale the platform up.

We have reduced alert investigation times by approximately a couple hours a week.

The pricing is good. They gave us some good discounts right at the end of the year based on the value that it brings, visibility, and the ability to build in cloud, compliance, and security within one dashboard. 

We did look at a couple other vendors who do similar cloud workload protections. Based on the relationships that we have with Palo Alto, we knew that Palo Alto was kind of the leader in this space. We had hands-on experience with the tool and Palo Alto was also a customer of ours. So, we had some strong relationships and Palo Alto was the leader. 

We did some demos with different tools that were not as comprehensive. We had some tools that we looked at which just focused more on the container side and some that focused more on the cloud API layer. Since Prisma Cloud has unified some of these different pieces into one platform, we ultimately decided that Prisma Cloud was going to be the best solution for us.

It is a good tool. Work with your stakeholders and cloud teams to implement Prisma Cloud within as many environments as you can to get that rich amount of data, then come up with a strong strategy for integrations and alerting. Prisma Cloud has a lot of integrations out-of-the-box, like ServiceNow, Jira, and Slack. Understand what your business teams need as well as what your engineering and developers need. Try to work on the integrations that allow for the maximum amount of integration and automation within a cloud environment. So, work with your business teams to come up with a plan for how to implement it in your cloud, then how to best integrate the tooling and alerting.

While Prisma Cloud does have the ability to do auto-remediation, which is a part of their automation, we didn't turn any of that on now because those features have a tendency to sometimes break things. For example, it will automatically shut down a security group or server that can sometimes have an impact into availability. So, we don't use any of the auto-remediation features, but we do have automation setup with Jira and Slack to create tickets and events for our ticketing and infrastructure teams/Slack channels.

We definitely want to continue to explore and build-in some of the Shift Left principles, getting the tool into our dev cycles earlier. We do have some plans to expand more on the dev side. I am hiring an AppSec engineer who will be focused more on the development and AppSec side. That is something that is in our roadmap. It has just been something that we have been trying to work on and get into our backlog of a lot of projects.

I would rate this solution as a nine out of 10.

We currently leverage Prisma Cloud's Cloud Security Posture Management and Cloud Workload Protection Platform modules and plan to migrate to their full Cloud Native Application Protection Platform solution for a more holistic security approach.

Our security system uses three major CSPMs, ingesting logs and integrating them with a central CSPM page for visibility. We also incorporate identity and document management systems. Prisma Cloud's detection tool based on its policies provides initial alerts, with our SOC team focusing on the most relevant ones. We leverage a modified threat framework combining NTSF and MITRE to monitor key policy areas like malware, unauthorized access, phishing, data loss, and system failures. Within Prisma, we categorize policies based on our organization's priorities, using custom tags to identify them and create dashboards. Webhooks then send these alerts to our SIEM platform for further analysis.

Prisma Cloud offers security spanning across multi-cloud and hybrid cloud deployments, supporting industry leaders like Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, Alibaba Cloud, and Oracle Cloud.

Prisma Cloud simplifies compliance with regulations, a crucial security aspect for large organizations, by providing full visibility into our cloud environments. This eliminates the time-consuming need to manually check configurations within each cloud service provider. With Prisma Cloud's single pane of glass view, everything can be done in one place, saving us an average of 15-20 percent of the time compared to the previous method of having a dedicated person manage each CSP individually.

Automation streamlines report delivery and notification generation. It can also integrate with various third-party services like Slack, Jira, Microsoft Teams, and Microsoft Sentinel, allowing for further automated notifications and actions within those platforms.

Our cloud visibility was limited before Prisma Cloud. Now, we have a good level of insight, not perfect, but significantly improved. We can monitor new deployments, configurations, and overall activity. This is crucial because most organizations, like ours, are increasingly cloud-based. Stricter regulations require compliance, and Prisma Cloud simplifies this. They offer pre-built compliance standards so we can easily generate reports, ensuring we meet our obligations.

While Prisma Cloud delivered as promised, realizing its full benefits in our large organization took several months. Due to the size and complexity of our internal communication and collaboration structures, it naturally took time for everyone to fully understand and adopt the platform's capabilities.

Prisma Cloud offers timely runtime alerts when properly configured. These alerts integrate well with our SIEM and are easy to understand. However, the majority stem from the CSPM module, as CWPP typically necessitates manual investigation for actionable insights. Prisma Cloud has reduced the runtime alerts by 20 percent.

Our initial Prisma Cloud deployment has already delivered a 5 percent cost saving, and we expect these savings to grow as we expand its use across our cloud environment.

Our primary focus right now is compliance. This means having clear visibility into our organization's security posture. Additionally, agentless scanning with Prisma Cloud is important for us. While we're also interested in the Cloud Workload Protection Platform, it's important to consider that our environment includes both containers and virtual machines. Overall, the most valuable features for us in Prisma Cloud are those that provide visibility, ensure compliance with regulations, and help us align our on-premises servers and cloud environments with mandated security standards.

Prisma Cloud stands out as a user-friendly and powerful CSPM solution thanks to its comprehensive capabilities, built-in features, and flexible tagging system. It simplifies cloud security by automatically connecting to numerous cloud service providers and pulling relevant information for our use, minimizing the need for manual configuration and troubleshooting.

Prisma Cloud's preventative approach to cloud security can be complex, especially for features like automated certificates. These require specific access permissions for Prisma Cloud, introducing dependencies and additional configuration steps.

While Prisma Cloud offers agent-based deployment for comprehensive visibility and control, agent dependencies and user resistance can create hurdles. Improved agentless scanning capabilities from Prisma Cloud would be ideal, but currently, agents remain necessary for optimal visibility.

Prisma Cloud is a powerful security platform, but like any similar tool, it won't eliminate the need for occasional manual interaction with our CSPs. While Prisma Cloud can handle many tasks, some actions might still require us to log directly into our CSP account.

The CSP logs could be improved by providing more visibility into the specific logs Prisma is feeding. Since CSP has multiple versions and Prisma might be receiving different logs than expected, it would be helpful to have a clearer indication of the log types or more detailed logs themselves. This would allow us to verify if we're receiving everything or missing something. While Prisma Cloud offers log searching, it requires queries to navigate the vast amount of data. Ideally, Prisma could integrate a simpler way to view the logs it's collecting without extensive searching.

Some module customization might be needed and certain features like adding custom labels are currently unavailable unless we have administrator access. This limitation can be frustrating and I would like to have this functionality included in Prisma Cloud.

I have been using Prisma Cloud for two years.

I would rate the stability of Prisma Cloud seven out of ten. Occasionally when we have an issue it can take some time to resolve.

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

We have a dedicated account manager who provides support whenever needed. While they're always responsive, responses may occasionally take some time.

Positive

Despite being a cloud-based solution designed for easy deployment, Prisma Cloud's initial setup took a few months due to our team's workload on other projects. Fortunately, only two people were required for the actual deployment process, which itself is straightforward as long as the necessary network connectivity is established beforehand.

Prisma Cloud's licensing system functions as expected with a solid licensing infrastructure.

In our evaluation of Wiz and Aqua Cloud Security Platform, we investigated their capabilities to address detection rule limitations in Prisma Cloud CSPM. We were hoping to find alternative solutions offering broader rejection capabilities. However, both Wiz and Aqua require agents for in-depth details, similar to Prisma Cloud. While neither excelled in overall detection capabilities, Wiz impressed us with its integration of external alerts. Unlike Prisma Cloud, Wiz allows for easy visibility and filtering of alerts from AWS Guard Duty, a significant advantage.

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

Prisma Cloud offers built-in security automation for tasks like remediating misconfigurations. For instance, it can automatically adjust a non-compliant AWS configuration, but only if you grant the necessary permissions. While this is useful, a SOAR solution like XSOAR can provide a fuller approach to security automation.

Over 50 people in multiple departments within our organization USE.

Prisma Cloud required minor maintenance for platform updates and policy changes that need to be reviewed.

While many Cloud Security Posture Management tools offer similar features, consider your budget before choosing Prisma Cloud. Some CSPMs bundle all functionalities into one package, forcing you to pay for everything even if you don't need it. Prisma Cloud, on the other hand, allows you to purchase only the modules relevant to your organization's needs. Additionally, Palo Alto is a well-established vendor in the market.

We use it for mobile access, and we probably will also adopt a direct connection to our small branch offices across Europe.

Prisma Cloud has improved the response time and the availability of our applications on-premises and on the cloud for our users in many different countries in Western Europe, Eastern Europe, and the United States.

We use it for our mobile users. Prisma Cloud is a very strong and robust platform that improves endpoint security. The COVID-19 pandemic made us realize that we should be able to permit more or less 50% of our employees to work confidently and securely from home.

Prisma Cloud provides security across multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud environments. We already have developed a direct connection between the Prisma Cloud platform and the Azure Cloud solution. We also have integration with the AWS cloud where most of our servers are now located. It was absolutely a strategic choice for us.

We have decided to adopt almost all the security features that Prisma Cloud offers, such as DNS security, threat prevention, vulnerability analysis, anti-phishing, email, and so on. We did not use Prisma Cloud for security automation capabilities. We have a very specific application for the OTC environment, and we prefer to maintain this environment completely separate from the other world of traditional information technology applications.

Prisma Cloud helps with cloud security, but we are also managing security at many different levels. We have endpoint protection, firewalls, SIEM, and log collectors. We also have dedicated probes that work silently to discover any anomalies, such as zero-day threats, that could be there. We have a Palo Alto firewall, and this cloud solution also has some predefined level of security managed by the cloud provider.

Prisma Cloud provides the visibility and control we need, regardless of how complex or distributed our cloud environments become. We can very quickly and easily analyze the clusters, the connections, and so on. We have very good control over the data flow and any possible security problems. It increases our confidence in our security and compliance postures.

About 50% of our people work from a private network, not inside the company. The protection of the endpoints is more difficult than the protection inside the office. Prisma Cloud can elevate the level of security for people who are working from home or are traveling to another country and so on.

Prisma Cloud provides us with a single tool to protect all of our cloud resources and applications, without having to manage and reconcile disparate security and compliance reports. Prisma Cloud is used by remote users that are working from home, and that is it. It makes our operations easier.

I have daily evidence of any possible new threats that could appear. I get to know how often a threat was blocked and from which client these threats were blocked. We can then very quickly contact the user if there is a compromised endpoint.

Prisma Cloud sends the email and data to the administrative IT staff in case a very severe threat appears. So far, we have not received any alerts related to severe threats.

Prisma Cloud has reduced a lot of our alert investigation time. We have perfect visibility of every single connection from our colleagues who are working from home, a hotel, or any other place. We have activated a mechanism by which the VPN connection is mandatory as soon as the end users switch their computers on. If I have a severe alert, I could investigate the related bad behavior and node in 10 to 15 minutes.

We found it to be easy and flexible. We could easily configure it for our needs, and we could spread the Prisma Cloud platform to 16 countries without encountering any kind of problem.

It can be too expensive for small companies.

In terms of features, I wouldn't add anything specific. They did a major improvement in the field of reporting. It can automatically produce statistics on usage and so on. This aspect was not very well developed at the beginning of the project, but now, there is a very big improvement in this specific field. Reporting is better than the previous versions, so at the moment, for our needs, the solution is good enough. We might need something in the future, but at the moment, we are not asking Palo Alto for any new developments.

We have been using this solution for half a year. We started the project at the beginning of this year, and at the moment, we have about 2,100 people who use this solution.

It is very stable. The platform is quite robust and available. From the time the project was released to other countries, we received one or two tickets for a sporadic problem for some users.

We have 4,000 licenses. We have Prisma Cloud in 16 different countries with a total of about 2,100 people. We do not have a large presence in the Extreme East or Middle East, but we have people connecting from Europe and also from Russia. It works perfectly.

Its usage will increase when there is a new acquisition or there is a new office somewhere in the world. 

The customer support is good and professional. I would rate them a ten out of ten.

Positive

We did not use any similar solution before. We adopted the same VPN technology based on the on-premise firewall that we already had, but there was a very big consumption of bandwidth. It was sometimes a little bit difficult to manage a high number of remote users, and this problem was completely solved by Prisma Cloud.

I was involved in its deployment. It took us about nine months to implement it.

In terms of the implementation strategy, we started with deciding about the site of our company that should be directly connected to Prisma Cloud. We produced an inventory of the applications and identified whether they are located on-premise, on Azure cloud, or on AWS cloud. We then started to configure the server and endpoints inside Prisma Cloud. We established the service connection between the site and Prisma Cloud, and we started to develop the solution for the end users. We selected a subset of users. We selected about 100 people from different departments in different countries to be sure that the solution was working properly in every country and every application environment.

We received very professional and qualified support from both Palo Alto technicians and a platinum partner that normally assists us in developing Palo Alto technologies.

We had two people from Palo Alto for implementation. We had one senior engineer and one junior engineer from Palo Alto. We had two engineers from our partner. We did not have a lot of staff.

In terms of maintenance, Prisma Cloud is subject to periodic updates, and we follow what is required by Palo Alto. For maintenance, we have a colleague of mine and one person from our partner.

It was a good investment because now we can manage so many remote users without any problems.

The platform is not famous for being cheap. It is quite expensive, but we know that we have the protection, so there is enough value for what we pay for. It is worth the money.

It takes more or less nine months to realize its benefits.

This solution is good for a company with at least 400 people that must be connected remotely. For smaller companies, it can be too expensive.

There are no costs in addition to standard licensing. We pay based on the number of users. We have 4,000 user licenses, and we use more or less 60% of our licenses.

We evaluated solutions from Cato Networks and Palo Alto. Because we have quite a large installation of Palo Alto's firewall and in-depth knowledge of this technology, we decided to adopt Prisma Cloud.

I am very satisfied with Prisma Cloud, and we do not have any plans to change to anything else. I am confident that we will retain this solution for a long time.

Overall, I would rate Prisma Cloud a ten out of ten. We have received very positive feedback regarding this solution. I would recommend it to others.

We use Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks for our cloud security posture management.

Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks has multiple aspects that help protect the full cloud-native stack. We are not concerned with just one cloud at the enterprise level; we are focused on the multiple cloud environments we have. The solution provides us with a comprehensive dashboard and a comprehensive view of our cloud security posture. Furthermore, the solution not only covers the security posture but also informs us of our compliance with leading industry standards.

The solution does have security automation capabilities, but we do not use much of it in this case. We use automation for the alerts; if there are any misconfigurations, the alerts are automated. However, we do not mitigate any specific items using automation, as that is something we have not configured. We prefer to first look at the problem manually, and then take action against it.

There is no single comprehensive cloud security solution. We will need to use multiple tools, such as those offered by Palo Alto Networks and Check Point. Every security firm has a range of products, so if we consider all of them, we can have anti-virus, anti-malware, vulnerability assessment solutions, EDP software, and cloud security posture management. We need to evaluate each tool, and Prisma and Check Point both offer good solutions, including next-generation firewalls.

The solution provides the visibility and control we need, regardless of how complex or distributed our cloud environment becomes.

The solution can enable us to incorporate security into our CI/CD pipeline and add checkpoints to existing DevOps processes. From an automation standpoint, we enabled certain monitoring features. However, the remediation steps are still manual. This can be integrated into our DevOps pipeline, though some of the features are not being used as we prefer to keep it manual.

The solution provides us with a single tool to protect all of our cloud resources and applications, without having to manage and reconcile disparate security and compliance reports.

The solution reduced runtime alerts. We don't need to receive all the runtime alerts every time, as they will overwhelm us with messages. People often neglect this. Depending on the situation, generally, only very important alerts should be sent. I prefer that the solution be configured for when there is a major business impact. For minor alerts and notifications, we can still check the dashboard. Generally, we monitor the dashboards at certain times. We don't need to be alerted for everything, as this will defeat the purpose of this mechanism.

The solution significantly improved the time taken to investigate alerts by 40 percent with the alert monitoring and all its mechanisms, we receive our critical alerts quickly via email. We can even configure the remediation, although we have not done so yet. 

I appreciate the multi-cloud support that this solution provides; I can use it with AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. I find the ability to configure alerts and monitor misconfigurations in the cloud to be particularly useful, and we take advantage of this feature as well.

Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks is an impressive solution. The solution continuously assesses our security posture, making it the ideal preventive measure. If any misconfigurations occur, I am immediately notified of any unnecessary ports that are open in my cloud. This alerting system allows me to take the necessary steps to secure it before any attack can occur, making it the best preventive measure for our cloud.

I now extensively use cloud security posture management. There needs to be a mechanism that allows me to manually configure compliance more easily. Currently, it requires programming knowledge, so if someone without hardware programming knowledge could customize certain features to their requirements, it would be very helpful.

I have been using the solution for five months.

The solution is stable because it is a SaaS offering.

Nowadays, all cloud solutions are scalable; scalability should be a given feature and does not need to be asked for.

A maximum of ten people have administrative-level access, which will be used by 50 to 60 Security Operations Center personnel. This personnel must log in with various role-based access rights. In total, we have around 70 people using the solution.

In my previous project, we had a dedicated team associated with the account, so we did not have to pay for support. This was beneficial because, most of the time, we would go to our account team instead of the technical support, and our issues would be resolved quickly.

Positive

The initial setup is seamless. We only need to integrate our API key and connect it.

The deployment took one hour.

I can see one return on investment due to continuous monitoring. Before, we had a few staff members who monitored our environment, but now the alerting and other processes happen automatically, so there is a good ROI in terms of resources. Additionally, the security posture of the environment is increased and fewer incidents occur, which improves our response time and resource efficiency. There are also indirect ROIs.

The pricing is competitive; for the most part, the security firms have similar prices. Therefore, I believe it is competitive and a good investment. The solution is good quality, so I would not hesitate to invest in Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks.

I give the solution a nine out of ten.

I absolutely recommend Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks at an enterprise level because the solution is an enterprise-grade product.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We have been working with it for two years.

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

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

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

Positive

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

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

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

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

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

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