Prisma Access by Palo Alto Networks Reviews

My clients used Prisma Access essentially for security in the cloud. We integrated their SD-WAN into Prisma Access.

Palo Alto Firewall is one of the best firewalls in the world. It's very clear about the policies and all the security features they have. Also, the user integration works very well in Palo Alto. The WiFi, anti-threat, web filtering features and IT/OT separation are also good.

Though the monitoring is fine, the solution should improve its application graphs and interface monitoring. Additionally, the pricing could be improved.

I worked as a consultant on Prisma Access for one year for one integration project.

The product is very stable.

The product is scalable. Our clients are medium-sized businesses. There are 1,500 users worldwide.

The support is good. I rate the support an eight or nine out of ten.

Positive

The solution is not easy to implement. The first setup is a bit more difficult, but it gets better. The solution is easy to maintain.

A global partner did the setup.

I'm still comparing, but the solution is quite expensive.

I recommend people try the product out because it's really good. I rate Prisma Access an eight out of ten.

It made VPN easy with the ability to build distributed VPN gateways. The cost of IT deployment is a bit less because you just need a VPN-capable device at the branch, as against the full stack, before leveraging the firewall service feature. There is also better latency for the clients in terms of talking to resources back at the data center.

It's Panorama-managed. Using Panorama makes it easy for me in terms of pulling policies and doing things on the fly.

It's pretty similar to the native physical firewalls. The only difference is that with SaaS security, we're able to get a little more detail about shadow IT SaaS applications and properly categorize them, which is helpful to decide what we need to do with those applications. It affects which applications we would want to see running over the network and which applications we need to restrict from users.

Similarly, in terms of protecting data and preventing zero-day threats, it's the same thing that I get with my physical firewalls. The data is sent to Wildfire. All the features are all pulled from the same intelligence sensors. The only difference is that this is in the cloud.

Prisma SaaS helps to keep pace with SaaS growth in our organization, but it's not a big deal for us. Mostly, we're looking through or sifting through identified SaaS applications, and it's a good thing to have that visibility. That's what we're enjoying right now, and then probably with time, we might be relying on it to make decisions in terms of setting restrictions to some SaaS applications, especially those that are not sanctioned by IT.

It's hard for me to pinpoint a certain feature against the other. The product makes more sense as a whole. Overall, the cost savings, ease of deployment, and better VPN user experience and performance are valuable.

It helps to identify and control shadow IT apps. In terms of its impact on our organization's security, it has been like a sword with two edges. Sometimes, it has proved to be helpful in securing workloads, and sometimes, especially when there are modifications to App-IDs pushed through the content database, we find some things messed up. We've come to a point where we have our ways of managing these things, but all in all, App-ID has been very helpful, especially in detecting tunneled applications.

At the end of the day, it's simply an operational thing. Sometimes, you have these notifications sent out about changes in App-IDs, modifications in App-IDs, or even the introduction of entirely new App-IDs to replace. Sometimes, the recommendations are followed, but even then, when the package is installed on the firewall, it gets messed up. I remember a particular one was with Tableau, and suddenly, people weren't able to use Tableau, which is an analytics tool for business. So, it can get messed up, but it doesn't happen often.

I have been using it for about two years.

So far, it has been stable. We get all those notifications around changes. I haven't seen a lot of IT changes that need some kind of manual effort. 

Being on the global license package and being able to spin up a VPN gateway just like that has been a huge benefit. If I have new users in Berlin, I can make life better and just spin up something close to Berlin for them to connect to. If there's an office coming up somewhere in Poland and there are some supply chain issues. If I have a router somewhere there, I can just leverage on that easily without worrying about, "Oh, when am I going to get my stack deployed? How soon can I complete a project so that users are able to start working from that office?" Those are the things that I don't need to bother about anymore because I can easily spin up a complete node close to their location, and I can tunnel between them, do my routing, and they're good. They can talk to whatever resources we need them to talk to remotely and connect to the cloud from there for internally protected cloud workloads. Scalability is obviously a huge factor.

The Cloud App-ID technology is something I am still observing. It takes us back to SaaS security. App-ID is a critical and fundamental part of being able to identify SaaS applications. So far, the applications identified have been true positives. It seems to work so far, but with time, we'll see how it's able to help with identifying SaaS applications better. 

It helped to identify cloud applications that we were unaware that our employees were using. I don't have the metrics, but we do generate reports from time to time just to see what's going on and how we compare with the industry in terms of application usage. Similarly, for risk identification, I don't have metrics. We are just reviewing and sifting through these applications. We don't, or we haven't, put a risk score on them yet. Until that's done, it's almost impossible for me to say if these are bad actors or not. We have visibility now. The SaaS applications that have been used at the moment are not of concern based on the last review we did. As time goes on, we might start considering some as risky or start categorizing the risks in some of these SaaS applications. Currently, it's all open. We mostly have mobile users, and we have another solution for endpoint security and Internet-based applications that go through their home Internet. There are few who do visit the office. Probably less than 10% of the organization goes into the office, so there's no huge concern at the moment because of those very low numbers.

For the parts and the features that I use, which are mostly remote branch and mobile gateway, I would rate it an eight out of ten.

The use case for our clients is that they have branch office locations all over the world. Users can connect over the internet and inspection of their traffic will happen on the Prisma infrastructure. Remote users can also connect to the VPN through Prisma infrastructure, and they can connect their data center with the Prisma infrastructure as well.

It's a cloud solution from Palo Alto Networks. Customers just need to establish an IPSec tunnel from their on-prem device with Palo Alto's closest location, which they have all over the world—100-plus locations.

The benefit of using Prisma Access is that the customer doesn't need to have their own data center. They just need to purchase a Prisma Access license. The customer will save on the labor cost associated with the data center, on the electricity cost, and they will save on the land cost as well. The data center infrastructure is provided by Palo Alto Networks.

Prisma Access is a big change for our customers. Not having to have data centers, and not having to deploy a firewall at each location, makes things simpler.

The solution also enables customers to deliver better applications. It helps them save on costs. It is easy to manage with fewer resources.

It's easy to manage. Our customers do not need to worry about what is happening in the data center. With legacy networks, they have to worry about things like the firewall being down and having to go to the data center to replace it. With Prisma Access, they do not need to worry about that. Palo Alto takes care of it. If something goes down in the infrastructure, the Palo Alto team will take care of it.

Prisma Access protects all app traffic, so that users can gain access to all apps. It is important for our clients that all traffic coming through the firewall is inspected. Prisma inspects all the traffic, and if a customer wants to make an exception for certain traffic, that is also possible.

It also inspects both web-based apps and non web-based apps.

In addition, it's really easy to manage. If customers have Panorama they can use it to manage Prisma Access. There is also a cloud application which provides a single console to manage it. Changes can be made on that console and pushed to the customer's environment, which is another way they make it easy to manage. The customer can opt for Panorama or the cloud management application. The latter is free.

Prisma Access provides traffic analysis, threat prevention, URL filtering, and segmentation, as well as vulnerability protection, DLP, anti-spyware, antivirus, URL filtering, and file blocking. It provides everything. This combination is very important. When a customer wants to block certain URL categories, they can block them. If they want to exclude any entertainment websites from their environment, they can block them. What we implement depends totally on the customer's environment and what they need. We can play with it and modify things.

Another benefit is that if any vulnerability is detected, such as a Zero-day attack, Palo Alto provides an update dynamically. The patch is installed so that the network is not exploited.

The Autonomous Digital Experience Management (ADEM) offered by Palo Alto is a good reporting tool. It gives insights into how things are going within the network. It takes all the data from the users' endpoints and does an analysis, and it suggests changes as well. The ADEM analysis of various tests will give the user feedback such as, "Okay, I'm seeing latency here." We or the customer can then improve on that. If something is blocked that shouldn't be, we can make a change in the policy. It's a good tool to have. It makes the user experience better.

The Cloud Management application has room for improvement. There are a lot of things on the roadmap for that application; things are going to happen soon.

I have been using Palo Alto Networks Prisma Access for around one year, as a consultant. I have deployed the solution for clients all over the world.

The availability of Prisma Access is good. I haven't seen any major issues yet.

It is scalable. We scale the solution based on the customer's requirements, after getting their technical design and discussing how they want to deploy it.

I would rate their customer support at nine out of 10. The one point I have deducted is because it is very hard to get support sometimes. There are times when the customer has to wait a long time in the queue. But once they get an engineer, they get the proper support. The Palo Alto engineers are good. It's just that it's very hard to get the engineer on time, sometimes. I believe this is because the solution has expanded a lot. Users are purchasing it but the support is not keeping pace. They are working on that and the support is going to be increased in the future.

Positive

The deployment is simple.

The time it takes for deployment of Prisma Access depends on how big the environment is. One company may have 120 or 130 branch sites, while another company may have just six or seven. It varies on that number of sites or on the number of data centers they have. If there are only five or six branch office locations, then the deployment can be completed in five or six days.

I'm not involved on the financial side, but I believe the solution is costly.

In the same way a customer manages their on-prem firewalls that are not on Prisma Access, they can manage Prisma Access infrastructure through Panorama. That makes it easy for them. The customer is already familiar with how to manage things with Panorama, so there isn't much that is new. There are little changes but that's it. If a customer is already using Palo Alto, we recommend going with Panorama.

Overall, the security provided by Prisma Access is top-notch. It is the same firewall that Palo Alto provides for a local setup. It's the best firewall, per the industry review ratings.

As a Palo Alto provider, their Platform as a Service (PaaS) for their Prisma Cloud-Native product, is offered as a hosted or Software as a Service (SaaS) version. As a user their product should scan and manage cloud container images to identify vulnerabilities. It's a key feature for identifying CI/CD development issues for remediation. 

The most valuable feature of Prisma Cloud-Native, in my opinion, is that it assists in identifying, analyzing, and remediating vulnerabilities.

Palo Alto does a great job on managing updates to their products. It can be difficult managing all the subscription updates, especially if they are manual. There should be a process in place. 

One area of challenge is for them to stay on top of current CVEs on their platform. Anything in the lines of compliance should be current from potential attacks. They have a URL link where customers can make recommendations to map to specific compliance frameworks or standards. That's great, but instead of having the customer identify those, they should make sure they're using the most recent version. The NIST SP 800-53 Rev. 4, should be mapped to NIST SP 800-53 Rev. 5 current version. Many people are unaware of this change. Should use the most current version, unless you have an exception for legacy systems.

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

I'm currently supporting a Prisma Cloud-Native re-configuration project. It's their Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) version in the Cloud to scan for vulnerabilities. 

Prisma Palo Alto Networks is an optimal solution. They use the Amazon platform. They have some extremely talented engineers who keep the product up to date. Version updates could be a challenge as some versions are not automated. They don't always push you to update unless you're maybe using the hosted version. If you are unaware of this, you may have been using an older version for an extended period of time. There will be bugs and issues, and it will not perform optimally. It's important to use the most current version. 

Palo Alot support is great. There are no complaints.

I am familiar with Trend Micro, and WatchGuard solutions. I really like Trend Micro. They are excellent, in my opinion. They are great for anti-malware, as well as scanning your desktops and computers for personal or business use.

Proofpoint is another product that I really like for DLP Endpoint Security. They do an excellent job.

I didn't do the original configuration, but I am doing some of the re-configuration. It is important to understand your organization's infrastructure, cloud containers, and all the various types of administrative access controls. It all comes down to having the knowledge and visibility to configure it with your environment. 

The pricing is reasonable for Palo Alto. They price their products using credit modules. There are various types of modules in each section. I believe there are four different modules. If you want to ensure that you are saving on cost, you should develop a very good DevOps or DevSecOps process with the cloud engineers and development team. Meaning, when the development team is no longer creating apps or working in their CI/CD environment, they must scale down, repave and decommission or it could increase your costs significantly.

One of our use cases is that it is used by our internal users, our employees, when they need to work remotely. They'll be out in the field and, wherever they have an internet connection, they run the GlobalProtect client, connect, and they can access our resources as if they're in our building. For example, we have health inspectors who go to different sites.

Of course, we're doing more teleworking like everyone right now. Also, our admins all use it because that's how we get in and do remote work. And, periodically, we have contractors or vendors who need remote access. We'll build an account in AD and either have them download the client and connect to us, or if they currently use the GlobalProtect client for some other VPN connection, we can just provide our gateway and they can use their existing client to connect to the resources that we allow them.

We also have a clientless VPN by Palo Alto. It's a website where you can enter your AD credentials, and it will publish internal web apps that you can access through a browser. We have some users, and a set of contractors, who use that to access some of our internal systems for COVID response.

It's a cloud-based VPN, but it's managed from our Panorama instance, which is on-site. There's the GlobalProtect client that gets installed, that's the VPN client on your laptop, and that automatically updates from the cloud when a new version is available.

Prisma Access is our first cloud-based VPN solution. I like that aspect because I don't have all the traffic hitting my firewall interface directly. Users go to the cloud, wherever they are, and connect to some kind of cloud. It will grab their config, and our firewall doesn't see any extra traffic from that. That's awesome.

Because we are in the health sector, the clientless, web-based VPN that we're using has allowed us to partner with some external companies to do contact tracing for COVID. That means that if someone is positive for COVID, those companies track back to the people they have been in contact with and try to find the source. The fact that the only way a couple of hundred of our employees can access our records at any time is through the web-based VPN has really improved our ability to respond to the pandemic.

I like it because it's very easy to use. You install the client and you have to know your gateway, but that's something we give to our users. Beyond that, it takes about three seconds to train them on how to use it. And it just works well. That's great for us because it means less administrative time.

It's also nice that Prisma Access provides all its capabilities in a single, cloud-delivered platform. 

The thick client secures non-web apps in addition to web-based apps. If you have the client installed on your laptop, it's a completely secure VPN connection and anything you run will be secured by it. The clientless VPN, the web-based one, only allows you to redirect to URLs; it's only web. Being able to access non-web apps is important to us because it's how we get our remote work done. Not everything is web-based. We have to run applications and access Windows shares and the like. 

This ability helps decrease the risk of data breach. Information security is more and more a huge concern for everyone. Knowing that everything's going across an encrypted tunnel, and that we can manage what is accessed by which user, are huge benefits.

Another important aspect is that Prisma Access provides millions of security updates per day, because security has really become our number-one focus lately. That feature is very good.

I've been using Prisma Access by Palo Alto Networks for about two years, maybe a little longer.

It has been very stable. We've had a couple of small outages, but overall it's very trustworthy and stable.

It's cloud-based, so it's infinitely scalable. For us, it has worked fine. We went from a few users at first and we built up to hundreds.

It's our clientless VPN that really builds up our user count. It is consistently between 300 and 400 users. It rises and falls depending on what kind of campaign we're doing. If a new COVID variant is discovered and we have to ramp things up because of CDC guidance, the user count will bump up.

The one thing that I've been a little bit disappointed with is when we have had to open cases with Palo Alto about Prisma Access issues. Versus their other platforms, like their firewalls, where we tend to get really quick responses and very definitive answers, the few tickets I've had to open for Prisma Access have taken them longer to respond to. And they haven't necessarily given me the kind of answer I was looking for, meaning a fix to the problem. Maybe this technology is not as cut and dry as some of their other technologies. But I think they could improve their support offering for Prisma a little bit and put more expertise in place.

Overall, I'm very happy with Palo Alto's support. I'm not saying that their Prisma support is awful. It just hasn't been quite up to par with other support I've seen from them, which has been pretty phenomenal.

Positive

For VPN, we used Cisco AnyConnect. The switch to Prisma Cloud was part of a platform switch from Cisco ASA to Palo Alto firewalls.

We also have other solutions, such as a virtual desktop solution that is available externally. Some of our users use that and others use the VPN.

The setup was medium complex. Because of the way we're doing it through our Panorama, it's a little more complex than it would be on the cloud-only solution. There is definitely some  complexity to it.

I wasn't involved in the initial deployment of it, but our organization worked with a vendor called CompuNet, a company with Palo Alto expertise. I would guess it took one to two days to get through everything and test it. 

The evaluation happened before my time here, but we had people who had worked with Palo Alto previously. They knew its reputation and were happy with it. I think the switch happened directly.

It functions like a lot of other VPN solutions. It's not special in that sense. It just works.

I have spoken with another agency that was looking at Prisma Access. The one thing they weren't aware of was the clientless, web-based VPN that is part of the product. They were pretty excited when I explained to them how we use it. So make sure you review the full feature set that Prisma Access offers. It may be broader than you expected.

We are using it as a hybrid solution where we manage it through our onsite firewall. There is a Prisma Access full-cloud solution where you do all the management there. If we were to start over again today, I would probably go full-cloud. That would ease the management a little bit. People who are using the cloud-only solution probably have fewer hoops to jump through to get certain things accomplished. But we've been fine.

The biggest issue I've run into is that most of the documentation for Prisma Access is based on the full-cloud model, as opposed to our hybrid implementation. It's a little trickier to find out how to implement some of those changes through Panorama. There are also some connectors you have to set up to make sure that your Panorama is talking to the cloud the way it should. Those wouldn't be necessary in the cloud version, and that means it's probably a little easier to sync your AD, set up your users in the cloud, and you're done. Everything is already on the cloud.

Overall, I'm very happy with the security provided by Prisma Access. Palo Alto is a security company and is always working on ways to make things more secure. I feel very confident that our data is safe using the solution, which is the whole point.

My customers are military and federal government agencies. They're really interested in Secure Access Service Edge technology for their endpoints. Palo Alto Prisma is one of the solutions we use to make the SASE solution work for endpoints. For our customers, we normally do SD-WAN, Zero Trust, SWG, and SWaaS. Nobody has really asked for ADEM yet.

Prisma Access lets us compete in the cloud space.

Prisma isn't hard for the average system admin to use, and our customers are interested in Prisma's SD-WAN and Zero Trust capabilities. Government customers are particularly interested in the CASB capability. Prisma protects all app traffic, so our customers can access all of our apps, which is essential. That's one of the main reasons my business and customers use this technology, especially in the COVID-19 environment.

My military customers have users who need secure access to their information from all over the world. If they're using Microsoft Office products or some other app that isn't web-based, they can still access them through the web whether they're using their corporate devices or working on their personal devices using corporate information. Prisma will still protect that from phishing or other attacks.

Having all of these capabilities on a single cloud-delivered platform was extremely important to us. We also liked how well Prisma integrates with other solutions. Other solutions offer the same functionalities Prisma does when it comes to Zero Trust, CASB, and SD-WAN within the Microsoft Cloud. Prisma helps us protect our customers when a user isn't going to the Microsoft Cloud. 

Prisma also helps with traffic analysis, and that is controlled through the Manager. We can see what websites individuals within organizations are going to. For example, we can do cybersecurity analysis, such as phishing and so forth, to determine the cybersecurity risk of a particular site. While Prisma is doing that, we're also sending those Prisma files to our security operations, and they're also doing the analysis. In addition to threat detection, we're doing threat prevention. URL filtering fits into that category because we can determine what website an individual was able to access.

Prisma does segmentation either through the management of user groups or according to network access. Prisma provides millions of security updates per day, which is crucial for my government customers and business partners. It helps us keep up with security violations or phishing attacks by bad state actors. These threats are dynamic.

Prisma should implement industry updates in near real-time. Also, Prisma's integration between operational technology and IT should be more seamless. Right now, it requires additional setup and maintenance.

We've been using Prisma Access for about a year.

Prisma is stable. It works as advertised.

Prisma is highly scalable and global.

I rate Palo Alto's tech support 10 out of 10. It's outstanding. But I'd like to highlight the difference between technical support and government technical support because it's two different beasts. I'm talking about Palo Alto's government technical support. They have a separate set of personnel inside the organization that handles government customers.

Positive

Setting up Prisma is pretty straightforward. It takes around an hour to get it up and running. The amount of time needed to fully deploy Prisma depends on the size of the enterprise and the number of units, groups, endpoints, etc. Pre-deployment preparation also varies according to the size of the enterprise. It takes about a couple of days for a medium-size organization. You have to set up the architecture, determine who the users are, set up the IP schema, establish your Zero Trust scheme, set up network access, and send your log files over to the site. All of that takes about three days. Two network engineers can handle setup and deployment. After that, Prisma can be maintained by normal networking staff and at least one engineer.

Integrators from our partners at Tech Data help us deploy. We also get help integrating from my engineers over at TOSIBOX, our proprietary VPN solution.

We're now able to go after contracts that require a Zero Trust solution and Prisma's other technology solutions. 

We looked at other competitors, including Aruba, HP, Cisco, and Microsoft Enterprise solutions. 

I rate Prisma Access nine out of 10. It has been constantly changing since it was released. Palo Alto is the leader in all these technologies on the Gartner Magic Quadrant. 

I would advise anyone considering Prisma to look at their endpoint protection and evaluate how it fits in the overall enterprise solution, including integration with operational technology.

We are a small team of ITOps Engineers. With Prisma, we can manage all our Edge Network Infrastructure (Mobile Users, Remote Networks, and Data Centers) in one location.

We also decommissioned our  legacy MPLS connections and moved to VPN. If we need to expand to more offices, different countries, and different regions, it would be much simpler to do it with Prisma Access because the only things required are an internet connection and a pair of firewalls. 

On our IT team, we now have a single interface (using Palo Alto Panorama) where we can monitor our whole infrastructure. The office and Data Center Firewalls, as well as, the Remote User VPN, forward all the traffic to the Prisma Access Infrastructure. There we can apply deep packet inspection and allow or deny traffic, and also apply additional security features like threat prevention, DNS security, malware and anti-virus protection etc.

For remote users, the VPN connection is more secure and much faster than the legacy solutions. Some of our users are located in different European countries. Now they can pick their closest location and connect to a VPN "concentrator" near their region. Whereas before, they needed to connect with one of our data centers in the UK. 

Since everything is connected to Prisma, now we are able to be more proactive, detect end-user or site connectivity issues much faster. Before we were running multiple applications (NMS, Syslog, Netflow) that required a lot of engineering overhead to manage those, but also to extract the information needed. Now a lot of those tasks can be picked by the Service Desk team. 

In addition, similarly to any other Cloud "Platform" the administrative tasks have been dramatically decreased. The upgrade process is very simple compared with any on-premise solution.

I don't think we have actually fully utilised all the functions of Prisma yet. The main concept of Prisma Access is what really help us to transition our infrastructure from a legacy and complex approach to a more simple and easy to manage and maintain one.

Prisma Access has three major components / connections: 

- Remote connections: The links to the Remote Offices 

- Mobile Users 

- Service Connections : The links to the Data Centers. 

You connect everything by establishing VPN tunnels with the Prisma Access Infrastructure. Prisma is now the “brain” of the infrastructure. All edge devices send all traffic to Prisma and Prisma has the knowledge to route the traffic to the correct destination. In addition you can also apply all the additional security features a NGFW can offer. 

Since this is a cloud platform you can easily scale up adding more mobile users or new remote offices. Prisma will simple auto-run (if needed) additional instances in the cloud to support your load 

Also,  because everything's on the cloud, we don't have to worry about patching; we get all the new features as they come in. One of the biggest problems for us used to be to upgrade our VPN application. Now, it can be done with a click of a button. The administrative overhead has been reduced, and we are able to focus on things that actually matter.

The only drawback at the moment is that a “Cloud” solution like Prisma Access requires Palo Alto Panorama, which is normally a VM that sits in your DataCenter. Panorama is used for monitoring and mainly for configuring the different components of Prisma Access.

For the configuration part, Palo Alto has recently introduced an equivalent cloud application, but not all features are available yet. Also at this moment if you enable Prisma Access with Panorama you cannot migrate to the Cloud version.

I've been working with the Palo Alto team since the beginning of the year (2021), when we started the initial setup. It took us around 2 months (multiple weekly sessions) to complete the setup. And the last 2 months we are fully utilising the Prisma components (Remote Networks, Service Connections and Mobile Users)

We have utilised Prisma Access for the late couple of months. Now we are in the process of migrating all our Remote users from the on premise Firewalls to the Prisma Access VPN as a Service solution. 

Over this period we haven't faced any connectivity issues. Prisma Access underlying infrastructure is high available and scalable. 

As any major Cloud Vendors line Google or AWS we may face outages in the future, but we havent experience any problems yet. 

As with any infrastructure where the managent plane is in the cloud, we can know schedule an upgrade and the Prisma will take care the rest. No more complicated upgrade processes that could lead to outages and downtimes. 

A few days ago the Prisma Access dataplane was upgraded. We had zero downtime and the auto-procwss went smoothly (as expected).

As for scalability, you can easily bring more users to the platform; you would just need to buy additional licenses.

There is no need for purchasing new and more powerful hardware. Palo Alto will scale your platform up to support your infrastructure.

Simple integration with LDAP, SAML can help us to provision 100s of users quickly and onboard more users are the company is getting out of the pandemic freeze period.

I think Palo Alto has great technical support in terms of the time of response and the efficiency of response.

Over the past few months we raised multiple tickets (P2-P4). On all of them the responses were quick within the SLA timelines. All the support Engineers had deep knowledge of the product, and always went above and beyond not only by fixing our issues, but also by trying to explain us why was misconfigured or what actually went wrong. Everyone had great communication skills, they were patient and listening our needs and requirements.

We used local Cisco ASA Firewalls that were located in our two UK offices.Normally we had around 10-15 % of our users working remotely. During the pandemic we had to setup around 500 users to connect to the VPN. Unfortunately our ASAs had limited capabilities (250 max users for the 5515-X and 100 for the 5508-X). Our temporary solution was to use the AWS VPN solution for the remaining users. 

At that point we realised that we need a flexible and scalable solution. In addition the company has embraced the cloud first approach a few years back by moving all our servers to the cloud, so utilising a VPN as a Service (offered by Prisma Access) was an expected next  step. 

In my team there are Cisco certified engineers and we have been using Cisco products for many years, but for my opinion when it comes to security and NGFWs, but they haven't reached the level of Prisma Access by Palo Alto Networks. I believe Palo Alto is the key player in the market. 

We had a mixture of different applications and vendors, and we wanted to merge everything under Prisma Access. The terminology is a bit different between Palo Alto and Cisco ASA, and between their local firewalls and the Prisma Access firewalls. It took us about a month to wrap our heads around it and understand how things worked. Once we did that, it was easy to implement. We have gradually migrated all our services. We did our MPLS and the connection to AWS, and now, we're slowly migrating the users. No one has noticed, so it has been seamless.

We don't have a big infrastructure and did the migration piece by piece, and it was really easy and seamless.

To set up the infrastructure with the team, it took us less than a week. The gradual migration took us three weeks, but the basic setup takes less than a week.

We used the Palo Alto professional services, which mainly help us though multiple Zoom sessions to understand all the Prisma components and also to configure the core Prisma setup. The fine tuning was done by the in-house team. 

We had a great experience. All the Palo Alto consultants had a great knowledge of the product and they were very helpful, making it very simple for us to understand this new Platform. They were never leaving any questions unanswered and they were always providing accurate documentation and references for my team to get the required knowledge and to understand / follow up during the Setup.

I think the ROI has been good. We no longer need people to maintain the whole infrastructure, and we do not need to spend money on different services that we no longer use like MPLS or other kinds of support.

Also, the fact that we can quickly scale up without worrying about buying additional licensing is great for us.

The price has been good for the ROI during these difficult times for the cruise industry. With Prisma, you need three types of licenses

- Palo Alto support

- Number of Remote Users that are connected to VPN (concurrent connections)

- Total Bandwidth between Remote Sites offices and Prisma. If you have three or fewer DCs then you don't have to purchase additional connections or bandwidth.

There are no hidden costs; what the product offers is what you get.

We didn't run any PoC with other vendors. Before we were introduced to Prisma Access we were thinking of moving also our Firewalls to Meraki (as we will do with our switches). I believe no other vendor can offer what Palo Alto with Prisma provides, at least at this moment.

In my experience, Prisma Access is a great platform. However, since SASE is a new fairly new concept, it was a bit confusing to understand all the  different components and how all of them work together. On top of that if you are not very familiar with Palo Alto firewalls and especially Palo Alto Panorama, additional training would be recommended. Of course the same concepts of a NGFW from any other vendor are applied. 

 Once you grasp how Prisma Access works, then it's really a piece of cake to set everything up.

For example, we are a small team of three people, and I'm the senior network engineer. My VPN knowledge was not good because we've mainly had MPLS. Still, it was very easy to set everything up.

You setup everything through the web GUI (Palo Alto Panorama). You don't need to know a lot about CLI. With Cisco devices, you have to be an expert in CLI to set up a few things.

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate Prisma Access by Palo Alto Networks at ten because it's an innovative product. They “invented” the whole concept (SASE), and they're way ahead of other competitors.

This solution helps us with visibility of the data stored in the cloud and it even scans our files. If a user is trying to upload any kind of malware file or a script, Prisma SaaS scans those files and helps us identify anything malicious. If it finds something, it directly cleans the file. We are partners with Prisma SaaS.

I've evaluated multiple solutions on the market but to quarantine and clean a malware file is something I haven't seen anywhere else. It's a great feature and provides a lot of security.  

I would like to see a hybrid model which has API plus in-line security, where the user's data is controlled via an API call and also controlled in-line. 

We been using this solution for over a year. 

We've never had any issues in terms of stability. 

In terms of scalability, we initially went with the out-of-the-box solution which was able to support around 40 to 50 users and it was fine. There was no need for any add-ons. We now have a license for 200 users and it scales well. 

Technical support is responsive. We contacted them a few times and they were helpful. 

The initial setup was straightforward. It was completely on cloud and easily activated, and we were up and running quite quickly.

The licensing of this solution is a little expensive and is paid on an annual basis. 

If a company is looking for an API-based technology to control their SaaS data uses and user access, then Prisma SaaS is a good product but if they're looking for a complete CASB solution, then this is not suitable. The solution provides a lot of security but when you look at it in terms of the high cost for licensing, then it is not cost effective to spend that amount just to protect the data stored by the user.

I rate this solution a six out of 10.