Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks Reviews

We host a Prisma Cloud platform on AWS. My role is to host the Prisma Cloud application and provide support to the development team.

We use Prisma Cloud to monitor the health of our Kubernetes clusters and to scan images for vulnerabilities. Developers use Prisma Cloud via twistcli CLI to scan images and view vulnerabilities on the Prisma Cloud user interface.

My job is to maintain the production and staging environments, including installing the twistcli client and deploying dependencies. I also help developers troubleshoot issues with pipelines that connect to Prisma Cloud using twistcli CLI.

Prisma Cloud provides security for multi- and hybrid-cloud environments. It can also monitor multiple on-premises and cloud accounts. In our use case, we have around 40 AWS accounts, which we have added to the Prisma Cloud monitoring tool. We receive non-conformance alerts every month. Prisma Cloud monitors every node in AWS. If a developer opens ports globally, Prisma Cloud will detect it and send an alert to our cloud operations technical team, who will immediately alert the respective developer teams. Prisma Cloud also detects certain types of alerts related to managing data plane infrastructure. For example, if a developer deploys an application on a Kubernetes cluster on AWS and then deletes the application, but the EBS & balancer is not deleted, Prisma Cloud will automatically detect this and send a non-conformance alert to our group email ID.

Prisma Cloud's security automation capabilities provide a variety of features, including twistcli CLI, which can be used to identify vulnerabilities in Docker images. When twistcli CLI detects a vulnerability, it sends an alert to a group email address. The alert includes remediation steps that can be easily followed to fix the vulnerability.

In my experience, Prisma Cloud is the best cloud security solution, whether on-premises or in the cloud. It can monitor multiple cloud products, such as Azure and AWS. I believe it is the best tool for meeting the container requirements of cloud-native applications. It is user-friendly, and upgrades are easy to perform, with documentation available on the official site. It can be deployed on-premises or in the cloud infrastructure. I think it is a good security tool for cloud infrastructure.

We started using Prisma Cloud around version 808.48. That is one of the console versions. Recently, they added some features in the newer version, so our dev team asked us to upgrade to the latest version to get those features. As the administrator, I am not aware of all the cases that Prisma Cloud provides, but I can see that it is easy to manage and has improved all the stakeholders' experience, especially for Docker image scanning. We started with a few teams using Prisma Cloud, but now many stakeholders are using it to scan their Docker images using Prisma CLI. With their request, we recently upgraded the console to the latest version to get the latest features. When we started, we only used basic monitoring, but later we started using it for pipelines to scan Docker images. Then, we added AWS accounts and Kubernetes clusters for monitoring. We deploy twistcli depending on the cluster, and it monitors in the console.

It provides good visibility and control regardless of how complex or distributed our cloud environments become.

Prisma Cloud has enabled us to integrate our security into CI/CD pipelines.

It allows us to add touchpoints to existing DevOps processes.

It also provides us with a single tool to protect all of our resources and applications.

Prisma Cloud provides risk clarity at runtime and across our entire pipeline.

Prisma Cloud has reduced runtime alerts and reduced our alert investigation times. We can remediate alerts within 20 minutes.  

twistcli CLIs are the best feature. They provide a twistcli for scanning Docker images. We have integrated a number of pipelines so that whenever any development is built, the image is scanned for vulnerabilities. Based on the vulnerability reports, the pipelines confirm whether the image needs to be rebuilt after fixing the vulnerabilities, and then build another version if necessary.

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

The technical support team is good. They always help me resolve my tickets with minimal downtime.

Positive

The initial deployment was straightforward because of the well-written documentation that was available. I handled the deployment for the AWS cloud environment.

They have an excellent technical team with sound knowledge of the product.

I would rate Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks a nine out of ten for its compatibility, easy upgrades, user-friendliness, and UI.

Regarding maintenance, we have deployed the application on a Kubernetes environment. We will have one EBS value for the console pod and one persistent volume for the application data. We are taking a snapshot of the PV because we can take a backup of the PV in the Prisma Cloud console UI, but this backup is stored on the same PV where the application is running. If the application crashes completely, we will not be able to restore the backup from the UI, and Prisma Cloud has suggested that we maintain a separate cluster for disaster recovery. However, this is too expensive for us. Therefore, we are taking a snapshot of the PV. If the application crashes, we can simply deploy the console on a new cluster and restore the data from the snapshot.

I do not personally use it in my organization. I am a consultant, and I support my clients. I understand the environment, and based on that, I suggest they implement Prisma Cloud. My job is to do a technical evaluation of the product and recommend it to my clients. I give my recommendation to the client as an advisor. I tell them about the features and capabilities of Prisma Cloud and how they can utilize it. I also do a price or cost-effectiveness comparison of different products, but in the end, my clients decide whether they want to choose the technology over the cost or vice versa.

There have been multiple use cases of Prisma Cloud. The use cases vary based on a client's requirements. It is not necessary to implement all the features and capabilities of Prisma Cloud, but generally, it is for continuous compliance monitoring. The Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) feature identifies vulnerabilities within your IT organization or ITOps environment. The main part is to ensure compliance with industry standards such as GDPR and CIS Benchmarks.  

Vulnerability scanning has been a major problem for clients. Nowadays, clients do not have just one cloud. They are not using just AWS or Azure. They have multiple clouds. For example, the primary site is on Oracle, the disaster recovery site is sitting on AWS, and some of their applications are on Azure, so there are three hybrid cloud environments. We try to identify the best solution that can seamlessly integrate with all three cloud providers. Our clients want a centralized Cloud Security Posture Management solution for monitoring vulnerabilities and threats. This is one of the major use cases for which we recommend the Prisma Cloud CSPM solution to our clients.

Prisma Cloud can seamlessly integrate with all clouds. When you go into a cloud, there are multiple landscapes. Some are Windows machines, and some are Linux machines. There are different APIs, different databases, and different types of environments with microservices, Kubernetes, etc. Prisma Cloud has the capability to integrate with all these. That is the beauty. This seamless integration is very critical in every product.

There are multiple CSPM products in the market. The key feature of Prisma Cloud is seamless integration. They have thousands of in-built APIs. You do not need to do much customization. It can seamlessly integrate with multiple clouds. It can integrate seamlessly with Azure, AWS, Oracle, Alibaba Cloud, etc. This is the main feature and the key selling point of Prisma Cloud. For example, today, the client is using only Azure Cloud, but tomorrow, the requirement might come for AWS or Oracle Cloud. It does not mean that they are going to buy a new product for CSPM. That is the beauty of Prisma Cloud, and this is where Prisma Cloud scores. It integrates seamlessly. It does not mean that other products cannot integrate. They can integrate, but they might not seamlessly integrate, or they might integrate only with AWS and Azure but not with Oracle or Alibaba Cloud. All of my client base is in the GCC region. I have clients in UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, and Oman. Oman has Google Cloud. Saudi Arabia has Alibaba Cloud and Oracle Cloud. UAE has AWS Cloud and Azure Cloud. In Saudi Arabia, there are even private clouds. Prisma Cloud can even integrate with your private cloud. You can integrate your on-premise cloud.

Prisma Cloud can protect the full cloud-native stack. It is great, and it can solve your needs from a security point of view. The whole purpose of Prisma Cloud is to scan vulnerabilities.

Prisma Cloud's security automation capabilities are good. For example, you can define a policy for virtual machines. The policy hits an API and scans all your virtual machines. It can identify a virtual machine that is not supposed to have access to the Internet, but its ports are open. If you have set the rules, it can also remove the access of the port or the VM to access the Internet. This capability is definitely there, but it is based on the defined rules and policies and how you do the configuration.

Prisma Cloud provides good visibility. The dashboard or UI is user-friendly. You get a holistic view of your entire infrastructure. 

Prisma Cloud integrates security into our CI/CD pipeline at the resource,  component, and infrastructure levels, but at the application level, it is limited. For application-level security, you need to do something else. You need to have an additional capability or additional security solution.

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

It provides risk clarity at runtime and across the entire pipeline, showing issues as they are discovered during the build phases. It discovers issues at the scanning level. It also has the capability to rescan. For example, if you have discovered an issue or vulnerability, after resolving it, you can rescan the same resource to identify whether it has been mitigated or not.

Prisma Cloud has reduced runtime alerts by 60% to 70%. It has also reduced alert investigation time by 60% to 70%. With these time savings, you also save money. By preventing any vulnerabilities or threats, you also save your organization's reputation.

It has a feature for customized security policy. I implement it in banking, health insurance, and other sectors, and every organization has its own customized policies and procedures. In Prisma Cloud, you can customize policies, and based on that, you can do monitoring. 

It has multiple capabilities, such as threat detection and remediation. You can even orchestrate. For example, you can set a rule that a specific set of users need to have XYZ access. If any user is identified as having an additional level of privilege, which he or she is not supposed to have, Prisma Cloud can scan and identify it. If you have set the policy, it can also do mitigation. It can remove the access accordingly.

One major observation is that it is not possible to implement Prisma Cloud on-premises. This is the limitation. Prisma Cloud itself is on a cloud. It is sitting on AWS and Google Cloud. It is a SaaS solution, but some of my clients have a local regulatory requirement, and they want to install it locally on their premises. That capability is not there, but government entities and ministries want to have Prisma Cloud installed locally.

It is stable. It is a leading product.

It is a SaaS-based application, so we need not to worry about scalability. It is their responsibility. They have to ensure its scalability and high availability.

From what I know, their support is good enough. They meet the SLAs. They have been good so far. That could be because they are new in the GCC market, and someone from Europe or the UK might have different feedback. 

I did not use any similar solution previously.

We provide consultancy. We do the implementation but with the support of the vendor. It is not just about buying the product. It is about how you design and configure it. We ensure that the implementation is done as per the defined design.

The key point for a successful product implementation is how you configure it and what is your use case. Every client has different requirements and different use cases. It depends on how you drive it. You need to define the use cases, the policies, and the procedures, and you need to ensure they are aligned with your business objective. You may have the best product in the world, but if you do not know how to configure it based on your use cases and your environment, it will not work for you. You will have vulnerabilities in your environment even after you have invested millions.

The vendor takes care of the implementation, and we validate and guide them with the implementation.

In terms of maintenance, it is not a set-it-and-forget-it solution. It is based on your IT environment. Generally, small organizations do not use a CSPM solution. It is used by mid to large organizations. In such organizations, there are multiple changes in the IT resources. The environment is agile. Every day you add something or change something, and you need to ensure that it is integrated with Prisma Cloud. It is an ongoing operational activity.

We evaluated multiple products. Zscaler was one of them.

My clients are quite happy with this solution. Some of my clients are also based in the UK and Europe. So far, it has been good. It met their expectations. Their use cases are met, and they are able to monitor all their infrastructure. It has been good so far, and it worked for all the generic or standard use cases. That does not mean that it is going to solve all the use cases for all customers. If you want to go for a CSPM solution, you need to do a technical evaluation.

If you are looking into implementing a CSPM solution, I would advise first understanding your existing cloud landscape or your on-premise landscape. Understand your local regulatory requirements and local laws. After that, define the use cases. Define what exactly you are looking for and then go to market and evaluate different products. You can check whether there is an integration with AWS, Oracle, Alibaba, or any other cloud. If your regulatory requirements are that you cannot host your solution outside your country or you need to have it on-premises in your data center, not someone else's data center, you have to choose accordingly. You cannot go for Prisma Cloud. If you do not have any such regulatory requirements, you can go with Prisma Cloud or any other solution. 

You should also understand your future landscape in terms of:

• Over the next five or ten years, how do you want to grow? 
• What is your current IT strategy? 
• How are you evolving? 
• What would be your technology? 
• Would there be any major digital transformation? 
• How seamlessly can it integrate? 

You need to consider multiple parameters. It is also about money. It should also meet your financial budget.

Overall, I would rate Prisma Cloud a seven out of ten.

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 initially wanted something to protect our infrastructure. We acquired Prisma Cloud, so at least our containers are secure because we already installed agents in the containers. Our infrastructure is being monitored by Prisma Cloud. Then, we started with the WAF (web application firewall) service to enable API discovery and to understand what our APs are doing.

We can protect our APIs in case of a DDoS attack. We are currently working on CI/CD integration so that we can enable Slack CLI in our pipelines. Whenever there is a vulnerability, it will automatically be produced into the Prisma cloud.

The most valuable feature of Prisma Cloud is WAF. AWS also provides web application security, but it is outside the VPC. Since the agent is already installed in the container, we can protect it directly from the application side. We have a UI-based view of the request.

If I want to know how many SQL injection attacks happened in a day, I can just make a filter. Instead of typing, I can select the filter and get the details. It's much faster, and it is very easy to find out attacks and discovery from the user's perspective.

A couple of exporting functionalities should be more user-friendly because if I want to export something, I can get a lot of data visible to that particular CSV. There is no filter for what kind of data I want to export. That is something that I have missed as someone from the management side. When we see any CVE issues, proper information, including the path, should be mentioned.

For example, in the case of vulnerable packages or images, whether a base image is vulnerable or the package under the base image is vulnerable should be mentioned. That visibility is sometimes missing there, although not every time. It took me some time to figure out what kind of issue it was trying to resolve.

For example, one issue was that an image should be run with a non-route user. Only the discussion was there, but how to validate and fix that was not there.

I used Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks for around one month in my previous company. I've been using it for the past four months in my current company.

Prisma Cloud is a stable solution.

It is a scalable solution. We have more than 20 people using Prisma Cloud in our organization.

I rate the solution's one-on-one technical support session a six out of ten. The support team usually provides only a half an hour session, which sometimes is very little for us when the issues are big. However, their support through email is good. The solution's one-on-one support session should be extended by at least half an hour. Since their one-on-one sessions are based on their availability, I don't get instant assistance when I need it.

Neutral

I have previously worked on different tools like PingSafe. PingSafe is only into cloud security posture management, but Prisma Cloud has everything enabled in it. As a cloud security posture management tool, both the tools have their own advantages and disadvantages.

I can compare only one functionality, which is the CSPM module. For the CSPM module, Prisma Cloud's finding is good because it has access inside a containerized agent. PingSafe was more into the basic CIS benchmark things where we were able to identify the issues. PingSafe was also good, but Prisma Cloud has more advantages and configurations enabled.

The solution's initial setup was pretty straightforward. It's a bit complex for a new person, and some guidance will be required. However, the documentation is quite enough to reduce those things. The initial setup is neither too hard nor too easy.

The DevOps team does the solution's deployment. I was not a part of the deployment process. When I discussed it with them, they told me they had some script or documentation. They started that, and the deployment was completed in a day or two.

We are using cloud protection, virtual protection, and the CI/CD modules of Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks.

The comprehensiveness of the solution for protecting the full cloud-native stack is pretty good. We need to monitor those things. We initially did all the configuration from the container or API side. Now, our work is only to monitor periodically. It has a report functionality on a mail and download basis.

Periodically, we'll receive a mail asking us if we want to work on the weekly summary of our findings. There is a rescan functionality that I can use to rescan and confirm if someone has fixed a vulnerability so that it will not be shown in the results the next time. Prisma Cloud provides comprehensiveness that covers most of the areas.

When we didn't have this tool initially, we had to run around for different open-source tools because there was no one-stop solution. We had to go for different open-source tools for different functions. Prisma Cloud is a one-stop solution that covers multiple things like API security, container security, infrastructure security, AWS cloud security, and CI/CD security. So, it's a complete package for us to look around and figure out the issues in every area.

We did not immediately realize the solution's benefits from the time of deployment. It took an initial one month to understand the functionalities and their uses. After one and a half months, we were able to identify the benefits of using these services.

The solution provides the visibility and control we need. Initially, we did some access analysis to know what kind of permissions these particular agents are running. Then, we got to know and understand the agent's particular privileges.

The solution has reduced runtime alerts by around 15 to 20%. As soon as we use any image, we decide to run the scan and get the finding immediately. We have a time window to figure out the issue.

In case of an incident, Prisma Cloud requires some maintenance. If something happens because of the tool, we have to stop those agents, rerun them, and then check the logs. Sometimes, the services are disrupted when we enable something amid permission issues. So, that part definitely requires some maintenance.

I would recommend Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks to other users. Prisma Cloud is a one-stop solution where you get multiple tools within one tool. That is a great thing because you don't have to run around for different kinds of tools.

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

When we started using this tool, the name was Twistlock, it was not Prisma Cloud. We had a container team responsible for modernizing our environment and they created an on-prem solution using Red Hat OpenShift. They started using Twistlock as a way to manage the security of this on-prem environment.

My team, which was the security team, inherited the ownership of the tool to manage all the security problems that it was raising.

When we started using containers on the cloud, our cloud provider was Azure. We also started migrating our security solutions for the cloud, but that was at the end of my time with the company, so I didn't participate much in this cloud process.

We were also sending the logs and alerts to Splunk Cloud. We were managing all the alerts generated by policies and vulnerabilities and the threats from the web. That way, we had a pipeline system sending these alerts to a central location where our investigation team would look at them. So we used the system to manage both cloud and on-prem and connect them.

We had one team that didn't have any security whatsoever. We helped them to add Prisma Cloud to scan their environment. It was a big issue in the company at the time, because they had a huge environment which was not following the security rules of the company. They didn't have any security. Prisma Cloud helped us to start raising alerts and vulnerabilities. That was a successful case because in the timeframe of one to two weeks, we installed the tool and were teaching the team how to manage it, find their vulnerabilities, and how to fix them. We were able to help a team that was totally vulnerable to have a security solution.

Overall, it covered all the stages that we hoped it would cover.

The solution also reduced our runtime alerts. I don't have the exact numbers but I would say it lowered the number of issues by 70 percent. Our strategy was that we started using the tool for some small applications, and then we started using it for other teams. For the small applications, I can't guarantee the reduction was 70 percent because those solutions were managed by the security team which had smart people who were security conscious.

We used the policy features to manage users so that they would not have secrets in their containers. We also used the vulnerabilities, the CVEs, that were being raised by the tool.

The CVEs are valuable because we used to have a tool to scan CVEs, at the language level, for the dependencies that our developers had. What is good about Prisma Cloud is that the CVEs are not only from the software layer, but from all layers: the language, the base image, and you also have CVEs from the host. It covers the full base of security.

The compliance is good because it has a deep view of the container. It can find stuff that only administrators would have access to in our container. It can go deep down into the container and find those policy issues.

We also started looking for the WaaS (Web-Application and API Security) solution, but we didn't implement it during the time I was at the company. We tested it. What's good about the WaaS is that it's almost a miracle feature. You can find SQL injection or cross-site scripting and defend against that by setting up Prisma Cloud and turning on the feature.

Prisma Cloud also provided risk clarity at runtime and across the entire pipeline, showing issues as they were discovered during the build phases. It provided a good rating for how to prioritize a threat, but we also had a way to measure risk in our company that was a little bit different. This was the same with other scanning tools that we had: the risk rating was something that we didn't focus too much on because we had our own way to rate risk. Prisma Cloud's rating was helpful sometimes, but we used our risk measurement more than the tool's.

One problem was identifying Azure Kubernetes Services. We had many teams creating Kubernetes systems without any security whatsoever. It was hard for us to identify Kubernetes because the Prisma Cloud could not identify them. From what I heard from Palo Alto at the time, they were building a new feature to identify those. It was an issue they were already trying to fix.

In addition, when it comes to access for developers, I would like to have more granular settings. For example, in our company we didn't want to display hosts' vulnerabilities to developers, because the infrastructure or containers team was responsible for host vulnerabilities or the containers. The developers were only responsible for the top application layer. We didn't want to provide that data to the developers because A) we thought it was sensitive data and B) because it was data that didn't belong to developers. We didn't want to share it, but I remember having this problem when it came to the granularity of granting permissions. 

They need to make the settings more flexible to fit our internal policies about data. We didn't want developers to see some data, but we wanted them to have access to the console because it was going to help them. One possibility was to develop our own solution for this, using the API. But that would add complexity. The console was clean and beautiful. It has the radar where you can see all the containers. But we just didn't want to show some data. It was a pain to have to set up the access to some languages and some data.

Another thing that was a pain was that in our on-prem environment there was a tool that sometimes generated a temporary container, to be used just for a build, and Prisma would raise some compliance issues for this container that would die shortly. It was hard to suppress these kinds of alerts because it was hard to find a standard or a rule that would fit this scenario. The tool was able manage the whole CI/CD pipeline, including the build as well—even these containers that were temporary for a build—but sometimes it would raise too much unnecessary data.

Also, one of the things that it's hard to understand sometimes is how to fix an issue. We managed to do so by testing things ourselves because we are developers. But a little bit of explanation about how to fix something would help. It was more showing what the problem was than it did about how to fix it.

I used Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks for about a year and a half.

It's pretty much stable, as much as containers are stable. It is more about the container solution itself, or how Kubernetes is managed and the state of health of the containers. As Prisma is a container solution itself, it was as good as the Kubernetes environment could make it. 

I don't know about the Prisma Cloud SaaS solution because we didn't use it, but the on-prem solution was as reliable as our Kubernetes system was. It was really reliable.

It's pretty scalable because of the API. I liked how simple the console was and how simple the API was. There was no complexity; it was straightforward. The API documentation was also very good so it was pretty easy to scale. You could automate pretty much everything. You could automate the certificate information, you could automate the access for developers, and a lot of other stuff. It was a pretty modern solution. Using APIs and containers, it was pretty scalable.

We used their technical support many times and it was very good. The engineers there helped us a lot. They were engaged and interested in helping, and they were polite and they were fast. When we raised an issue to high priority, they answered faster. I would rate their support at five out of five.

Prisma Cloud was the only solution we had for container security. We had other tools such as SAST and DAST tools, as well as open source management tools. Those intersected somewhat with what Prisma does, but Prisma had access to the whole environment, so it's a little bit different.

We used the API from Prisma Cloud. We had a Jenkins pipeline with a lot of scripts to automate the installation of Prisma Cloud and the patching updates as well.

In our company, the security team had about 10 people, but only two were responsible for Prisma Cloud. As I mentioned, we inherited ownership of it from the containers team. In the containers team, we had a guy who was our main contact and who helped us. For example, when we needed to access a certain environment, he had to manage access so that it could have privileged access to do what it needed to do in the container environment. So overall, there were three people involved with it.

We used Prisma Cloud extensively. We used it across the whole on-prem environment and partially on cloud. We were at around 10 or 20 percent of the cloud. I think that nowadays they have probably reached much more than that, because we were just beginning on the cloud at the time.

Smaller companies should probably use the SaaS. I know that Azure and the cloud providers already have different ways to use tools in an easy manner so that you don't need to manage the infrastructure. So smaller companies should look into that. The infrastructure solution would be more for big companies, but I would recommend the solution for big companies. I would also recommend it for small companies. In terms of budget, sometimes it's hard to prioritize what's more important, but Prisma fits into different budget levels, so even if you have a small environment you can use Prisma's SaaS solution.

I was pretty satisfied with it. My impression of Prisma Cloud was pretty good. It's an amazing tool. It gives the whole view of your container environment and connection with multiple platforms, such as Splunk. It is a good solution. If I had my own company and a container environment, I would use it. It can fit a huge container environment with a lot of hosts, but it can also fit a small container environment. Azure also provides built-in solutions to install Prisma in your application. So there are different solutions for various container environments. The company I was in had huge container environments to monitor, on-prem and in the cloud, and the tool fit really well. But the tool also fits small environments.

We are a system integrator. My organization has a cloud practice, and we focus on cloud security. Predominantly, Prisma Cloud is used to identify misconfigurations in the cloud.

We have been using Prisma Cloud for two specific customers on Azure Cloud. It is quite a new organization, and we currently have two customers, but in my previous organization, we had about eight customers.

We predominantly focus only on the cloud. We don't work with hybrid models. MultiCloud is there, but we haven't worked on MultiCloud as of now. This specific region is more into Azure Cloud. Azure has a data center over here. Therefore, the adoption of AWS or Google is not high in this region. For data compliance, customers want to stick to a cloud vendor that has a data center in this region.

My 18 years of experience is purely in serving the US and Europe markets. I am quite new to the UAE and the gulf region, and I found that this region is not very mature when it comes to cloud security. The majority of the CISOs are not aware of cloud security controls that need to be implemented, and they only speak about traditional security such as EDR, endpoint security, DLP, etc. So, there is a big potential for cloud security, specifically at the containers and serverless layer.

When we evaluated solutions, we carried out PoC not only for two customers but also for the other six accounts, and they were pretty shocked to know that there were a lot of misconfigurations in the cloud. This region lacks cloud security skills, and there are not many cloud security experts or solution architects to design proper architecture. When we carried out the PoC, they became aware of the misconfigurations and security gaps. It helped them to identify the potential risks they have in the cloud. Generally, with security, it is not easy to measure the outcome or gain from a solution because it purely depends on the breach and the data loss, but so far, we have helped two organizations in fully implementing the solution, and the other four are still in the PoC process.

We purely focus on the container and serverless security, and we predominantly work with Cloud Posture Management (CPM). We opted for Prisma Cloud because we found Prisma Cloud to be better in terms of the overall posture and integration. There are other products in the market, but they don't have a complete and broad portfolio range when it comes to containers or serverless functions. Prisma Cloud has good integrations. You can integrate vulnerability management for the overall risk score. When it comes to commercials, costing-wise also, it is far more reasonable for the customers.

It is good for helping us to take a preventative approach to cloud security. It identifies all the controls and gives an overall picture. For example, it tells us the portion that has misconfiguration. So, we can fix that portion. It is a very good preventative tool. Certain customers predominantly use it for one-time assessments, which I don't recommend. It should be an ongoing assessment to have a good incident response as soon as an alert comes in. Normally, people just ask for a weekly report or monthly report to identify their security posture. Instead of that, they should have a real-time incident response solution to act as a preventative tool. As soon as an alert is generated, there must be someone to immediately work on it, and having such a tool really helps.

It provides the visibility and control we need. In my previous organization, we had quite a complex environment with about 30 Kubernetes clusters. As compared to other tools, it provided better insights, but I haven't evaluated it for much more complex architectures. When it comes to serverless architectures, our work has been minimal. Therefore, I cannot confirm or guarantee whether Prisma Cloud will satisfy a highly complex environment.

It gives the overall picture of compliance when it comes to the cloud security portion. We also have a couple of custom dashboards wherein we integrate the security risk score from other tools. Before implementing this solution for the customers, there was no proper mechanism for the cloud. They only had the vulnerability management reports, the SIEM score, or the application VAPT reports, but they did not have any visibility to anything on the cloud in terms of overall compliance and container security. It definitely gave visibility to the CISOs. A lot of people are still concerned about whether the cloud is secure, whether they need to migrate to it, and whether they have proper security controls for containers and serverless security. It gives better exposure to them. We do have proper tools with CISO-enabled dashboards using which they'll be able to see the score. 

It has reduced runtime alerts by 60% to 70%. 

It has reduced the alert investigation time. False positives are reduced. So, we are able to focus on what has been highlighted. At certain times, we need to accept certain changes, and it also gives us the flexibility to mark something as safe. Based on the change control, we can disable the alert so that the alert is not repeated until the change is completed. We have the functionality to do it.

The container and serverless security is most valuable. It is quite a new technology for this region. Even though containers have been there for a long time, the adoption of containers is very minimal in this region. When it comes to using Kubernetes containers in a complex architecture, there is a lack of security in the market. People aren't aware of the security controls or the process for governance. Container security provided by Prisma Cloud is quite good at filling that gap.

We identified two things that we felt would be great to have, but they are under NDA. So, I can't disclose them. Other than those two things, we identified a generic bug in the secret key management service on AWS that needs to be fixed. We reported it to them, and we want them to fix it.

It is very good with predominant cloud vendors, such as AWS, Azure, and GCP, but I am not sure about its efficiency when it comes to other cloud vendors. They should expand its coverage to other cloud vendors such as Alibaba Cloud and Oracle Cloud, which are quite common in this region. I am not sure if they have a full-fledged Oracle Cloud controls evaluation. If they can improve it in terms of the MultiCloud aspect for the organization, it will be helpful, especially in this region.

I have been working with this solution for almost three years. In my previous organization, I worked with it for two years, and it has been about eight months since I joined my current organization. Here also, we have opted for Prisma Cloud.

Its stability is good. We didn’t have any issues with it.

In my earlier organization, we used it for a bigger client with about 3,000 VMs in AWS and about 30 to 40 clusters. We did not have any challenge with its scalability. As we started putting things, it was working well. 

In this organization, we only have two small customers. There is not much workload. We haven't had any issues. It works fine.

In my earlier organization, I worked directly with Prisma Cloud support. Their support was good. My engagement was minimal, but the initial support from them was quite good. When I had some RFCs and RFIs coming in, their turnaround times were quite less. We had a very good rapport with them. We had a specific account manager who handled any RFCs and PoCs. Their support was good, and we didn't have any challenges. 

In this organization, we have been working with a channel partner, and there have been a few challenges because they are also occupied with other proposals and tasks. The same partner also works with other competitor organizations. Overall, I would rate their support an eight out of ten.

Positive

In my previous organization, we were using the Skyhigh networks. Earlier, it was Sky network, and later on, McAfee acquired it and made it a CASB and cloud posture management product. We had a couple of challenges with it. So, we evaluated a lot of products and shortlisted Palo Alto Prisma Cloud. 

It is straightforward. They provide two options. You can configure it manually or just grant access. It can then easily sync up. They also provide the cloud formation templates to spin up in minutes. So, it is straightforward and very simple.

It is hard to measure cost savings at this time because it is quite a new investment for the organization. Cost savings will be there in terms of security and reducing the development time and error fixing time, but it will take some time to measure that.

Its price is reasonable as compared to other products. The main challenge is explaining the licensing model to customers. It isn't a problem related to Palo Alto. Commonly, people don't understand cloud licensing or security licensing. When they have fixed virtual machines, they know what they are going to be charged, but when it comes to cloud automation, it is hard for them to get clarity in case of high workloads or when they have enabled auto-scaling, etc. It would be helpful if Palo Alto can educate people on their licensing programs.

We evaluated multiple products after I came into this organization. We evaluated various CSPM and container security products, such as Aqua Security and Rapid7.

Nowadays, every vendor has come up with a cloud posture management tool. So, we carried out a couple of PoCs in specific customer accounts that had an almost similar type of infrastructure, and based on the outcome, we found Prisma Cloud to be better in terms of identification of miscontrols and security. The cost also played a major role. As compared to other products, it was reasonable. So, the feature set for fulfilling customer requirements and the cost were the two factors that played a major part.

The third factor was the flexibility to work with the vendor. In terms of partnership and support, we felt that being a Palo Alto product, Prisma Cloud would be better. Palo Alto has better service over here, and their channel partners are quite flexible to work with on initial customer demonstration and other things. We felt much more comfortable with Prisma Cloud in all these three aspects.

When it comes to its security automation capabilities, currently, not every customer prefers to automate. We have been trying to implement automation, and when the right access was given, we did a certain amount of automation to immediately block the firewall rules or revoke access when any privileged access has been given. We have been doing a little bit of automation, and it has been good. We are able to achieve our goals. Out of two customers in this company and eight customers in my previous company, only three customers preferred to do automation to a certain extent. The rest of them wanted the alerts to be sent to the incident response team of their SOC. They wanted their team to act upon them. They only allowed us to automate high severity ones or highly critical ones. For example, they only allowed us to automate things like immediately blocking access to specific ports or IPs, but we haven't tried the automation to a full extent.

It enables you to integrate security into your CI/CD pipeline and add touchpoints into existing DevOps processes. We implemented it for just one use case. Before that, we were using Qualys Container Security in the CI/CD pipeline. After switching to Prisma Cloud, I did not have an opportunity to evaluate it completely because I moved to another organization. In my previous organization, we had expertise in DevOps. We had a dedicated DevOps team with almost six years of experience in automating the entire deployment of servers infrastructure, as well as applications. It was pretty easy for them to implement or integrate any security tool into the CI/CD pipeline. In my current organization, we don't have an expert team, and we struggle a bit in implementing things because there are multiple CI/CD deployments from Jenkins to Amazon's native one and Git. So, we take support from Palo Alto to get things deployed during the PoCs. In my previous organization, it was also easier for us to implement because the training provided from the Palo Alto side was quite good, and we had a lot of training materials in the partner portal. We utilized them. We got in touch with the technical team, and we implemented things quite faster, but here, there is a bit of lag because we don't have expertise in DevOps for implementations or integrations.

It can provide risk clarity at runtime and across the entire pipeline, showing issues as they are discovered during the build phases. Shifting your security to the left cuts down the entire life cycle of application deployment, and it does help to fix the security issues at the beginning of the development life cycle itself. We have not seen a large amount of time being cut down. That's because, typically, teams deploy the code, and then initiate a security scan. By integrating these things into the early development cycle, the time can be cut down to three weeks from about one and half months.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

I primarily use the solution for vulnerability management, compliance management, and sometimes defense and access control. It has a sandbox. We can scan and manage CI pipeline security. 

The cloud solution as one platform can provide us with a lot of features and cover most of what customers care about. 

I have some clients that are moving from computing to a container environment. For cloud sets, customers need to increase the power of security over the DevOps environment. It doesn't create any bottlenecks when launching new products. From a business perspective, it's very helpful and supportive. It expedites go-to-market.

The runtime defense and API security are very good. It offers very good application security.

It's very comprehensive. It can cover the full cloud-native stack. There is a wide range of integrations, and the compatibility with various cloud providers is very useful.

It's perfect in terms of the security automation. We can do everything from the portal and choose a variety of policies. It can cover medium to large customers. 

We can take a preventative approach to cloud security. It's helpful.

They are constantly updating and adding new features and offering support for each of the updates. 

It is very comprehensive. It covers all aspects of the customer's cloud.

It provides good visibility and control regardless of the complexity. 

We can integrate into CI/CD pipelines. It's very efficient. They can integrate with whatever CI tools the customer uses, including Windows, Linux, and so forth. 

Modules can be added to cover additional items from the customer's side.

It reduced runtime alerts. We've saved more than 50% to 60% of our time.

We've reduced alert investigation times. With any incident that happens, we can do an investigation and correlate and normalize the incident quickly. We've saved more than 70% of the time typically taken.

They could improve more features for the enterprise version of the solution. They need to also have more features for on-premises versions for companies that cannot access the cloud version. 

I've been using the solution for around two years. 

The solution is stable. I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. 

We use the solution for one location. 

It's a scalable solution. I'd rate it nine out of ten. 

I was not involved in the deployment of the solution. 

There is maintenance, however, it is very minor. You just need one to two people to manage it. 

The ROI users get from the tool is very high. 

The pricing is a little bit high. It is not a cheap product. 

I'm a partner and reseller.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. 

I'd recommend the solution to others. The cloud-based version is very good. Users can rely on the product.

We have deployed Prisma Cloud for one of our client premises. And we are managing it internally. Although we do have support and other stuff for this solution, it has two kinds of modes. One is the detect and protect mode, and one is only for the monitoring purpose. There's different licensing. If you need protection from Prisma Cloud, then you will purchase a firewall kind of module with that. Otherwise, by default, it comes in monitoring mode.

It's deployed on all VMs and workloads. With the Prisma Cloud, you can have it on a cloud server or you can deploy it as a stand-alone. That said, the container should be persistent. Otherwise, if you restart the container, you will lose your configuration and everything.

We were doing a deployment for a telecom client, and they have two different application pipelines. One was based in India with the Oracle team. They were developing their own application, so we have also incurred it to the Prisma Cloud in their CI/CD pipeline.

The second use case was to monitor the OpenShift environment. The solution was basically bare metal. Then on top of that, there was OpenStack. It's an on-prem cloud service. We have deployed the Prisma Cloud solution, so it was on top of an open stack.

If there is a large infrastructure involved, you need to run continuous vulnerability assessments. You also need comprehensive reports and complete inventory details. Doing everything manually would cost a lot of human resources. And it can take a long time. This helps automate and control vulnerability scanning that's continuous. It also helps with compliance. If I have to scan something monthly or quarterly, I can do it, and it will run. What Prisma Cloud actually does is that it keeps on doing this activity for you without any required request from the operator side. Its agents are deployed on the infrastructure, on all the components, on all the applications, on all the operating system images, VMs, or the old private cloud environment or your work on nodes. If you spread your agents all over your infrastructure, it'll keep scanning and reporting, and you can see everything from your dashboard. 

We have integrated OpenStack, OpenShift, RH, et cetera. You don't need to integrate every individual part; you only need to integrate the worker node. And once you deploy it on the worker node, all the parts running on that worker node.

Prisma gives you full-fledged posture management. You get detailed insights into all your modules, how they are communicating, and on which ports they are communicating. If there is any unknown port or unknown address, et cetera,  Prisma Cloud can show you the configuration, and the ports. That way, as an architect or product manager, you know through your documentation which application should be communicating on which ports. If there is any deviation from that documentation, Prisma Cloud can see that, and you can get the details for that. 

With respect to virtual protection, it tells you which image, VM, physical server, worker node, or port has what kind of vulnerability. It gives you everything in real time. 

Monitoring mode is great if a company wants to know every single vulnerability and loophole in its infrastructure. It gives you a complete inventory list of VMs and devices within your infrastructure from the dashboard. You can add new policies or elements easily. You just integrate it within Prisma Cloud. That way your inventory automatically gets updated. 

Real-time continuous vulnerability assessment and reporting are key features. It's critical to most large-scale enterprises.

Prisma Cloud provides security scanning for multi and hybrid cloud environments. Sometimes, if we, for example, have some infrastructure on a public cloud, like AWS, then you need to monitor them continuously and you will require the inspector module of AWS. The inspector module is initially free of charge. And after two weeks, they'll start charging you. However, you can just put the credentials or access keys for AWS within the Prisma Cloud and assign the agent to that. It will start monitoring your cloud infrastructure as well with less overhead.

Prisma Cloud provides the needed visibility and control regardless of how complex and distributed the cloud environments become. What you do is you need to open the communication matrix. That communication matrix is the baseline or the product for the Prisma agent or CLIs, to communicate with the Prisma Cloud and share its findings directly. Whatever the agent finds on its local host, it will respond and share it with the Prisma Cloud. 

Prisma Cloud has two types of interfaces. One is towards the Internet to the main Palo Alto cloud environment. The second interface is towards the infrastructure or architecture. Most of the time, the operators focus on the corporate side since their responsibilities are related to that scope. The other side should be automatically updated, similar to how Microsoft. They simply tell you updates have been downloaded and installed, and you need to restart your system. The update processes are transparent. There is nothing manual to worry about.
There are a lot of compliance rules that you can configure. If the product manager knows that there's a new compliance rule, they ensure that the new compliance rule is compatible with their product. Compliance is not an issue, however, rules should be configured. It's just like any other compliance activity. 

Prisma Cloud enabled our customers to integrate security into their CI/CD pipeline. Our client was developing a large-scale application for billing purposes. And Oracle India was involved in that, and there was a DevOps pipeline. We have integrated the Prisma routes to the CLI within their pipeline; it was being handled through Prisma Cloud automatically within different DevOps gateways. It's seamless. Once you integrate it, then it's part of the pipeline, and it's being done automatically just like any other pipeline gate.

Having a single tool to monitor cloud sources has had a positive impact on our customers. Tasks that were headaches have become easier. It's easier to assess vulnerabilities and compliance thanks to automation. 

Prisma Cloud provides risk clarity at runtime and across the entire pipeline showing issues as they are discovered in the build phases. The vulnerability will stay on the dashboard until you fix it as well. It will keep showing you the issue until it is resolved. Vulnerabilities that are identified are documented and stored in the vulnerability management system.

Prisma Cloud has reduced alert investigation times thanks to the comprehensive dashboard. You can directly search for any host you are targeting or go through the entire list and check everything. 

It's helped customers save money in that it's helped them catch vulnerabilities thanks to 24/7 scanning. That helps you fix the issue earlier. If a vulnerability gets through and the company is breached, they can lose their reputation. The same is true if their service goes down - especially in a banking scenario. It can lead to a big financial loss. Having proper security controls and monitors in place mitigates this. 

They have very rich documentation, and everything is very clear with respect to integration and configuration.

It provides a lot of compliance rules. It provides us with around 160 different rules. That way, you can define everything during scanning and the system will keep checking for compliance, which is automated.

One single drawback is that updates are not directly based on push notifications. There is a lot of software that gets updated automatically. Since this is a security product, this product should be automatically updated. Right now, it must be manually updated. I should be able to focus on vulnerabilities and security, not updating.

Delays can be very costly. Even with a minute delay in updating, if an attack is successful, when you have this corrupted million-dollar product, it's useless to you then. That's why updates should be automatically done. 

It doesn't patch your products; it only provides insights into vulnerabilities. It's merely a value-added service for your overall security posture. 

They are missing some compatibility details in their documentation. If I am choosing a product, the first thing I look at before recommending it to my organization, is the documentation, including how it is organized, if their documentation is informative, what information they are providing, et cetera. Prisma Cloud has one issue within its documentation, and that is that it does not provide exact details of every single plugin. I was very concerned about which version of Prisma Cloud was compatible with which version of the solutions we had in our CI/CD pipeline. They need to be more clear. 

The solution is stable and is capable of covering large enterprises. I've never faced issues once I've deployed it. However, if you will be holding the data for the long run, you need to think about storage. That's it.

It's scalable. You can scale horizontally or vertically. 

Their support is not very good.

Negative

I've deployed it from scratch in a containerized environment. I am running a persistent container for Prisma Cloud.

The setup is very straightforward, thanks to their documentation. It's rich and comprehensive. They just don't provide version compatibility.

We deployed the solution in a day.

There is no other complexity in the implementation. It can be anywhere in the VM or any other component of your infrastructure. The agent should be able to ping its Prisma Cloud server. Once that is done, there is no other complexity. You just deploy the agent. The agent will keep updating automatically via the Prisma Cloud, and it will start finding new vulnerabilities. That's it. There are no such complex issues with the Prisma cloud deployment.

The implementation strategy was that we knew for which kind of infrastructure we were going to deploy it. 

There isn't much maintenance needed. The only thing is that sometimes you integrate Prisma Cloud with something that is not supported by Prisma Cloud or documentation does not explain it. In that case, you need to engage their support team. Their support is not very good. 

The solution is very expensive. They must have decided internally not to go after SMEs or startups. They are targeting multi-million or trillion-dollar organizations. Those are the companies that can afford their products. 

We're an MSP; we provide this product to customers. We provide security as a service.

We wouldn't recommend the solution for SMEs or startups. This is for larger corporate enterprises like large banks, fintechs, or telcos. It's good for larger infrastructures that might have legacy controls or devices.

Prisma is not the only solution in the market; there are others as well. It offers good core functionality, and it covers your whole cloud environment. It's a fully-fledged package that can help provide insights into security threats in any kind of development environment, from production to staging.  

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten.

If you are interested in Prisma Cloud, look at your business cases first. If you have a massive, large-scale infrastructure, they should not go into new products blindly.