Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks Reviews

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is our first tool of this sort.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The pricing and the licensing are both very fair.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We use Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks to scan the Kubernetes cluster.

We use Prisma Cloud's threat detection module.

We implemented Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks to help us address vulnerabilities within our Kubernetes cluster.

Prisma Cloud provides security in multi- and hybrid-cloud environments. It is a security console that is essential to our organization. We have implemented Prisma Cloud on the Kubernetes cluster for threat detection and vulnerability monitoring.

Prisma Cloud's security automation capabilities are good. Once integrated with our Kubernetes cluster, it automatically detects vulnerabilities and provides reports in the dashboard, which we can use to generate CSV formats to help our development team detect vulnerabilities.

Before implementing Prisma Cloud, we had difficulty preventing threats. After implementation, the vulnerabilities were resolved, and we now receive immediate notifications to help us prevent threats.

Prisma Cloud protects both our Azure and AWS cloud environments.

The most valuable features are vulnerability monitoring, serverless access, container runtime features, and Defender.

Prisma Cloud supports generating CSV files, but I would also like it to generate PDF files for reporting. 

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

Prisma Cloud has a stability rating of 99.99 percent.

The solution has very good performance 

The technical support is dedicated and they respond quickly.

Positive

We previously used Lacework, but we faced some licensing issues in our parent company, so we switched to Prisma Cloud.

The initial setup is straightforward and was completed by my manager and me.

Initially, we implemented it along with the vendor team, they guided us excellently.

Prisma Cloud's pricing is good.

We evaluated other solutions' costs and features.

I would rate Prisma Cloud a ten out of ten.

Twenty-four people monitor Prisma Cloud alerts each day in our organization, and any issues are sent to developers to be addressed.

Maintenance is required to upgrade the dashboard.

We use this solution to detect misconfigurations in the cloud. It's a multi-cloud solution, so if you're running a multi-cloud environment like Azure, AWS, and GCP, you only need to deploy a single solution. It assists with improving the security posture of an organization.

I use CSPM and CWPP. The previous organization I worked for used both, but the company I work for now only uses CSPM. I've also worked with code security.

We recently acquired this solution, so it has slowly started gaining momentum in my organization.

This solution provides us with a single tool to protect all of our cloud resources and applications without having to manage and reconcile different security and compliance reports. It's a single solution for everything in a multi-cloud environment.

It enhances operations, but it's a pretty measurable tool. It provides comprehensive visibility.

It provides risk clarity at runtime across the entire pipeline and shows issues as they are discovered during the build phases. 

The modules in CSPM and CWPP are visibility, compliance governance, threat detection, data security, host security, container security, serverless security, web application, and API security. This is an additional cost, so I don't think any organization uses all of the modules.

I previously worked for a health organization that was using this solution. They were able to get certified in HITRUST using this product.

Our developers are able to correct issues using the tools they use to code.

The CSPM and CWPP functionalities are pretty good. It depends on what kind of data you have in your cloud, your workload, and some other factors. If you're doing a lot of containers, you need CWPP models. If you just do regular cloud contributions, then you can use CSPM.

It provides security spanning multi and hybrid-cloud environments. My current organization's goal is to migrate to the cloud eventually. If that's your organization's goal, you need to have some kind of security mechanism or protection in place to make sure that the resources you're building in the cloud are built for the best security practices and are free of misconfiguration vulnerabilities. 

When we deploy containers in any cloud, the runtime protection is really good. If a container is running any kind of application, it can detect a cryptomining attack. The solution also provides File Integrity Monitoring testing.

It has various models and provides comprehensive visibility. It shows us how our assets are performing in any of our clouds. It gives us a holistic view of our native cloud environment, and we can also fine-tune the policies for our architecture.

The modules help us take a preventative approach to cloud security. Flow Logs provide a real-time assessment of our network.

It recently integrated with another company called Checkov. It checks all the misconfigurations that a developer could make during the build phase. This means that whenever we're building any kind of application or deploying any application, it will detect it right away. We can integrate it into our CI/CD pipeline or with any other Jenkins plugins. I tested those use cases as well. The solution has improved since they integrated the product with Checkov.

It provides good visibility. In terms of controls, it depends on how you want to do it. Sometimes, you need to be specific in terms of controls. With runtime detection, it's going to be more powerful. We're confident that our assets are secure.

The solution is capable of integrating security into our CI/CD pipeline and adding touch points into existing DevOps processes. We don't have the option to leverage it, but I have tested it in my previous organization.

This solution is more AWS and Azure-centric. It needs to be more specific on the GCP side, which they are working on.

I have been using this solution for about two and a half years.

The solution is reliable.

The solution is scalable.

Technical support is very helpful. I would rate them a nine out of ten. We have a weekly cadence.

Positive

The setup was very easy and straightforward. We haven't set up the automation perspective. We're still testing it, so we haven't leveraged it yet.

The setup didn't take very long, but it will be different for every organization. If your cloud architect team is willing to deploy with you, it shouldn't take more than a week. It also depends on how large the organization is and how many subscriptions are in the cloud environment.

We don't need to maintain anything on the console side.

We used an integrator from Palo Alto. They were very good and offered great support.

The solution is pretty expensive. It all depends on the organization's goals and needs.

The cost depends on the pricing model. Compared to other solutions, the cost isn't that bad.

I compared the solution to other security products like Fortinet, Lacework, and Security Command Center.

I would rate this solution as eight out of ten. 

Those who want to use this solution, need to understand the concept behind this product and get to know their own environment first. The solution will give you holistic visibility of your assets, which will show you what needs to be fixed. Security comes with an expense, so it depends on what you want to leverage and where.

I'm still testing the automation capabilities because my organization is specific to one cloud. They were more aggressive on Azure and AWS Prisma Cloud, but now they are considering GCP customers as well.

We're still in POC mode for continuous security that comes under runtime protection. I can't 100% guarantee that it reduces runtime alerts.

Our customers' primary use case involves utilizing Prisma for various security purposes, such as application, cloud, and container security. I also employ the solution in different environments, including the European, Middle Eastern, and African regions.

Prisma Cloud saves time for technical teams by consolidating all necessary security tools into one platform. This eliminates the need to learn and manage multiple tools, streamlining workflows and increasing efficiency. Prisma Cloud provides comprehensive security across applications, cloud environments, and containers, ensuring complete protection within a single, unified solution.

Our clients take advantage of Prisma Cloud's multi-cloud and hybrid environment capabilities.

We can deploy the agents using automation, allowing clients to connect Prisma Cloud with Terraform and other tools via their well-documented API page.

Prisma Cloud's integration abilities with existing environments enhance its attractiveness.

Prisma Cloud can be used in prevention mode to protect against vulnerabilities.

Prisma Cloud's comprehensive platform offers a range of features, including runtime security and vulnerability assessments, through its Prisma Cloud Compute component. This component extends its capabilities to on-premises, OpenShift, and Kubernetes environments, ensuring broad coverage. Its ability to centralize and address security vulnerabilities across these diverse environments makes it a crucial and decisive element within the Prisma Cloud ecosystem.

Prisma Cloud's application security capabilities should be enhanced. The next update should include static application security testing and expand the functionalities of dynamic and API security testing.

I am a reseller that sells Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks. 

The customer service has various levels of support, including access to a customer success engineer. This indicates a structured approach to customer service.

Positive

Due to its cloud-based architecture, Prisma Cloud offers a strong return on investment. It eliminates the need for additional hardware, making it a financially and technically sound investment.

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

Our clientele consists of enterprise-level businesses.

My company provides solutions for Cisco customers and helps them secure their cloud environments. Most of our clients are adapting to the cloud, and we're trying to resolve vulnerabilities in their configurations. I use all of the Prisma Cloud modules but have expertise in the CSPM and CWP modules. We work with SMEs but also have some enterprise clients. 

Using Prisma Cloud has improved customer satisfaction. Our customers are happy with the solution and the level of security we can provide with this. Prisma can secure a cloud-native development cycle. We can configure Prisma to run a scan before we build the images. 

Prisma is known for its visibility and comprehensiveness. It provides insight into our entire inventory of assets and everything happening in our multi-cloud or hybrid environments. We want to know all the services working in our environment and who is accessing them. 

It provides a single tool for protecting all cloud resources without the need to reconcile compliance reports. All of our reports come into Prisma's CSPM module via the APIs. It's easy to get the reports coming into CSPM. We can get the inventory, asset, and alert reports containing all of the alert notifications coming into the CWPP and the reliability and compliance. It has enhanced our overall reporting experience. We can do a deep dive into alerts from various integrated third-party applications and get alerts sent via email or SMS text to keep track of any incidents in our environment.

My favorite feature is the CWPP module. We can define various kinds of rules for vulnerabilities, incidents, or suspicious activities. Prisma Cloud covers various cloud providers, including AWS and GCP. It covers every cloud on the market. 

Many customers in finance, healthcare, and other industries are adopting cloud or hybrid environments. Some of them are using GCP, AWS, and Azure services together, and Prisma is compatible with all of them.

Prisma's ability to protect a fully cloud-native stack is comprehensive. We benefit from Palo Alto's technical knowledge, training sessions, and learning programs to develop robust solutions for our customers. Prisma's automation features are helpful. We can set up automated remediation, messaging, and alerts. The CSPM module can be automated directly, and we can automate runtime rules in the CWP module. We can also automate some code scanning. 

Prisma is integrated into our CI/CD pipeline through the CWP module. We can load the images into Azure DevOps and scan them for vulnerabilities or compliance issues. We can block the vulnerabilities or disable the application so it cannot run with the vulnerabilities in place. 

Runtime alerts are among the best capabilities. In CWP, we have to block malicious or suspicious activities to stop the incoming attacks against our workloads. Using various templates, we can reduce our runtime alerts by 60 to 70 percent. 

I have some challenges customizing and personalizing some of the capabilities in the CSPM in terms of new policies and services. We have to reconfigure and rebuild the CSPM.

I have used Prisma Cloud for around three years. 

I rate Prisma Cloud nine out of 10 for stability. 

I rate Prisma Cloud nine out of 10 for scalability.

I rate Palo Alto support 10 out of 10. They come and help us a lot. 

Positive

Deploying Prisma Cloud is straightforward. We received some training from Palo Alto's technical team. The deployment time varies depending on the client and the modules you deploy. It may take a few weeks or a couple of months. After deployment, Palo Alto handles the maintenance. They notify us by text or email when there will be a scheduled maintenance window. 

I'm not involved on the financial side, but I know that Prisma Cloud isn't cheap. 

I've seen some other solutions with CSPM and CWP capabilities, but they do not have the same coverage of multi-cloud or hybrid environments. That's an area where Prisma stands out from its competitors. 

I rate Prisma Cloud 10 out of 10. 

We used a couple of modules, mostly WAFs. We use it for detection. 

We use it for our modern infrastructure, mostly run on the cloud. We use it to measure the security of cloud-native infrastructure and to calculate the risk of the applications we use and APIs we interact with. We also use it to meet compliance requirements. We have plenty of use cases for this product.

We really wanted to capture all of the information. To make something in-house would be too much engineering work for us. We don't have to bui;d something from scratch; this allows us to use something that is highly accurate.

We're a fintech company and we deal with a bank. Doing certain tasks manually, like logging every node, server, and container, can take six to nine months. However, if you can automate the process, you achieve the same results in a short time span to help ensure product security.

We were using common CBE for general identities.

I personally used the web application API security, WAF for in-line controls. It helps with implementing an additional layer of security to block the attacks and get alerts on vulnerabilities. I am just focusing on that side.

The support is excellent. They'll call us personally and keep us updated. It's some of the best support I've dealt with.

It's great for protecting the full cloud-native stack. Being a security engineer, I have the visibility of the solution on the infrastructure. The tool is doing a good job of automating this process and making it less time-consuming for me. I don't need to handle as many manual tasks.

There are various cloud configurations that can help you gain insights. If a threat is on the portal, it will give you insight into the cloud infrastructure to help you improve the configuration to make it more secure. In terms of threat detection, you can see different kinds of payloads coming to the API. It helps you consider fixes, like adding more validation.

It is very easy for us to generate reports and download the findings while working with the team to resolve issues.

It's good for build, deploy, and run, however, we still need to figure out how to better integrate it. We're still in the early stages of exploring this for CI/CD. 

The solution does provide the visibility and control we need regardless of how complex or distributed your cloud environment becomes. When we were using our core infrastructure previously, we didn't have the visibility, for example, on which APIs we had or were using. Now, there's a better understanding. It's helped us become more confident in our security and compliance posture. If someone comes tomorrow to audit, we can do a fast report and we can pass that over to show to compliance. It would show the risk factors and what we are monitoring. It's the first thing we would go to during an audit, to provide transparency. 

The solution provides a single tool to protect all of our cloud resources and applications without having to manage and reconcile disparate security and compliance details. It's mandatory to have a tool like this to run a fintech in India as we need to have an audit trail in order to be able to submit reports. Operationally, it's helping us stay compliant. 

We are able to enable alerts. We are using it more manually. We can see alerts on Slack. We can configure alerts as we like.

The UI is good, however, they could improve the experience. The animations on the dashboard could be better. They may already be working on an update to improve this.

We'd like to understand better how to automate between the pipeline and CI/CD. There's a bridge needed between DevOps and security. We need to understand the alerts. There seems to be a gap in DevOps that we need to reconcile. 

I've been using the solution for more than six months. 

While running the solution, we have no issues at all. 

We have Prisma installed on Google Cloud, across multiple accounts and environments. We also have data recovery in another region. I'm not sure if that is covered by Prisma. 

It's scalable. It's not difficult. In fact, it's easy. You just need to add agents to the nodes you want. 

Technical support is great. There are two teams. One is always available. Another is creating tickets and looking into issues. Both are quite good. They are eager to support the customer. 

Positive

We were using another product previously. It was called Lacework. The virtual business aspect was a reason we switched. We also wanted to have more functionality and more insight and control into APIs. The visibility was also better with Prisma. 

The deployment was handled by the DevOps team, not the security team, which is the team I am a part of. There was a requirement to install it on every node of the infrastructure. However, my understanding is it did not take too much time. My understanding is that it was easy to install and it was done within 30 minutes to an hour. It was deployed in a very short amount of time. One person was able to deploy it; we didn't need a team. 

There may be some maintenance required. 

I'm not sure of the licensing terms or the exact pricing. 

We did evaluate multiple tools. We knew what we needed the tools to do and we were comparing them all together. We realized that Prisma did a better job and decided to go with them. 

I am a customer and end-user. 

I'm not sure if the product is useful in a multi-cloud environment. I hope it is. We just have the one cloud environment we use it in. That said, we are using it in multiple staging environments. 

We have not enabled the Code Security module. We still need to integrate in that sense with Prisma. We did do the integration with cloud infrastructure. 

For any product you choose, it's good to consider security. I'd recommend Prisma as it offers good security. 

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. There isn't really anything missing in the product. However, there's always scope for improvement. 

In my organization, we use Prisma Cloud to Protect the cloud environment to identify misconfigurations and send the reports to the cloud account owners. We can use Prisma Cloud based on location or based on cloud accounts. 

The policies that we are using in our organization help us to work more effectively to identify misconfigurations based on severity and the dashboard is very user-friendly to work with. 

I am very happy to use this product and find it to be highly impressive.

Prisma improved our cloud environment. It helps to identify the misconfigurations by monitoring regularly which helps to secure the organization's cloud environment. 

This product helps our organization in various ways, including identifying account-level misconfigurations. It will protect the environment in many ways. With this, we can avoid data leakage and avoid/identify public and internal cloud-level misconfigurations will be identified.

Identifying misconfigurations and vulnerabilities from the cloud account level as well as the development and operational level helps to secure everything effectively. 

Vulnerabilities can be identified before deployment - which helps our DevOps team to minimize or reduce time in an effective way. 

Identifying misconfigurations and vulnerabilities at the first stage itself will help the organization save time and money - which is highly appreciated. 

For some custom policies, we need more features. For example, at the investigation tab level, while adding columns for required fields, you can't have more than three or four custom fields. New cloud policies can be added in the next release to address severity changes for the cloned policies. It would be nice to have alerts at the dashboard level. For example, if five members are working with 50 different policies, based on the user name, policies should be assigned with alerts that can be displayed either in a graphical or listed way.

I've used the solution for three years.

I'd rate the stability 4.5 out of five. 

I am highly impressed with the product's scalability. Whenever I have issues with the solution, I will get an immediate response from the product team. They will try to close the issue as soon as possible - which is highly impressive.

I am very happy with the customer service. Whenever I have issues with the solution, I will get an immediate response from the product team and they will try to close the issue as soon as possible. This level of service is highly impressive.

Positive

This is my first solution. I did not previously use anything else. 

The product team helped us when the Initial setup happened.

We implemented through a vendor team and I'd rate the service five out of five. 

When compared to other products, Prisma Cloud is high in pricing and licensing. However, when there is high security it can be expensive. Smaller organizations can't afford Prisma Cloud.

As this is my first solution, I didn't choose any other product other than Prisma Cloud.

There are three pieces to our use case. For the container piece, which used to be Twistlock, we use static scan to scan our artifact repositories and we use that data to remediate issues and provide it back to developers. We also do runtime monitoring on our orchestrators, which are primarily Kubernetes, but some DC/OS as well. Right now, it's all on-premises, although we'll be moving that to the cloud in the future. 

And we use what used to be RedLock, before it was incorporated into the solution.

Prisma Cloud has definitely enabled us to integrate security into our CI/CD pipeline and add touchpoints into existing DevOps processes for container. In the container those touchpoints are pretty seamless. We've been able to implement security control gates and automate notifications back to teams of vulnerabilities in the container orchestrator. It all works pretty smoothly, but it required a fair amount of work on our part to make that happen. But we did not run into limitations of the tool. It enabled us pretty well. The one part where we have a little bit of a gap that most of those are at deployment time. We haven't shifted all those controls back to the team level at build time yet. And we haven't really tackled the cloud space in the same way yet. 

I'm not sure we have SecOps in the container space exactly in the same way we do in other DevOps. We shifted a lot of the security responsibility into the development teams and into the Ops teams themselves. There's less of a separation. But overall, the solution has increased collaboration because of data visibility.

It also does pretty well at providing risk clarity at runtime, and across the entire pipeline, showing issues as they are discovered during the build phases. It does a good job in terms of the speed of detection, and you can look at it in terms of CVSS score or an arbitrary term for severity level. Our developers are able to correct the issues.

We are clearly better off in that we have visibility, where there was a gap before. We know where our container vulnerabilities and misconfigurations are, and even on the cloud side, where cloud misconfigurations are happening. That visibility is a huge benefit. 

The other part is actually using that data to reduce risk and that's happened really well on the container side. On the cloud side, there's still room to grow, but that's not an issue with Prisma Cloud itself. These tools are only a part of the equation. It takes a lot of organizational work and culture and prioritization to address the output of these tools, and that takes time.

The ability to monitor the artifact repository is one of the most valuable features because we have a disparate set of development processes, but everything tends to land in a common set of artifact repositories. The solution gives us a single point where we can apply security control for monitoring. That's really helpful.

Another valuable feature is the ability to do continuous monitoring at runtime. We can feed that data back to developers so they can get intelligence on what's actually deployed, and at what level, versus just what's in the artifact repository, because those are different.

In the security space, most security solutions typically do either development-side security, or they do runtime operational security, but not both. One of the relatively unique characteristics of this solution in the marketplace—and it may be that more and more of the container security solutions do both sides—is that this particular solution actually spans both. We try to leverage that.

And for the development side, we utilize both the vulnerability results from the static vulnerability scanning as well as the certain amount of configuration compliance information that you can gather from the static pre-deployment scans. We use both of those and we pay attention to both sides of that. Because this solution can be implemented both on the development side and on the runtime operational side, we look at the same types of insights on the operational runtime side to keep up with new threats and vulnerabilities. We feed that information back to developers as well, so they can proactively keep up.

We have multiple public clouds and multiple internal clouds. Some of it is OpenStack-based and some of it is more traditional VM-based. Prisma Cloud provides security spanning across these environments, in terms of the static analysis. When we're looking at the artifact repository, the solutions we're using Prisma Cloud to scan and secure will deploy to both public cloud and internal cloud. Moving into 2021, we'll start to do more runtime monitoring in public cloud, particularly in AWS. We're starting to see more EKS deployment and that's going to be a future focus area for us. It's extremely important to us that Prisma Cloud provides security across these environments. If Prisma didn't do that, that would be a deal-breaker, if there were a competitor that did. 

Public cloud is strategically very important to our company, as it probably is for many companies now, so we have to have security solutions in that space. That's why we say the security there is extremely important. We have regulatory compliance requirements. We have some contractual obligations where we have to provide certain security practices. We would do that anyway because they are security best practices, but there are multiple drivers.

Applying some of their controls outside of the traditional container space, for example, as we're doing hybrid cloud or container development, is helpful. Those things get their tentacles out to other areas of the infrastructure. An example would be that we look at vulnerabilities and dependencies as we develop software, and we use Prisma Cloud to do that for containers. We use other tools outside of the container space. They're starting to move into that other space so we can point Prisma Cloud at something like a GitHub and do that same scanning outside of the container context. That gives us the ability to treat security control with one solution.

When it comes to protecting the full cloud-native stack, it has the right breadth. They're covering all the topics I would care about, like container, cloud configuration, and serverless. There's one gap. There could be a better set of features around identity management—native AWS—IAM roles, and service account management. The depth in each of those areas varies a little bit. While they may have the breadth, I think there's still work to do in  flushing out each of those feature sets.

My understanding of Palo Alto's offerings is that they have a solution that is IAM-focused. It's called Prisma Access. We have not looked at it, but I believe it's a separately-licensed offering that handles those IAM cases. I don't know whether they intend to include any IAM-type of functionality in the Prisma Cloud feature set or whether they will just say, "Go purchase this separate solution and then use them next to each other."

Also, I don't think their SaaS offering is adoptable by large enterprises like ours, in every case. There are some limitations on having multiple consoles and on our ability to configure that SaaS offering. We would like to go SaaS, but it's not something we can do today.

We have some capability to do network functions inside of Prisma Cloud. Being able to integrate that into the non-cloud pieces of the Palo Alto stack would be beneficial.

The solution's security automation capabilities are mixed. We've done some API development and it's good that they have APIs, that's beneficial. But there is still a little disconnect between some of the legacy Twistlock APIs versus some of the RedLock APIs. In some cases the API functionality is not fully flushed out. 

An example of that is that we were looking at integrating Prisma Cloud scans into our GitHub. The goal was to scan GitHub repositories for CloudFormation and Terraform templates and send those to Prisma Cloud to assess for vulnerabilities and configuration. The APIs are a little bit on the beta-quality side. It sounds like newer versions that some of that is handled, but I think there's some room to grow. 

Also, our team did run into some discrepancies between what's available, API-wise, that you have to use SaaS to get to, versus the on-premise version. There isn't necessarily feature parity there, and that can be confusing.

We've been using Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto for about two-and-a-half years.

The stability has been excellent. The solution simply runs. It very seldom breaks and, typically, when it does, it's easy to troubleshoot and get back on track.

The scalability has been good for our use cases.

When we first adopted it, a single console could cover 1,000 hosts that were running container workloads. That was more than enough for us, and to date it has been more than enough for us, because we have multiple network environments that need to stay separated, from a connectivity standpoint. We've needed to put up multiple consoles, one to serve each of those network environments. Within each of those network environments, we have not needed to scale up to 1,000 yet.

There's wide adoption across our organizations, but at the same time there is tremendous room to grow with those organizations. Many organizations are using it somewhat, but we are probably at 20 to 25 percent of where we need to be.

It's safe to say we have several hundred people working with the solution, but it's not 1,000 yet. They are primarily developers. There are some operational folks who use it as well. To me, that speaks to the ease of deployment and administration of this solution. You really don't need a large operational group to deploy. When it comes to security, incident response, and the continuous monitoring aspects that a continual security team does, I don't have insight because I don't work in that area of the company, but I see that as expanding down the road. It's another area of growth for us.

Their technical support has been very good. Everyone that I've been involved with has been very responsive and helpful. They have remained engaged to drive resolution of issues that we have found.

We did not have a previous solution.

Standing up an instance is quite simple, for an enterprise solution. It has been excellent in that regard.

It's hard to gauge how long our deployment took. We have multiple consoles and multiple network contexts, and a couple of those have different sets of rules and different operational groups to work with. It took us several months across all those network environments that we needed to cover, but that's not counting the actual amount of time it took to execute steps to install a console and deploy it. The actual steps to deploy a console and the Defenders is a very small amount of time. That's the easiest part.

Our implementation strategy for Prisma Cloud was that we wanted to provide visibility across the SDLC: static scan, post-build, as things go to the artifact repository. Our goal was to provide runtime monitoring at our development, test, and production platforms.

We did it ourselves.

I don't know a better way to do it, but their licensing is a little confusing. That's due to the breadth of different types of technologies they are trying to cover. The way you license depends on where you're securing. When they were Twistlock it was a simple licensing scheme and you could tell what you were doing. Now that they've changed that scheme with Palo Alto, it is quite confusing. It's very difficult to predict what your costs are going to be as you try to expand coverage.

At the time we looked at our incumbent vendors and others that were container-specific. We were trying to avoid a new vendor relationship, if possible. We looked at Rapid7 and Tenable. Both were starting to get into the container space at the time. They weren't there yet. We did our evaluation and they were more along the lines of a future thought process than an implementable solution.

We looked at Twistlock, which was a start-up at the time, and Aqua because they were in the space, and we looked at a couple of cloud solutions, but they were in cloud and working their way to container. We did the same exercise with Evident.io and RedLock, before they were purchased by Palo Alto. They were the only vendors that covered our requirements. In the case of Twistlock, their contributions in the NIST 800-190 standards, around container security, helped influence our decision a little bit, as did the completeness of their vision and implementation, versus their competitors.

My advice would be not to look at it like you're implementing a tool. Look at it like you're changing your processes. You need to plan for the impact of the data for the various teams across Dev and Security and Ops. Think very holistically, because a lot of this cloud container stuff spans many teams. If you only look at it as "I'm going to plug a tool in and I'm going to get some benefit," I think you'll fail.

Prisma Cloud covers both cloud and container, or could cover either/or, depending on your needs. But in both of those cases, there's often confusion about who owns what, especially as you're creating new teams with the transition to DevOps and DevSecOps. Successful implementation has a lot to do with working out lines of ownership in these various areas and changing processes and even the mindset of people. You have to make strides there to really maximize the effectiveness of the solution.

The solution provides Cloud Security Posture Management in a single pane of glass if you're using the SaaS solution, but we do not. Our use case does not make it feasible for us to use the SaaS solution. But with the Prisma Cloud features and compute features in the self-hosted deployment, you have to go to multiple panes to see all the information.

When it comes to the solution helping us take a preventative approach to cloud security, it's a seven or eight out of 10. The detective side is a little higher. We are using the detective controls extensively. We're getting the visibility and seeing those things. There is a lot of hesitance to use preventative controls here, both on the development side—the continuous integration stuff—and particularly in the runtime, continuous monitoring protection, because you are just generally afraid. This mirrors years and years ago when intrusion prevention first came out at the network level. A lot of people wanted to do detection, but it took quite a few years for enterprises to get the courage to start actively blocking. We're in that same growth period with container security.

When it comes to securing the entire cloud-native development lifecycle, across build, deploy, and run, it covers things pretty well. When I think about it in terms of build, there are integrations with IDEs and development tools and GitHub, etc. Deploy is a little shakier to me. I know we have Jenkins integration. And run is good. In terms of continuous monitoring, it feels build and run are a little stronger than deploy. If we could see better integration with other tools, that might help. If I'm doing that deploy via Terraform or Spinnaker, I don't know how all that plays with the Jenkins integrations and some of the other integrations that Palo Alto has produced.

Overall, it feels like a pretty good breadth of integrations, as far as what they claim. They certainly support some things that we don't use here at build and deploy and runtime. But a lot of what they rely on, in terms of deploy, is API-driven, so it's not an easy-to-configure, built-in integration. It's more like, "We have an API, and if you want to write custom software to use that API, you can." They claim support in that way, but it's not at the same level as just configuring a couple of items and then you can scan a registry.

In the container space, we have absolutely seen benefit from the solution for securing the cloud-native development lifecycle. At the same time, it has required some development on our part to get the integration. Some of that is because we predated some of the integrations they offer. But in the container space, there has definitely been a huge impact. The impact has been less so in cloud configuration, because there are so many competing offerings that can do that with Terraform and Azure Security Center and Amazon native tools. I don't feel like we've made quite the same inroads there.

In terms of it providing a single tool to protect all of our cloud resources and applications, I don't think it does. Maybe that's because of our implementation, but it just doesn't operate at every level. I don't think we'd ever go down that path. We have on-premise tools that have been here a long time. We've built processes around reporting. Vulnerability scanning is an example. We run Nessus on-premise, and we wouldn't displace Nessus with, say, a Twistlock Defender to do host-level scanning in the cloud, because we'd have a disparate tool set for cloud versus on-premise for no reason. I don't ever see Prisma Cloud being the single solution for all these security features, even if they can support them.

It's important that it integrate with other tools. We talked earlier about a single dashboard. A lot of those dashboards are aggregating data from other tools. One thing that has been important to us is feeding data to Splunk. We have a SIEM solution. So I would always envision Prisma Cloud as being a participant in an ecosystem.

In summary, I actually hate most security products because they're very siloed and you have mixed-vendor experiences. I don't think they take a big-picture view. I've been really pleasantly surprised with how Prisma Cloud is, over time, covering more and more of the topics I care about, and listening to customer feedback and growing the product in the right directions. For the most part, it does what they say it will do. The vendor support has also been good. I would definitely give the vendor an eight out of 10 because they've been great in understanding and providing solutions in the space, and because of the reliability and the responsiveness. They've been very open to our input as customers. They take it very seriously and we've taken advantage of that and developed a good relationship with them.

When it comes to the solution itself, I would give the compute solution an eight. But I don't think I would give the Prisma Cloud piece an eight. So overall, I would rate the solution as a seven because the compute is stronger than the other piece, what used to be RedLock.

I would also emphasize that what I think is a strong roadmap for the product and that Palo Alto is really interested in customer feedback. They do seem to incorporate it. That may be our unique experience because our use cases just happen to align with what Palo wants to do, but I think they're heading in the right direction.

Early on in a solution's life cycle or problem space, it's more important to have that responsiveness than it is even to have the fullest of solutions. The fact that we came across this vendor, one that not only mostly covered what we needed when we were first looking for it three years ago, but that has also been as responsive as they have to grow the solution, has been really positive.