Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks Reviews

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We have not had any issues up to now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 cloud security posture management and CWPP.  We are also using Cortex, another Palo Alto product. We needed another cloud security tool to create an additional security layer on our CSPM solution. It's essential to secure our infrastructure against any zero-day attacks. 

We needed a cloud security tool to identify misconfigurations in our cloud infrastructure. We were using AWS Cloud Cover since we only had one cloud provider. We onboarded the SysTrack and were able to find the most configurations. In a short period of time, we detected the issues and got alerts.

Before we implemented Prisma Cloud, we were unable to detect misconfigurations based on the policies that we set up. Prisma has that capability. You can add custom policies, and the tool can handle the reconfiguration. 

You can also get feedback from the customer's side about custom policies that can be added on Prisma. We can see the custom policies contributed by other organizations, which has upskilled my knowledge. The primary benefit is the layer of security added to our other infrastructure. 

We started seeing the benefits immediately once the solution was fully deployed. After about a month, we could start digesting data into the tool. Then, we started enabling all the features that we secured for other organizations. After around two months, we could use the features and see the things we were unable to detect. We were able to set up remediation on the tool. Other teams like the developers and tech ops were able to get the details over Jira since it was integrated with SysTrack. 

Our development lifecycle was already prebuilt, and Prisma has absorbed it. There's nothing that Prisma doesn't cover or that isn't reported to the organization. The developers are able to see best practices for any type of resource. They secured training from the product team, and Palo Alto's developers attended it. They shared their knowledge base so we could make the right decisions about resources before making any changes to the AWS cloud.

Prisma can provide solid visibility even if your cloud infrastructure is complex. It can divide the infrastructure into different parts to give you visibility into vulnerability management, configurations, or workload protection. It doesn't matter how complex your cloud infrastructure is. Prisma can digest it and provide the right guidance.

Prisma was able to quickly integrate and onboard our account. As a fintech company, we need a cloud security tool with modules that can benefit the organization. It has a feature that gives you recurring reports for a specified period. 

The solution is handy for the team that handles the Jira tickets because it enables them to automate the tickets. We had to add them manually in the past, so Prisma has absorbed a significant chunk of their workload. It helps us to discover risks throughout the pipeline using the CWPP features. You can quickly identify a misconfiguration and resolve it. In addition to the features it adds, Prisma has helped us to solve tickets faster.

It creates an alert in under a minute. The software team receives this and notifies the owner of the resource within five minutes and resolves the issue according to the SLA. It helps us resolve zero-day cases. It would cost us a lot of money. Prisma helps us to resolve those issues promptly. 

I like Prisma's ability to integrate with other tools. We can integrate it with Jira so that when Prisma triggers an alert, it opens a ticket in Jira. That was a big selling point for the product. There's a feature called the guest custom template that allows you to trigger alerts in Jira based on the template. That can also be added as a feature on Jira.  

Prisma can work with multiple cloud types and hybrid environments. We use AWS, but Prisma also offers hybrid or multi-cloud features. You can onboard AWS, Azure, GCP, or any other cloud provider. You can do more with Prisma than basic cloud scanning. It can detect and handle misconfiguration on the local network or the cloud. 

The solution can control access and automate some tasks. For example, if any automation needs to be built on any of the API calls, we can have a consolidated page for any processes that need to use the API. You can use the APA. Once you establish console access, you can build automation and integrate it with Prisma.

The CSPM module has so many features for developing a preventative approach that you don't need to look to any others, but the IAC security module lets you store infrastructure as code securely. You can scan an IAC template from a tool like Terraform and compare it with the CSPM modules. 

I have one example of a threat that Prisma proactively prevented. In 2021, Prisma discovered and resolved a Log4J vulnerability shortly after it was introduced. 

It would be nice if Prisma Cloud merged its modules for CSPM and infrastructure as code. It would simplify the pricing and make it easier for customers to evaluate the solution because there are different modules, and you need to add it to your subscription separately. 

Overall, Prisma is continuously improving. They do feature requests by allowing the users to vote on things. If a recommendation receives enough votes, they will add it to the solution. 

We have used Prisma Cloud for two-and-a-half years

Prisma Cloud is stable. I've never experienced any downtime aside from the scheduled maintenance window. 

Prisma Cloud is scalable. You can add a hundred master accounts more than on the SysTrack Lab.

I rate Palo Alto support nine out of 10. Their product team has been helpful. I just had a conversation with them. They answer all my questions even if it's after hours. When you send them a message, you get a response in a minute or two. 

Positive

We had previously used PingSafe. I feel like switching to Prisma was the right decision. PingSafe lacked multiple features that Prisma has. After we did our PoC with Prisma, we found that these features added value to our cloud infrastructure security. Once we switched, we noticed an improvement at the management level. We also reduced the number of data tickets that we needed to manually create.

In the first phase, we did a PoC, and the initial deployment took around a month. We worked with Palo Alto's customer success and technical teams. We worked closely with them in the first year, but after that, our deployment was highly mature, so we didn't need to bug them so much. All of the implementation steps were provided by email. Two members of our team were involved. 

Prisma is a cloud-based solution, so it requires no maintenance on our side once it's deployed. Maintenance is handled during a scheduled window, and they send us advance notification the day before.  

Prisma costs a little more than our previous solution, but it has more features. Our previous solution lacked the features we expect from a CSPM tool.

We didn't look at anything else once we learned about this product and did a PoC. And once we evaluated Prisma, we discussed it internally with our team and made the decision to book it. 

I rate Prisma Cloud nine out of 10. If you're considering Prisma, I suggest starting with a PoC. Consider all the features and go for the ones that are suitable for your organization and add value. You could adopt the solution blindly, but there are some additional costs for the add-ons. 

Financial companies want to restrict user access, which means the users need to go through a subnet to access their services. When the user connects to the internet via the Prisma Cloud VPN, they can use different types of IP addresses globally. The changing IP addresses can be pretty complex. It costs a lot for the application site to apply for access.  

We negotiated with Palo Alto to get 20 servers, and the customers will be added to those 20 subnets. On the Spectrum Access side, we only need a white list of those twenty subnets, and we won't have issues in the future. 

The solution is managed by Palo Alto. We're using Panorama, a popular management tool, for managing the connection between the physical portal, firewall, and VPN, as well as Prisma Cloud.

The user experience is better than our previous solution. It gives us visibility into all the traffic. 

The most valuable feature is the closed VPN connection, which provides better performance than traditional VPN boxes. For example,  let's say a user in New York State normally connects in the East, but if they travel to the UK, they can connect to the same portal, which automatically redirects to any VPN gateway. We can control traffic based on Active Directory groups instead of the user's IP. That means a user in New York can access his application based on his user ID and AD group access when he travels to the UK or anywhere else.

Prisma Cloud can provide decent security across cloud environments, depending on how each company sets security policies. Prisma Cloud makes adding new users and managing access more flexible.  

I like Palo Alto's automated tool for migrating user data from other systems. We previously did this manually most of the time, but now we can update twice hourly automatically. 

During deployment, we created a tunnel from the cloud to our gateway in the data center because the users need some way to connect with the resources there, but all other traffic goes directly to the Palo Alto cloud. When the traffic goes to the Internet, sometimes it will come up with different IPs, causing some financial websites to be blocked. We needed to work with Palo Alto closely to solve this problem. 

Sometimes, when you assign subnets to regions, the IP address will jump from one location to another because it will automatically change substantially. Then, we need to add those IP subnets to our firewall for existing access. The need to update those subnets potentially causes maintenance or access issues. So far, we can only provide bigger customers with six subnets, and a small company may not be able to access those services. 

I rate Palo Alto customer service 10 out of 10. 

Positive

The migration takes time because we're typically not starting from scratch. We need to migrate everything from the existing VPN. I've used Prisma Cloud for a large financial enterprise with a complex infrastructure, and we worked on that for almost two years. It's less complicated for a mid-sized company, but the migration might take six to nine months.

It's hard to tell if there is an ROI in the short term. It may take a long time before you realize a return because there is a substantial initial investment. You can see a significant improvement in performance, but it may not necessarily save money. However, you'll ultimately improve service.

I rate Prisma Cloud nine out of 10. We would recommend it to any large global enterprise because it improves performance and offers a better user experience. It also gives you application-level control instead of regular IP address control. The latest version has many new features. So they can use the in-app Application ID and point to MAC applications instead of regular TCP/IP ports.

We are mainly using Prisma Cloud for Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) and for following the compliance standards as per the industry. Another use case is to get the runtime workload protection.

We are using the WAAS, CWP, application security, and CSPM modules. We are not using the DSPM module because it is not available for the India tenant.

All the features provided by Prisma Cloud are quite helpful for the BFSI sector and other sectors. It protects our overall infrastructure and detects any attacks or threats in real-time scenarios. It can also block any suspicious processes or things from the Internet, so it is quite helpful for the organization.

We are working for an organization with a multi-cloud environment. We have deployed Prisma Cloud in their infrastructure with AWS, Azure, and GCP. We are able to monitor all the tools and all the assets as per the compliance standards. We have deployed Defender on all the environments. We have integrated Defender with an embedded kind of application. We have been able to work with the client as per their specific requirements.

Compliance monitoring is very important for the banking sector. With Prisma Cloud, we can see the compliance status. It shows us how we are following the rules of a particular industry. It helps organizations match the industry level and ensure that their data is secure and they are following the guidelines of their particular industry.

Prisma Cloud provides security spanning multi- and hybrid-cloud environments. It is very important to create a secure infrastructure. Prisma Cloud has the ability to protect a multi-cloud environment with AWS, GCP, Azure, Oracle as well as Alibaba Cloud. It plays a very crucial role in the security of an organization.

For security automation capabilities, we have some integrations. We have initialized application security before deploying the infrastructure over different environments, such as prod and pre-prod environments. Every open point should be closed. If we are creating our infrastructure through any automation code, there should be no cloud security posture management alert. We have also integrated Prisma Defender at the same time with the app-embedded format to protect our workload.

Prisma Cloud has features to detect anomalies, attack paths, and escalation privileges as well. It detects the root cause and lets us know the things in our infrastructure that can lead to the attack. We remediate them and secure our infrastructure.

Prisma Cloud saves a lot of time. It provides a consolidated dashboard for our infrastructure. We have multiple accounts, and on a single page, we can see the types of issues and the resources impacted. From there, we can directly go to the cloud, and we can take action on that. It saves time. We can close an alert in minimal time. It saves about 60% of the time which also has financial benefits. There are more than 50% cost savings.

We are more aware of things. If something suspicious is happening, we can track it and take action on that. Also, if any critical issue or vulnerability is reported that can impact our infrastructure, we can take recommended action from there. It helps us to detect the root cause. If there is any data leakage or server compromises, we can get the details and investigate things in detail. We get the API call as well. We get to know which endpoints are not set or how we can secure them. We can secure the endpoints. It helps us to reduce any attacks. We are using a lot of things from Prisma Cloud.

We could realize its benefits within one week of its implementation. Before we started with the actual implementation, we had done a PoC. It took us one week to observe and understand the flow and how it can help our organization.

Prisma Cloud covers all the stages such as build, deployment, runtime, etc. It has the capability to detect, protect, and escalate at all of these stages. At the build stage, we can initiate scanning for application security. It has the capability to scan the images at runtime. It also has features to block things in real-time scenarios. It has all the features. We have already adopted all the features of Prisma Cloud.

We trust Prisma Cloud and follow all the recommended actions. If there is any module that we have not yet adopted, we do a PoC and adopt that as well. As security engineers, we have to secure our infrastructure and assets in real time. Most of the competitors are providing CSPM, but only Prisma Cloud has the features to detect and block things in real-time scenarios. That is why we believe in Prisma Cloud.

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

Prisma Cloud provides near to real-time alerts for our cloud infrastructure. At run time, when our Defender is running, it instantly gives the impacted process in a particular environment. So far, we have reduced more than 40% runtime alerts.

We have pre-production, production, prod, and UAT accounts. We can take action on the basis of severity and close any vulnerabilities.

The CWP module, runtime protection, and WAAS API are valuable.

For Prisma Cloud, I have already raised some requests, which are in progress. I am hoping they will be implemented soon. One of the requests is that Prisma Defender for the ECS solution is only supported for Linux. It does not support Windows.

For a runtime incident, it only has the option to archive. After validating the incident, the team members should have the option to add some comments and then archive. We should be able to add comments saying, "It is a false positive." or "This is the action we have taken." We have requested a few more improvements. The Palo Alto team is working on them.

I have been using Prisma Cloud for more than one and a half years.

It is a stable solution. We can trust it and rely on it. I would rate it a ten out of ten for stability.

I would rate it a nine out of ten for scalability.

In our organization, more than 60 users are using this solution. We have some team members working on AWS. We have some team members working on networking and we have some team members working on creating the infrastructure.

We are using the enterprise version, and we are getting the required support. If we find something suspicious, we can raise a ticket with the support team. They are working on priority, and they are following their timeline as well. They are working properly based on the severity and agreed timeline. There is no recommendation for any kind of change.

They are quite helpful, and they are aware of the things. If something is beyond their understanding, they reach out to their internal engineering team, and they are able to help us. They are very nice.

Positive

I have used multiple security vendors. Every vendor has its specific use case. Every tool has some kind of limitation. Overall, we found Prisma Cloud to be better. It has features like template scanning, runtime scanning, and runtime blocking. Endpoint blocking is also there in Prisma Cloud. 

Other products do not have all the features. Some products have only the CSPM feature. Some products have only vulnerabilities and scanning features. Some products only have API endpoint discovery features. Prisma Cloud has all the features integrated or consolidated into one platform. As a single platform, we are getting all the things. Prisma Cloud gives a consolidated report in a single platform. This is why we chose it.

Its deployment is very straightforward. The time taken for its deployment can vary depending on whether it is a migration or a new deployment. Overall, it takes a maximum of one week.

It is fairly priced. However, its price can be better so that small banks or small organizations can afford it and adopt it to secure their environment and data.

I would recommend Prisma Cloud if you are looking for security, real-time protection, and real-time API discovery. If a client needs such a solution, we recommend implementing Prisma Cloud.

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

We're using the solution for container monitoring in one project and workload security in another. We've installed the agents on the servers to monitor for threats.

We haven't had an issue with the product for over a year. 

Its threat-hunting capabilities are very good. Security is a major thing for us.

We're using it in a banking setup and are using it only on a private cloud. 

The security automation is very useful.

Compared to AWS, the cost management is very low. The automation ensures we have limited tasks to do. In other security tools that I am using, there is no automation option at all.

We can integrate it very easily.

It's very easy to remotely connect. We can do that within fractions of a second.

We are getting a lot of visibility and control.

We've been able to reduce runtime alerts with Prisma Cloud.

We'd like to have more tools for threat hunting.

Sometimes, on the Azure side, there are issues. Some errors aren't being found on Prisma Cloud.

I've used Prisma Cloud for my past two projects. I've used it for one and a half years. 

We haven't had issues with downtime.

The solution is scalable. 

We've contacted support during some deployments on Windows servers in order to open ports. We had issues when we opened some ports and had no connection. Sometimes, their responses were slow or late.

Positive

The solution was very easy to deploy and integrate. We had a three-member team working on the setup. We only have ten to 20 servers. 

There is no maintenance needed after deployment.

The pricing can be a bit costly. However, it has low cost management.

We're a customer.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

We use Prisma Cloud Data Security for security compliance and detection.

We implemented Prisma Cloud because it eliminates the need for hardware appliances, thereby reducing our on-premises footprint.

Prisma Cloud provides security scanning multi and hybrid cloud environments which is important.

Prisma Cloud provides comprehensive protection for the entire cloud-native stack, encompassing threat protection, global protection, threat intelligence, and zero-trust architecture.

Prisma Cloud's security automation capabilities are effective. It utilizes AI-powered cloud-based technology to analyze unknown files and identify potential threats.

Prisma Cloud employs a combination of features to safeguard against both known and unknown threats, including IPS and threat intelligence integration.

Prisma Cloud has benefited our organization by providing URL filtering, facilitating secure customer connections, implementing endpoint security with a zero-trust architecture, and enabling user identification.

Prisma Cloud safeguards our entire cloud-native development lifecycle. Palo Alto's architecture encompasses multiple engines, each with distinct functionalities. These engines include the SP3 engine, application visibility control engine, URL filtering engine, Wildfire, intelligent saving, zero trust, threat prevention, and content infection. Together, these engines enhance security, reliability, and threat monitoring.

Prisma Cloud provides visibility and control of our web traffic at the URL level and across other technologies.

Prisma Cloud's visibility improves our confidence in our security compliance posture.

Prisma Cloud effectively integrates security into our CI/CD pipeline and seamlessly harmonizes with existing DevOps processes.

Prisma Cloud provides a single monitoring tool. The single point of monitoring makes our company more secure.

Prisma Cloud provides up-to-date information about real-world threats at runtime and across the entire pipeline, through communications, community, and mail.

Prisma Cloud reduces the number of runtime alerts. The extent to which alerts are reduced depends on the appliance and the number of throughputs purchased.

Prisma Cloud has saved our organization money. 

What I like most about Prisma Cloud is its zero-day signatures, maximum security, minimal downtime, cloud visibility, control, and ease of deployment.

Firewalls can identify application and user activity within network traffic. This includes information such as, what applications are being used, what URLs are being accessed, how frequently applications are being accessed, and how much time users are spending on particular applications.

The Palo Alto support needs to improve. Their response time is not good.

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

Prisma Cloud is stable.

Prisma Cloud is scalable.

The technical support is slow to respond.

Neutral

We previously used Fortinet, CheckPoint, and Cisco. Palo Alto Prisma Cloud is more efficient in single scans.

The initial deployment was straightforward. Using a basic configuration, we can deploy within six hours. I completed the deployment myself.

Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks carries a higher cost, but its enhanced security measures justify the expense.

I would rate Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks nine out of ten. Its architecture is well-designed, more reliable, and more secure.

We have Prisma Cloud deployed in multiple locations across the globe.

The maintenance is done on the cloud.

I recommend Prisma Cloud to others.

We primarily use Prisma Cloud as a cloud security posture management (CSPM) module. Prisma Cloud is designed to catch vulnerabilities at the config level and capture everything on a cloud workload, so we mainly use it to identify any posture management issues that we are having in our cloud workloads. We also use it as an enterprise antivirus solution, so it's a kind of endpoint security solution.

Our setup is hybrid. We use SaaS also. We mostly work in AWS but we have customers who work with GCP and Azure as well. About 60 percent of our customers use AWS, 30 percent use Azure, and the remaining 10 percent are on GCP. Prisma Cloud covers the full scope. And for XDR, we have an info technology solution that we use for the Gulf cloud. So we have the EDF solution rolled out to approximately around 500 instances right now.  

Prisma Cloud is used heavily in our all production teams. Some might not be directly using the product since our team is the service owner and we manage Prisma. Our team has around 10 members teams, and they are the primary users. From an engineering aspect, there are another 10 team members who use it basically. Those are the actual people who work hands-on with Prisma Cloud. Aside from that, there are some product teams that use Prisma indirectly. If we detect something wrong with their products, we take care of it, but I don't think they have an active account on Prisma Cloud.

Prisma Cloud has been helpful from a security operations perspective. When a new product is getting onboarded or we are creating a new product — specifically when we need to create a new peripheral— it's inevitable that there will be a kind of vulnerability due to posture management. Everything we produce goes through via CICD, and it's kind of automated. Still, there are some scenarios where we see some gaps. So we can discover where those gaps exist, like if someone left an open port or an instance got compromised. 

These kinds of situations are really crucial for us,  and Prisma Cloud handles them really well. We know ahead of time if a particular posture is bad and we have several accounts in the same posture. Prisma gives us a deep dive with statistics and metrics, so we know which accounts are doing bad in terms of posture, how many accounts are out of alignment with the policy strategy, how many are not compliant. Also, it helps us identify who might be doing something shady. 

So we get some good functionality overall in that dashboard. Their dashboard is not customizable, however, so that's a feature we'd like to say. At the same time, what they do provide on their dashboard is pretty helpful. It enables us to make the posture management more mature. We're able to protect against or eliminate some potential incidents that could have happened if we didn't have Prisma. 

Prisma Cloud is quite simple to use. The web GUI is powerful. Prisma Cloud scans the overall architecture of the AWS network to identify open ports and other vulnerabilities, then highlights them. It's really good at managing compliance. We get out-of-the-box policies for SOC 2, Fedramp, and other compliance solutions, so we do not need to tune most of the rules because they are quite compliant, useful, and don't get too many false positives. 

And in terms of Prisma Cloud's XDR solution, we do not have anything at scope at present that can give us the same in-depth visibility on the endpoint level. So if something goes bad on the endpoint, Prisma's XDR solutions can really go deep down to identify which process is doing malicious activity, what was the network connection, how many times it has been opened, and who is using that kind of solution or that kind of process. So it's a long chain and its graphical representation is also very good. We feel like we have power in our hands. We have full visibility about what is happening on an endpoint level. 

When it comes to securing new SaaS applications, Prism Cloud is good. If I had to rate it, I would say seven out of 10. It gives us really good visibility. In the cloud, if you do not know what you are working with or you do not have full visibility, you cannot protect it. It's a good solution at least to cover CSPM. We have other tools also like Qualys that take care of the vulnerability management on the A-level staff — in the operating system working staff — but when it comes to the configuration level, Prisma is the best fit for us. 

Prisma Cloud's dashboards should be customizable. That's very important. Other similar solutions are more elastic so you have the power to create customized dashboards. In Prisma Cloud, you cannot do that. Prisma also should allow users to fully automate the workflow of an identified set. Right now, it can give us a hint about what has happened and there is an option to remediate that, but for some reason, that doesn't work. 

Another pain point is integration with ticketing solutions. We need bidirectional integration of Prisma Cloud and our ticketing tool. Currently, we only have one-way integration. When an alert appears in Prisma Cloud, it shows up in our ticketing tool as well. But if someone closes that ticket in our ticketing tool, that alert doesn't resolve in Prisma Cloud. We have to do it manually each time, which is a waste of time. 

 I am not sure how much Prisma Cloud protects against zero-day threats. Those kinds of threats really work in different kinds of patterns, like identify some kind of CBE, that kind of stuff. But considering the way it works for us, I don't think it'll be able to capture a zero-day threat if it is a vulnerability because Prisma Cloud actually doesn't capture vulnerability. It captures errors in posture management. That's a different thing. I don't know if there is any zero-day that Prisma can identify in AWS instantly. Probably, we can ask them to create a custom policy, but that generally takes time. We haven't seen that kind of scenario where we actually have to handle a zero-day threat with Prisma Cloud, because that gets covered mostly by Qualys.

I've been using Prisma Cloud for almost two years now.

Prisma Cloud is quite stable. At times, it goes down, but that's very rare. We have some tickets with them, but when we see some issues, they sort it out in no time. We do not have a lot of unplanned downtime. It happens rarely. So I think in the last year, we haven't seen anything like that.

Prisma Cloud is quite scalable. In our current licensing model, we're able to heavily extend our cloud workload and onboard a lot of customers. It really helps, and it is on par with other solutions.

I think Prisma Cloud's support is quite good. I would rate them seven out of 10 overall. They have changed their teams. The last team was comparatively not as good as the one we have right now. I would rate them five out of 10, but they have improved a lot. The new team is quite helpful. When we have an issue, they take care of it personally if we do not get an answer within the terms of the SLA. We tend to escalate to them and get a prompt answer. The relationship between our management and their team is quite good as well. .

We have a biweekly or weekly call with their tech support team. We are in constant communication about issues and operating problems with them. It's kind of a collab call with their tech support team, and we have, I think, a monthly call with them as well. So whenever we have issues, we have direct access to their support portal. We create tickets and discuss issues on the call weekly.

Transitioning to the new support team was relatively easy. They switched because of the internal structure and the way they work. Most of the engineering folks work out of Dublin and we are in India. The previous team was from the western time zone. That complicated things in terms of scheduling. So I think the current team is right now in Ireland and it's in the UK time zone. That works best for us. 

We have an engineering team that does the implementation for us, and our team specifically handles the operations once that product is set up for us. And then that product is handed over to us for the daily BA stuff accessing the security, the CSPM kind of module. We are not involved directly. When the product gets onboarded, it's handed over to us. We handle the management side, like if you need to create a new rule or you need to find teams for the rule. But the initial implementation is handled by our engineers.

I would rate Prisma Cloud six out 10. I would recommend it if you are using AWS or anything like that. It's quite a tool and I'm impressed with how they have been improving and onboarding new features in the past one and a half years. If you have the proper logging system and can implement it properly within your architecture, it can work really well.

If you are weighing Prisma Cloud versus some CASB solution, I would say that it depends on your use case. CASBs are a different kind of approach. When someone is already using a CASB solution, that's quite a mature setup while CSPM is another side of handling security. So if someone has CASB in place and feels they don't need CSPM, then that might be true for a particular use case at a particular point in time. But also we need to think of the current use case and the level of maturity at a given point in time and consider whether the security is enough.