Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks Reviews

We use Prisma Cloud primarily for clients with a multi-cloud environment who require all these posture checks to be done uniformly from a single pane of glass to ensure they are in compliance. They have regulatory policies that require integration with the SIEM to generate alerts and reports. That's the primary use case for a CSPM solution. For cloud workload protection, we need vulnerability management, runtime defense, as well as image, container,  and registry scanning.

In terms of modules, we started with Redlock, the cloud security posture management component, and followed with Twistlock for cloud workload protection. Lately, I've been using Aporeto for identity-based micro-segmentation and BridgeCrew for cloud security.

Identity-based micro-segmentation allows you to create microparameters across workloads on the cloud and on-premises. You can enforce a pure wireless model through whitelisting flows in various workloads. Cloud security is primarily for core security, including SaaS and PaaS tools for scanning container images and core infrastructure. We have Terraforms, which we need to scan if we forget to remove any passwords or if there is some consideration drift between what you've configured in the IaC and what has materialized into the cloud infrastructure. 

I don't think we have had more than four or five admins for any project. We provide read-only access to the monitoring guys and custom authentication authorization privileges to a couple of users. The number of authorized users varies from plan to plan. Lots of people don't need to have access to the solution. 

Prisma Cloud helped us with compliance. Most of my deployments have been greenfield, so I don't have a benchmark to compare how the security posture has improved. I've always used this from day zero of the configuration. However, I can say that the compliance checks for PCI, DSS, HIPAA, etc., made my life simpler. I don't need to look at each of these standards and compare the rules I have in place.

It also enabled us to adopt a preventative approach to security. It gives us an option to monitor and remediate, so I don't think there is any challenge. If we see something going wrong, the solution offers a way to implement preventative controls. 

You can incorporate Prisma into DevSecOps and put it into any of the pipelines, like Jenkins and Azure DevOps. I don't think there are any challenges. You have all the ready-made plugins on these CI/CD tools, so you don't need to do or write a custom script plugin or anything. It's already available. It takes care of your end-to-end security from build to deployment and runs.

The cloud workload protection module Twistlock has ready-made plugins. Still, I don't think there was a plunging for identity-based micro-segmentation sites in the past, so we had to build a pipeline manually, I think they released a plugin for IBMS, but I never worked on it.

Prisma provides a single pane of glass for all our cloud resources to control all these different functionalities from various menus. It also helps us assess risk at runtime and throughout the whole pipeline. I have never compared Prisma with other tools, like Qualys or Tenable, so I cannot say which gives better results regarding runtime. However, I get a lot of actionable insights and suggestions from the tool about the next steps to follow.

The solution provides excellent security coverage of multi-cloud and hybrid environments. Without it, I would need to create a manual playbook for each cloud. There is a lot to maintain for each cloud, and you can't monitor from a single pane of glass. That's an administrative nightmare because you can't pull compatible reports. If I identify some compliance issues on AWS, I don't have a similar set of parameters to compare those for Google Cloud or Microsoft Azure. I definitely need this for a multi-cloud environment. 

I can get a relatively good amount of end-to-end security within the cloud. All these pieces fit together to address all my cloud needs. Of course, I don't think any vendors target security within the microservices, analytics, or data warehouse. I'm unsure because I haven't done it, but I don't think anything is missing.

It gives developers the tools they need to correct issues so they do not have to write their own scripts. Sometimes, I need an administrator to work with these developers, so it's not fully automated. Maybe I didn't find the best way to do it. Perhaps I need to find a linter or something, but there were many instances where I needed to involve someone to work with the developer. I don't think we are doing everything from the developer's end. 

Prisma also substantially reduced alert investigation times because we previously did everything by hand. We used to scan it manually, so it depended on the periodicity of scans. Earlier, we used to run scans for a couple of customers about every 15 days, and then we did the remediation. Now, all these scans run every minute or 15 minutes, so it's faster.  

Prisma's identity-based micro-segmentation is better than all its competitors. I've already evaluated Guardicore and Illumio, but Prisma stands out for the ease of configuring rules and how seamlessly it works with your cloud workloads and container environments. I used it for Kubernetes as well as K3s. I prefer Prisma's identity-based micro-segmentation. I can't think of any competitors doing this as well as Prisma Cloud.

We integrated this solution as a part of DevSecOps, so we have a dedicated pipeline for cloud workload protection. That works brilliantly. You don't need to log in to the control unless you want to do some management or full reports. I can bake in all these functionalities within the pipeline, and I can do the same for IBMS. 

As part of application security or whatever my developers are working on, I can have them bake all the configurations they need to do, like listening and patching remediation. I think it's relatively automatic, but I would consider it to be more of a DevSecOps functionality.

Prisma is the result of multiple Palo Alto acquisitions, like CWPP, Twistlock, and Aporeto. Though they are part of a single pane of glass, there is no correlation between the solutions. I don't see vulnerability scans done for tools that have been micro-segmented. 

A better correlation between the multiple products Prisma Cloud contains would be crucial. It would reduce the time spent looking at reports and enable you to get all the actionable insights across products. I think that Palo Alto is working on it, but they need to work faster because it doesn't make sense to have all these products in a single pane of glass without any correlation between them. 

At some point, things get a bit unwieldy when working with complex environments, but I don't think that challenge is unique to Prisma Cloud. It's an issue for any solution deployed in massive and complex environments. Let's say you have an enterprise with 30,000 workloads in the cloud, so it's unwieldy to have it configured for a single instance of Prisma Cloud. In that case, it would be better to segregate it across multiple tenants.

In the future, I'd like to see Palo Alto create a single consolidated agent software for workload production and identity-based micro-segmentation. Currently, I need to install two agents for the same platform to get two different functionalities. The second is maybe ease of licensing. That would also be helpful.

I have been using Prisma Cloud for nearly three and a half years.

I never faced any challenges because of internal hardware issues or the agent. Because I've always worked on the cloud-managed version, we have never faced any problems with the functionality. We did have a couple of hangups with the user and administrator onboarding and privileges, but I don't think that affects the functionality of the overall product.

The product itself is scalable, but it can become unwieldy from the administrative side of things. I can push Prisma Cloud out for 10,000 workloads, but the reporting and management would be a bit difficult. I prefer to have it segmented across multiple tenants, but it's somewhat complicated. 

I rate Palo Alto support a nine out of ten. My company is a CPSP partner with premium support, so I can't speak to the typical support experience. Even if we don't raise a ticket, we have an internal account manager to take care of all this. 

Positive

Redlock was the original company doing CSPM, so I got into Prisma Cloud because they acquired Redlock. I previously used  Qualys and Tenable for vulnerability management. I thought putting the CSPM and cloud workload protection pieces of Prisma Cloud under one roof would simplify my life.

Also, all these are cloud-managed and take care of the end-to-end requirements for cloud workloads. Qualys and Tenable have all these vulnerability management capabilities, but they might lack some native remediation capabilities. It's not that the other products are falling short, but I need that consolidated single pane of glass for cloud security. 

Setting up Prisma Cloud is straightforward. You get an activation email and deploy a couple of scripts. I work for a consulting firm that is a CPSP partner. All I needed to do is email Palo Alto with a bill of material describing our environment and the components, and then we get the activation email. After that, I followed the self-service enrollment steps, and it's running. Depending on your environment, you need to install all these applications. It's a seamless onboarding experience.

The total deployment time varies depending on the client because some of them have restrictions. One mid-sized company with around 700 workloads took less than three weeks. However, we needed to do a step-by-step approach for some, moving from the on-premises environment to the cloud and from dev to production. Those deployments took a couple of months.

Usually, the deployment requires no more than two or three people, but it depends on the approach. One should be enough if it's a batch approach. I've been doing this alone for a lot of my clients. In some situations, if you may need some help troubleshooting an app that isn't working, or the client may need someone with specialized expertise. It also depends on the client's size. At most, you'll need a half-dozen.

It's a costly solution, so we spend a lot on the licenses. At the same time, we can perform compliance checks, external audits, etc., faster because we have all the right pieces in place. That definitely helped, but I've never calculated the total cost of ownership or return on investment.

Prisma Cloud Enterprise is a costly solution. You need a license for all the components. At the same time, you have everything under one roof, so I think it's still justified. 

I rate Prisma Cloud an eight out of ten. I deduct a couple of points because I would still like to see all the products in the platform correlated. They should also do away with the need to install multiple agents for various functionalities or burn it all down into a single agent that takes care of it.

My advice is to start early if you are moving from on-premises to a hybrid or cloud environment. Implement Prisma Cloud as soon as possible, especially for greenfield deployments. This isn't a problem with Prisma Access, but it's usually a challenge. You need time to customize your rules and tailor them to your setup. 

The second recommendation I have is for Prisma Cloud Compute, the cloud workload protection piece. It's available in self-managed and cloud versions. You should opt for the cloud-managed version because you can get two single-cloud platforms. 

I have mostly used the CSPM and CWP side of things. 

For one of our clients, we used the self-hosted version that we had deployed on IBM Cloud and the SaaS version hosted by Prisma itself. For the CWP side, we used it for securing applications of our clients, doing the runtime checks, and servicing the runtime events and plug-in vulnerabilities.

For the CSPM side, the use case was more heavily for compliance on the cloud. We had Google and AWS environments.

Its main benefit was that it made it easier to monitor our clients. It just made everything more efficient. There was efficiency.

Prisma Cloud provides security spanning multi-cloud environments. I have not worked with a hybrid cloud environment.

I never did anything with the automated features other than being able to click and have it do the relearn process when it comes to the runtime events. If I see that an application is creating a bunch of false positive runtime events, I can put it in an automatic relearn state. It will relearn what that application does so it is not firing off a bunch of false positives. That is the only automation I have used other than the Helm option provided at the time of deployment. It does some automation when it comes to deployment. That is about it. I am not sure about the savings money-wise, but I know that every time we deploy by Helm, it saves us time. It is hard to judge the time savings because I never deployed it in a manual way.

Prisma Cloud is pretty good for helping us take a preventative approach to cloud security. We can have lock-in controls where a developer cannot deploy vulnerabilities that are critical. We can prevent them from doing it that way. It is excellent in that regard. I also like the preventive controls on the runtime side. If you see a runtime event, you could put options in place to prevent that specific command from running, or you can shut down the console, container pod, etc. It is hard to measure the time savings. However, it can take us an hour if we have to reach out to the proper team to get a pod shut down. It would also depend on how responsive they are. Having something in place to automatically shut something down does save a lot of time.

When we first started deploying it, our team was new. We had done some training, but it did take us a little while to fully grasp all the benefits of Prisma Cloud itself. It could have taken a couple of weeks to a month before we really got a good grasp of everything. I would not say that this is the case with everyone. None of us in the team had done the cloud before, so it took us longer to understand and realize the benefits compared to others.

Prisma Cloud is pretty comprehensive. On the CSPM side of things, the SaaS-hosted version seems to have a lot more capability than the self-hosted version. The SaaS-hosted version is more comprehensive than the self-hosted version.

The visibility and control that Prisma Cloud provides affect confidence in the security and compliance postures. A great thing about it is that we can set up whatever specific compliance needs the clients have. It has a lot of features already built into it. It is a simple toggle action to enable the compliance that they need to follow. It lays out what is failing. It gives you all the information that you need to work with clients to get everything compliant. It also offers some options if you want to make custom policies and things like that. If the compliance policies that clients follow are not available nationally, they can have their own compliance policies. They can put those in. It is great.

Prisma Cloud provides a single tool to protect all of the cloud resources and applications, and then there are other tools that you can download from the console, such as the twistcli tool. It is all in there, but there are different tools that you can use as well.

Prisma Cloud saves a lot of time and probably a lot of money too. That is because you can log in to one specific tool. The CSPM SaaS side of it even has more, so being able to log in on that one tool helps. You do not have to worry about different tools to take care of different security aspects. Everything built into one saves a lot of time.

We were able to reduce runtime alerts as we worked with our clients to get to that security posture maturity. There were some clients that were getting probably 25 or more different alerts a day, and we were able to bring that down by more than half. We were on the way to getting even fewer alerts than that. It was quite a bit of a reduction. It is a slow process of getting the runtime alerts knocked down depending on how big the environment is, but it definitely helps.

When it comes to the vulnerability side of things, it has built-in top ten features or top ten vulnerabilities. We can look at them and say that these vulnerabilities are being ranked by Prisma Cloud as our top ten. These are the ones that we should be focusing on. We can work with our clients to help them determine which things should be knocked out first and so on.

Runtime protection and the ability to set up policies and controls are valuable.

The thing that I like the most is that when it comes to runtime events, whenever we see an event, we are able to look through the logs. It is pretty easy to look back through everything that took place. I also like the Radar screen for seeing how everything is connected.

While you can find everything, sometimes, it is a bit difficult. I have always had a little bit of an issue or struggle using the Resource Query Language that we can use to look through and find different things. I wish it was a little bit easier. It might be just my failings in that regard, but it can be a little bit difficult to find everything. You can find everything, but it is difficult sometimes.

If there is a way for auto Defender upgrades, that would be great. They started to implement it, but I do not know if they have done it yet. Having auto Defender upgrades so that we do not have to upgrade Defender manually would be helpful. If there is a way to push the upgrades from the console, that would be one way to improve it. I had created a couple of other requests for improvements, but I do not remember them at this point in time. I know that was one of them.

I started using it back in 2020 although I did a little bit of training a little bit before that around the end of 2019. It was originally Twistlock. I am not sure if Palo Alto had bought it out when I first started training with it.

I would rate it an eight out of ten for stability. Sometimes, on the SaaS version, the console would not load. It was a glitch on their end that they had to fix. We had issues with the GUI at a couple of points. We had issues whenever we were downloading the vulnerability report. It did not include all the information. Once they got some bugs worked out, it was pretty stable, but there were some issues.

It is very scalable. I would rate it a ten out of ten for scalability.

We had a couple of Fortune 500 clients. I do not know if we had anything that was small. A lot of them were big organizations, but some of the environments were small.

We had a client that had the SaaS version that had hundreds of different endpoints, if not more. Most of our clients were on the self-hosted version. Some of them only had four or eight different endpoints or hosts. One of them had about 50 different hosts, give or take. It was a wide array depending on the client we were working with.

When we started, there were three of us working with Prisma Cloud. There were about six of us by the time I left.

They are pretty good, but sometimes, it does take them a little bit longer to move from level 1 support to a higher-up level when it is a technical issue that they have not dealt with before. Overall, it is pretty good.

Positive

We also used a product called Aqua Security. We were using Aqua Security back when we were using the self-hosted version of Prisma and not the SaaS version of Prisma. We had not worked on the SaaS version yet, so I do not know if it is a completely fair comparison, but I did feel that at that point in time, Aqua Security had more features and a better layout. I do not know how that compares today. It has been a little over a year since I last touched Aqua Security, so I am not sure what updates and changes they have made.

We had a deployment team handling the initial deployments. We worked on the upgrades after the initial deployment, which were pretty straightforward, but I am not sure about the initial deployment. It seems to be pretty straightforward, but I have never done an initial deployment.

In terms of maintenance, it is just doing the upgrades. That is really about it. It seems that they push out a patch pretty close to every month. You can upgrade to the minor versions at the very least or security patches.

I would recommend Prisma Cloud to others. It does take a good bit of work to learn it and fully understand the complexity of it and all the features. There are still features in there that I do not even know about or have not even touched, but it is great for protecting the environment. It is easy to get into and understand some of it, but it requires a lot of learning to understand the whole complexity of it.

Its learning curve depends on what you need to do with it. I had taken a week-long class with it, and then there were other training sessions. It could take weeks, if not months, if you want to try to do all the different training they offer.

With my limited use of other platforms, I would rate Prisma Cloud a ten out of ten. This is the one that I have used the most. It is the best of the ones that I have used.

We use the solution for cloud security, multi-cloud environments, compliance, and governance.

We have not had interruptions. It helps us to prioritize and gain resolutions faster. We can see what is happening in any particular environment. 

The visibility and control are very good. It offers good runtime protection. Risk prevention is also a valuable aspect.

Prisma Cloud provides security in multiple and hybrid cloud environments.

Prisma Cloud plays a crucial role as it is one of the key pillars in our security tech stack. It helps us secure the whole multi-cloud cloud infrastructure and protects the deployments, which are crucial to our production environment. 

The automation capabilities are there. In the general context of automation, it offers policy customization to eliminate false positive alerts and fine-tune detection. It constantly gives us more and more facilities to fine-tune the configurations over time. The automation itself also helps save time. 

The real-time protection and management of compliance (of multiple standards, such as ISO, and SOC 2, et cetera) is useful. We can custom-add policies for enhanced protection.

We began to observe benefits immediately after integration. When it comes to real-time protection or risk prevention, there were some initial drawbacks. Over time, however, when we started working on it and fine-tuning the alerts, we started seeing the results.

It provides comprehensive security from the initial phase of spinning up the instance to the termination of the instance. In that life cycle process, it is giving us visibility and control. 

Prisma Cloud provides the visibility and control we need regardless of how complex or distributed our cloud environments have become. 

This positively affected our confidence in your security and compliance. No matter how complex the environment is, the seamless integration from the top layer itself gives us immediate visibility on the number of services. The way Prisma Cloud is structured makes it so that even if the environment is complicated, the categorization will give us a clear picture of where we should focus, what it lacks, or which specific areas we should have more control. 

Prisma Cloud provides us with a single tool to protect all of our cloud resources and applications without having to manage or reconcile disparate security and compliance reports. Managing all of the infrastructure, security, compliance, and reporting can be done on the console itself. 

The fact that Prisma Cloud is the single tool for protecting all of our resources saved us money. If we were to replace Prisma Cloud; we'd need two to three other solutions. We'd need to cover replacement and management costs. It would be 30% more expensive, at least. 

Prisma Cloud hasn't reduced runtime alerts. However, it has helped us identify the true alerts. That helps save us time as we manage multiple clouds. Instead of chasing down each and every alert, we can see what matters and what doesn't. We can focus on the alerts that have the biggest impact on the most sensitive data.

We've been able to save a good amount of money using Prisma. When it comes to cloud security, it satisfies 90% to 95% of our needs and we don't need multiple solutions which would be more expensive. 

We do have many feature requests and custom policies. I don't have any specific notes for improvement; however, if they could continue to focus more on giving users the ability to create custom policies and configurations, that would be ideal. 

I've used the solution for more than three years.

We have not had any issues with stability. We've only had one or two instances where there we outages, however, it's never been down for a long period of time. 

The scalability is good. I'd rate scalability eight out of ten. 

I've contacted technical support on a regular basis. In most cases, they are pretty quick. For some, depending on the issue, it may take time. However, for us, it's not an inconvenience as we understand the physicality of the issue. 

Positive

We have tried a few solutions, however, we did not deploy them. This wasn't recently. This was a while ago. We weren't completely satisfied with the capabilities. 

The initial deployment was pretty easy. It wasn't too difficult. I found it fairly seamless. It was a hassle-free experience. 

We tried it in a test environment (non development) for three months. They we deployed it over nine months to a year in the cloud and production environments. We had three to four people deploying the solution. 

The solution does not require any maintenance after deployment. 

We did have help from the vendor. 

The licensing model is based on assets. The pricing for what we are using is pretty good. 

We're a customer and end-user.

I'd rate Prisma Cloud nine out of ten. 

From a customer point of view, even is a user has multiple products, they should test it out so that they are able to satisfy the requirements. Then, they can easily upgrade with additional add-ons and features. Instead of just creating the Prisma Cloud itself with too much complexity, start simple. 

We use it for compliance management and policy detection, especially for hybrid clouds.

If you have just one or two clouds the detection policy provided by the cloud provider is sufficient. But if you have more than two clouds, a tool like Prisma Cloud is required because you want to go to one place and do things once. The value of a solution like this is that when you have multiple cloud providers, it plays a vital role in security posture management, security detection management, and alert management.

The solution also enables us to make security alerts and security risks visible to our tenants, as we have a common dashboard. In addition, it helps us to improve knowledge of the environment by allowing people, and not just the central team, to always access the data and to see what the security posture looks like. It gives us a central location to see what the security posture is like for multiple cloud providers.

Prisma Cloud also provides the visibility and control you need, regardless of how complex or distributed your cloud environments become. It helps to simplify that complexity. Now we know what the best practices are, and if something is missing we know.

It also helps us to confidently certify compliance for a customer. The reports it provides become a basis for compliance certification. It gives us a single tool to protect all of our cloud resources and applications without having to manage and reconcile disparate security and compliance reports.

In addition, by using the Prisma Cloud 2.0 Cloud Security Posture Management features, our security teams get alerts with the context to know which situations are the most critical. That helps because we have visibility without having to log in to multiple cloud providers. It gives us one simple way to look at all the three cloud provider policies. Those alerts provide us with a good place to start. Our teams get all the data they need to pinpoint the root cause.

Prisma Cloud provides security spanning multi- and hybrid-cloud environments. That is very important when you have a multi-cloud environment because it gives you a single pane of glass for all of them.

In that single pane of glass it gives you Cloud Security Posture Management, Cloud Workload Protection, and Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management, and the vast majority of Cloud Network Security. Without this kind of tool, you would have to go through the three cloud providers and do the mappings for each one. It would be a huge amount of mapping and cross-referencing work, but that work is already done with this solution. Not just the referencing work is done, but it also does the monitoring and scheduling. And a given workload that needs to be compliant with the requirements of a certain country or with your business will be compliant, based on the regionality. Visibility and monitoring are things that are required and Prisma Cloud provides them.

It provides mapping for all compliances so that you do not have to do it. Mapping policies to different compliances can be tricky but it's also a good thing. And you can reuse it as-is. You do not have to do anything. It also provides mapping to the compliance history.

And when it comes to detection, it allows you to write policies that are not just based on compliance but also on your cloud security controls. It allows you to write customizations. It is also the sort of tool in which customization of alerts, notifications, and cloud posture management is possible.

In addition, Prisma Cloud gives you visibility over all of your policies. I know that it can do auto-collection, but I have not seen that implemented by anyone because auto-collection requires organizational maturity, but that lack of implementation is not due to tool immaturity.

And it is a perfect tool, in terms of security policy detection, when it comes to the comprehensiveness of the solution for protecting the full, cloud-native stack. It's very effective.

Another great feature of Prisma Cloud is its integration with Jira and ServiceNow. With those integrations, you do not have to manually intervene. If you do an integration, alerts can be assigned to the respective group, using Jira and ServiceNow. That definitely helps in reducing a good amount of work.

It also provides integration with Agile tools, and that is a great thing. It integrates security into the CI/CD pipeline for container workloads. (We have not used it for non-container workloads, but that's not an issue with the tool). The touchpoints in our DevOps processes are just API calls, making the integration very easy and very smooth.

Developers are able to correct issues using the tools they use to code. The way we have it set up, it's a process of reverse engineering. When an alert comes up it is used to see what was detected and how that can be converted into a preventive policy. That feedback loop is manual, but that input helps to turn the policy into a preventive one. Prisma Cloud has helped to reduce runtime alerts by about 30 percent because we are converting everything into preventive policies. And because it gives you an idea of what needs to be done, it has reduced alert investigation times by 30 to 40 percent.

There is some work to be done on preventive security policies. I would give the existing preventive approach a seven out of 10. I'm sure they will be doing something in this area.

In terms of securing cloud-native development at build time, a lot of improvement is needed. Currently, it's more a runtime solution than a build-time solution. For runtime, I would rate it at seven out of 10, but for build-time there is a lot of work to be done.

Another area for improvement is support for OPA (Open Policy Agent) rather than the proprietary language. Nowadays, people mix things, but you don't want to write a policy in different languages.

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

We haven't seen any issues with the stability of the solution in the last two years. It's good, with no problems at all.

As for the scalability, we haven't seen any issues. We are not cloud-busting, but so far, so good.

We want to extend the solution more in the container world and have more service automation. Those are scenarios we have not gotten to yet.

I am happy with Palo Alto's technical support. It has been good.

Positive

Before Palo Alto, we used the cloud providers' native tools. We switched because, while the native tools were great, managing three different cloud provider portals was not ideal. We needed some centralization and customization.

The initial deployment was a simple and automated process. It was good. It took four or five hours per cloud provider. We use it with AWS, Azure, GCP, and Oracle. There was some strategy involved in the implementation because there are differences among the cloud providers. For example, in AWS you have a Control Tower. A good strategy reduces manual intervention, but it's a SaaS solution so we did not have to do much.

We don't need any staff members to maintain the solution but we do need people to write the custom policies and to make sure that someone is there to take action when there are alerts. We have three staff members involved because writing the policies is not easy. One of the guys is responsible for policy writing, one of the guys is responsible for communication and checking the portal to make sure we communicate with people, and the other guy is helping them both with whatever tasks they need help with.

We tried a few other options but once we looked at Prisma Cloud we decided it was a better option.

The advantage of Prisma Cloud was its support for all the cloud providers and its automation. The ease of automation was one of our selection criteria. Cost was another consideration. While Prisma Cloud is not cheap, it's in the medium range. But if an organization is already using Palo Alto, they can negotiate a good price.

It makes sense for a smaller company to use the native cloud tools, but for a large organization it makes sense to have a tool like Prisma Cloud with centralized information, especially for security.

We use Prisma Cloud in several ways and there are a lot of use cases. The first way that we use it is for inventory. It keeps a near real-time inventory of virtual compute storage and services. Second, we use it for monitoring and alerting of misconfigurations or other items of security significance. Next is compliance. We use it to monitor compliance with the centers for internet security (CIS) benchmarks.

Prisma provides security that spans multi/hybrid-cloud environments. We have it configured to watch for compliance in AWS, the Google Cloud Platform, and very soon, Azure as well. This is important to us because our risk management organization mandated the fact that we would maintain this overwatch capability in any of our clouds that have virtual compute storage or workloads.

Prisma's comprehensiveness for protecting the full cloud-native stack is excellent.

The comprehensiveness of the cloud-native development lifecycles is excellent. For us, the deploy functionality is not applicable but the build and run capabilities are. It positively affects our operations and gives us optics that we wouldn't otherwise have, at the speed of the cloud.

Prisma provides the visibility and control that we need, regardless of how complex our environments are. This very much boosts our confidence in our security and compliance postures. It's also been deemed acceptable as a sufficient presence and efficacy of control by our internal auditors and external regulators alike.

This solution has enabled us to integrate security into our CI/CD pipelines and add touchpoints as a control stop in the release chain. The touchpoints are seamless and very natural to our automation.

Prisma Cloud is a single tool that we can use to protect all of our cloud resources without having to manage and reconcile several security and compliance reports. It unifies and simplifies the overall operations.

Using this tool provides us with risk clarity across the entire pipeline because we use it as a pre-deployment control, ensuring that the run state is known and the risk posture is known at runtime. Our developers use this information to correct issues using our tools for YAML, JSON, CloudFormation templates, and Terraform.

Prisma does so much pre-screening that it limits the number of runtime alerts we get. This is because those pre-deployment code controls are known before the run state.

The investigations capabilities enhance our process and lower incident response and threat detection time. However, it is an enabler and it is run in parallel with our SIEM, which is Splunk. Most of what we're going to do, investigation-wise, is going to be in Splunk, simply because there's better domain knowledge about the use of that tool in Splunk's query language.

The most valuable feature is the continuous cloud compliance monitoring and alerting. The way Prisma works is that it has a tentacle from Palo Alto's AWS presence into ours. That tentacle is an application program interface, an API, a listener. That listener goes in and is entitled to look at all of the Amazon Web Services' logging facilities. It can then do event correlation, and it can tattletale on misconfigurations such as an S3 storage bucket made publicly available. We wouldn't otherwise be aware of that if Prisma didn't watch for it and alert on it.

Prisma provides cloud workload protection and cloud network security in a single pane of glass, and these items are very important to us. It also provides cloud infrastructure entitlement management but identity and access management is not something that we use Prisma for. We implemented a PoC but we opted to use another tool for that use case.

The security automation capabilities provided by this product are excellent and industry-leading. Palo Alto bought a company called Twistlock, which makes a pre-deployment code scanner. They added its functionality to the feature set of Prisma in the form of this compute module. Now, we're able to use the Twistlock capability in our automation, which includes our toolchains and pipelines.

This tool provides excellent features for preventative cloud security. We use all of the auto-remediation capabilities that Prisma offers out of the box. That "see something, do something" auto-remediation capability within Prisma keeps our human responders from having to do anything. It's automated, meaning that if it sees something, it will right the wrong because it has the entitlement to do that with its Prisma auto-remediation role. It's great labor savings and also closes off things much quicker than a human could.

Palo just keeps bolting on valuable features. They just show up in the console, and they have their little question mark, down in the lower right-hand corner, that shows what's new, and what's changed for August or September. They just keep pouring value into the tool and not charging us for it. We like that.

We would like to have the detections be more contemporaneous. For example, we've seen detections of an overprivileged user or whatever it might be in any of the hundreds of Prisma policies, where there are 50 minutes of latency between the event and the alert. We'd always want that to be as quick as possible, and this is going to be true for every customer.

The billing function, with the credits and the by-workload-licensing and billing, is something that is a little wonky and can be improved.

We began using Prisma Cloud in October or November 2018, when it was still known as RedLock.

Stability-wise, it has been perfect.

The scalability is excellent. Palo keeps adding cloud support, such as for Alibaba, Oracle, and others.

We have approximately 5,500 employees. Our deployment is all-encompassing overwatch to all of our AWS accounts, of which there are 66. We also have two or three different folders within GCP.

We do have plans to increase our usage. This includes using it for more of its capabilities. For example, there is a workload protection link that we haven't fully embraced. There are also some network security features and some dashboarding and geo-mapping capabilities that we could make better use of.

The technical support is excellent. We have premium support with Palo Alto and I never have any critique for the quality or speed of support.

We have used this solution from the outset of our cloud journey. It began with Evident.io, then it became RedLock, and then it became Prisma Cloud.

The initial setup is very straightforward. We did it several times.

The first one was deployed to AWS, which probably took about an hour. Years later, as we adopted the Google Cloud, it was configured in probably half an hour.

Palo provides the necessary setup instructions and you can't go wrong, as long as you have the role entitlement set up for Prisma. The handshake only takes about an hour.

Our deployment was done entirely in-house.

We have three people, full-time, who are responsible for the maintenance. Their roles are policy management, meaning these are the rule sets. It's called RQL, the RedLock query language, the out-of-the-box policies that are ever dynamic. When there's a new policy, we have to go in and rationalize that with our cyber organization.

We have to scrutinize the risk rating that's put on it by Palo. We have to realize when we're going to turn it on and turn it off. Also, we have to consider the resulting incident response procedures associated with the alert happening.

One metric that would be meaningful in this regard is that our company has had no cloud-based compromise. 

You can expect a premium price because it is a premium quality product by a leading supplier.

We are a strategic partner with Palo Alto, meaning that we use all of their solutions. For example, we use their NG firewalls, WildFire, Panorama, Prisma, and all of their stuff. Because Prisma was an add-on for us, we get good pricing on it.

There are costs in addition to the standard licensing fees. The credits consumption billing model is new and we're going to be using more of the features. As we embrace further and we start to use these workload security protections, those come at an incremental cost. So, I would say that our utilization, and thus the cost, would trend up as it has in the past.

We evaluated several other products such as DivvyCloud, Dome9, and a product by Sophos.

We did a full comparison matrix and rationalization of each of the capabilities. Our sister company was using DivvyCloud at the time and as we do from time to time, we conferred with them about what their likes and dislikes were. They were moderately pleased with it but ultimately, we ended up going with Palo Alto.

My advice for anybody who is considering this product is to give it a good look. Give it a good cost-balance rationalization versus the cost of a compromise or breach, because it's your defense mechanism against exposure.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

We use the GlobalProtect module within Prisma Cloud to ensure the security of our mobile users.

Prisma Cloud provides security spanning for multi and hybrid cloud environments.

It includes automation capabilities that we can deploy if the environment is suitable.

Prisma Cloud has enabled us to migrate from multiple vendors, creating a more user-friendly experience for everyone.

Prisma Cloud enhances the security of our cloud-native development lifecycle from start to finish.

One of the advantages of Prisma Cloud's GlobalProtect module is that it provides a centralized tool for monitoring applications, user connections, and latency. Additionally, it allows us to track the percentage of availability.

Prisma Cloud saves the equivalent time of one full-time employee.

The most valuable aspect of Prisma Cloud compared to other VPNs is its security and performance.

In the GlobalProtect module, we can easily guide users experiencing connection issues through the notification column. Within that column, we can submit and escalate notifications on host entries for troubleshooting purposes. Additionally, we can troubleshoot by collecting direct logs during user data connections. On the security front, we have a wide range of SaaS-based items at our disposal. Using Prisma Cloud, we can send internet-based reminders about the option to create a VPN tunnel internally.

Palo Alto needs to add more support staff to improve their response time.

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

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

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

The support response time is slow, with resolutions sometimes taking up to two days.

Neutral

The initial deployment is straightforward. I have experience with two deployments. In my previous job, the deployment took six months to complete. Currently, we have 15 tenants to deploy and have successfully deployed ten within the first seven months.

The price for Prisma Cloud is reasonable.

I would rate Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks eight out of ten. However, the delay in support time negatively impacts my overall assessment.

We have 90,000 accounts and have already migrated 50,000 users over to GlobalProtect.

Palo Alto does the maintenance.

I recommend Prisma Cloud to others, as long as the solution meets their requirements for cost, support, and number of locations.

I primarily use the solution to uncover misconfiguration and for cloud code security. We can find gaps that hackers might access in order to steal data. It can trigger alerts and show you everything.

It's been helpful for managing multiple accounts. If we had to handle hundreds of accounts manually, it would take a lot of time. 

We've been able to mitigate issues and fix them before they become bigger problems. If the system detects any critical misconfiguration, we'll receive alerts. 

The risk control is very good. They have scanning that runs often and we can see the latest configurations and get alerts.

The solution offers very good configuration capabilities. It can show you how to resolve and remediate issues, and you can pull reports that will show you everything you need to know.

It provides security across multi- or hybrid-cloud environments. It can work with AWS, Azure, Google, Oracle, et cetera.

We have many projects within our organization, and we need protection from people trying to steal our information. We can see gaps from every corner of the cloud. Having a solution like this is important to our organization so that we have the capability to see and monitor everything from everywhere, which would be hard to do manually. 

We can take a preventative approach to cloud security. If anything is open to the public, we can find it and see it. That said, we are using other solutions also. Still, this product will alert you and engage you if there are any areas where information weaknesses filter up. It will guide you and show you how to fix the issues with configurations.

We might have witnessed some cost savings. If anything gets stolen, it would cost our company monetarily; however, that hasn't happened.

It does help us save time since we don't have to check every console ourselves manually. 

We've noted the benefits of the solution across the last five years.

The remediation data is already available in its logs. You don't have to Google fixes. It's already there on the platform.

We're using containers and Docker. Instead of using open-source, we can use our own code and cloud. We'll be able to know if there is a misconfiguration. For example, if there is an AWS-level misconfiguration, Prisma will help us discover this. 

We use a variety of tools, and we can use Prisma to handle various types of misconfiguration. It covers our entire cloud-native development life cycle.

It provides us with the visibility and control we need regardless of how complex or distributed our cloud environment becomes. It's very helpful. It mitigates 98% to 99% of mitigation issues. It's helped us maintain confidence in our compliance and security reporting. I'm able to see configuration changes. If something changes, I know.

It helps us reduce runtime alerts. You can log in and check each and every account via the portal quite easily. If I see an alert, I can quickly fix issues. Or I can go through each alert and find out which are important or not. It reduces the time we take to handle these tasks by 75%. We can focus on the alerts that have the most impact. It prioritizes alerts to critical, high, and low. 

The console is good and user-friendly. We can see the logs very easily. People without experience can also easily adopt the solution.

We only use the solution for misconfigurations. There may be other features that are lacking, however, we don't use the full scope of the product.

Technical support could use some improvement. 

I've been working with the solution for the last seven years.

The stability is very good. There is no issue. 

We only have two security people using the solution currently. We have it across multiple clouds and regions. 

We haven't had any issues scaling the solution. 

We've only used support if we've had issues around false positives. In those cases, we create a ticket.

Neutral

I also work with CrowdStrike. Both offer a lot of features. We've recently switched to CrowdStrike. 

The initial deployment is very easy. You can add it, for example, to your AWS account. You just need to configure it in Prisma Cloud. You may have to create a policy and allow access. After that, you'll be able to see the console. 

We had two people managing the setup process. The time it takes to deploy depends on how many accounts there are. If you only have one account, it's very easy and only takes one to two days. If you have 100+ accounts, you will need a few weeks. 

There is no maintenance needed from our end. 

We didn't use any consultants during the implementation. 

I don't manage the licensing aspect of the solution. 

We are not using application-level security here. At the application level, we're using other tools. We're also using other XDR and EDR tools. We're only using this product for misconfiguration.

I'd advise other users to try the solution. It's a product that offers many features. It's a good idea to go and look at the market and see which solution is the best. It depends on your environment and what you might need. 

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

Our environment consisted of a cloud-native stack, including Kubernetes, OpenStack, and OpenShift, running alongside additional virtualizations. This hybrid setup required securing both the cloud-native components and the virtualized instances. To address this challenge, we implemented a comprehensive CI/CD pipeline with cloud security in mind. Following vendor code pushes to our environment, we use rigorous scanning and verification procedures to ensure the code's safety before onboarding. Once onboarded, Prisma Cloud provides continuous posture management and security monitoring.

Our current Prisma Cloud deployment utilizes the Registry Scan, Runtime Protection, CI/CD Integration, and Vulnerability Management modules. While we have opted for the Complete Edition, it does not include Posture Management, a feature frequently inquired about by our customers. Currently, Posture Management is only available in the SaaS model, and we are utilizing the on-premise edition, also known as the Complete Version.

We are a system integrator for the telecom sector.

Clients utilizing cloud-native environments often face challenges in scanning and securing their containerized solutions and clusters. Prisma Cloud offers a comprehensive solution, providing end-to-end protection for these clients. 

Prisma Cloud is a crucial component of our clients' security, particularly for their billing environments.

It offers comprehensive security across multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments. This is particularly valuable for hybrid environments because it unifies all security needs under one platform, simplifying management and providing a more consistent approach.

It helps us take a preventative approach to cloud security. It is a comprehensive solution with a lot of features.

We have improved our clients' organizations by offering unified monitoring that directly connects their SIEM, SOAR, EDR, and XDR within their environment. The benefits are usually seen within six to eight months.

The Prisma Cloud SaaS version's comprehensiveness secures the entire cloud-native development life cycle.

Prisma Cloud delivers comprehensive visibility and control over our client's cloud environment, regardless of complexity or distribution. It provides a complete map of the environment, visualizing traffic flow for enhanced understanding.

The touchpoints in the DevOps process are seamless. We can integrate them with our registry and the CD platform, so there are no challenges during automation.

Integrating with a CI/CD pipeline and incorporating a vulnerability assessment process are highly effective features, especially when combined with runtime protection. This synergy provides a comprehensive view of how our application is performing while it's running, which is immensely valuable.

Prisma Cloud's Complete edition is not a complete suit. Only the SaaS version includes posture management and IDE integration.

The visibility on the SIEM needs to be streamlined so we can get the data without any issues. 

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

Prisma Cloud is stable.

Prisma Cloud scales well. In addition to our main site, we recently added Prisma Cloud to our disaster recovery site.

We acquired the services of their technical support several times which was helpful.

Positive

I have experience with Trend Micro Cloud One as well. The pricing is what differentiates Trend Micro Cloud One from Prisma Cloud. 

Initially, we deployed Prisma Cloud quickly, focusing solely on the containerized environment. The remaining deployment across the entire environment took two months to complete. From the solution's perspective, the deployment is straightforward. Some customers have complex environments but that has nothing to do with the solution itself.

Three people were required for the deployment.

Prisma Cloud licensing works on credits.

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

Maintaining Prisma Cloud is generally straightforward.

We have Prisma Cloud deployed in a single department used for the billing system in our hybrid cloud environment. We have eight users.

While Prisma Cloud Complete offers runtime protection, organizations seeking a comprehensive cloud security solution should implement Prisma Cloud SaaS.