Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks Reviews

We are using the CSPM, CWP, and Code Security modules across our team. We are using the CSPM for our compliance system and the CWP for container security.

We are using multiple cloud accounts and the solution helps us with posture management. We have identified things that have optimized our posture across those accounts. We now have a single tool to protect all of our cloud resources.

We have also been able to integrate security into the CI/CD pipeline with touchpoints into existing DevOps processes. At runtime, it gives us risk clarity; the modules are really good and we have seen a decrease in alert investigation times.

Integration is very easy. And because it supports security that spans multi- and hybrid-cloud environments, it's very easy to use.

It's also a very good tool for helping us take a preventive approach to cloud security. The CSPM part is very easy.

It's pretty good when it comes to protecting the full cloud-native stack, but it depends on how you configure it and the kinds of rules you implement.

When it comes to compliance, the issue is that when we are exporting the reports, there is only a single compliance option. If I need to report on multiple compliance requirements, that feature isn't available. For example, I made a single report for ISO 27000 but I can't correlate it with GDPR.

Also, for the different modules we have to set up different policies. There should be a single console where we can implement and define all the rules in one go.

It provides visibility and control across our distributed cloud environments, apart from network segmentation. The network segmentation modules have very limited functionality.

And onboarding multiple Unix platforms is a little complex.

I have been using Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks for one and a half years.

Overall, it's stable.

It's scalable.

The initial setup was slightly complex, when it came to integrating everything.

Almost all the CSPM tools are pretty expensive. I also explored Orca but it is also pretty expensive.

As of now, we are going to continue with this product. But we are also exploring. New tools are coming into the market so we have to keep up with all the tools and technologies. We are exploring what other kinds of features are available in the market.

From the security automation point of view, it's a fairly good tool, but it still needs some enhancements. Sometimes, it becomes somewhat complex to implement everything.

Overall, Prisma Cloud is a pretty good tool. The only part that stands out for improvement is the reporting.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Previously, we were primarily using Amazon Web Services in a product division. We initially deployed RedLock (Prisma Cloud) as a PoC for that product division. Because it is a large organization, we knew that there were Azure and GCP for other cloud workloads. So, we needed a multi-cloud solution. In my current role, we are primarily running GCP, but we do have some presence in Amazon Web Services as well. So, in both those use cases, the multi-cloud functionality was a big requirement.

We are on the latest version of Prisma Cloud.

It is very important that Prisma Cloud provides security spanning multi-cloud environments, where you have Amazon, Azure, and GCP multiple cloud environments. Being able to centralize all those assets, have visibility, and set some policies and rules within one dashboard when you have multiple cloud accounts is a big advantage.

The comprehensiveness of Prisma Cloud for securing the entire cloud-native development lifecycle was shown when Palo Alto bought Twistlock and integrated in some of the container security pieces, particularly for containers, Docker, and Kubernetes, and building in the Prismic Cloud Compute tab. Having that functionality from Twistlock more focused on Docker and containers filled in some of the space where the original Prisma RedLock piece was a little more focused on just the API, e.g., passive scanning. The integration of Twistlock into Prisma Cloud Compute definitely expanded this functionality into the container and Docker space, which is a big growth area in the cloud as well.

Prisma Cloud has enabled us to take a very strong preventive approach to cloud security. One of the hardest things with cloud is getting visibility into workloads. With Prisma Cloud, you can go in and get that visibility, then set up policies to alert on risky behavior, e.g., if there are security groups or firewall ports open up. So, it is very helpful in preventing configuration errors in the cloud by having visibility. If there are issues, then you can find them and fix them. 

Educates and trains cloud operators on how to better design their different cloud and infrastructure deployments. Prisma Cloud has very good remediation steps built in. So, if you do find an issue, they will give you steps on, "Here is how you go into the Console and make this change to close out this issue, preventing this in the future." So, it is a strong tool for the prevention and protection of the cloud, in general.

We have gone in and done some tuning to remove alerts that were false positives. That reduced some of the alerts. Then, as our team has gone in and fixed issues, we have seen from the metrics and tracking of Prisma Cloud that alerts have been reduced.

The compliance tabs were helpful just to have visibility into the assets as well as the asset management tabs. In the cloud, everything is very dynamic and ephemeral. So, being able to see dynamic asset inventory for what we have in cloud environments was a huge plus. Just to have that visibility in a dashboard instead of having to dump things into a spreadsheet, e.g., you are trying to do asset inventory and spreadsheets, then five minutes later it changes cause the cloud is dynamic. So, the asset inventory and compliance tabs are strong. 

When the cloud team makes a change that may introduce some risk, then we get alerts.

We pretty heavily used the Resource Query Language (RQL) and the investigate tab to find what instances and cloud resources are externally facing and might be higher risk, looking for particular patterns in the resources. 

Prisma Cloud provides the following in a single pane of glass within a dashboard: Cloud Security Posture Management, Cloud Workload Protection, Cloud Network Security, and Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management. It is particularly challenging, especially in a multi-cloud environment, where you would have to log into your Google Cloud, then look for your infrastructure and alerting within Google. In addition, you have to switch over to Amazon and log into an AWS Console to do some work with Amazon. Having that central visibility across multiple cloud environments is definitely important when you have different sources and different dashboards for the cloud, which will still be separate, but you still have some centralization within that dashboard.

The solution’s security automation capabilities are definitely good. We use some of the automation within the alerting, where if Prisma Cloud detected a change and there was a certain threshold, e.g., if it was above a medium or a high risk issue, then we would send off an alert that would go to our infrastructure team/Slack channel, creating a Jira ticket. The automation with Slack and Jira have been very good feature points. 

The Prisma Cloud tool identifies for the security team the resource in the cloud that is the offender, such as, the context, the resource in the cloud, what is the cloud account, and the cloud environment that the resource is in. Then, there is always very good context on remediation, e.g., how do we go in and fix that issue? Do we either go through automation or log into the Cloud Console to do some remediation? The alerts include the context that is needed as well as the risk ranking and severity, whether it is a high, medium, or low issue.

The Prisma Cloud Console always has good remediation steps, whether it is going into the Console, updating a Cloud Formation, or Terraform scripts. The remediation guidance is always very helpful from Prisma Cloud.

Some of the usability within the Compute functionality needs improvement. I think when Palo Alto added on the Twistlock functionality, they added a Compute tab on the left side of the navigation. Some of the navigation is just a little dense. There is a lot of navigation where there is a tab and dropdowns. So, just improving some of the navigation where there is just a very dense amount of buttons and drop-down menus, that is probably the only thing, which comes from having a lot of features. Because there are a lot of buttons, just navigating around the platform can be a little challenging for new users.

They could improve a little bit of the navigation, where I have to kind of look through a lot of the different menus and dropdowns. Part of this just comes from it having so many awesome features. However, the navigation can sometimes be a little bit like, "I can't remember where the tab was," so I have to click and search around. This is not a big negative point, but it is definitely an area for improvement.

I started using this solution when it was still called RedLock. Before Palo Alto bought RedLock, I used RedLock for about a year and then for another year or two once Palo Alto bought them, rebranding them as Prisma Cloud. So, I have been using it for about three or four years.

It is very stable and solid. We haven't really had any issues with the dashboard. The availability is there. The ability to log in and get near real-time data on our cloud environment is very good. Overall, the stability and accessibility has been good.

We use it pretty much daily, several days a week. We are licensed for 200 workloads in Prisma Cloud.

We are definitely still working on maturing some of our operations. We have a pretty small infrastructure team; just two engineers who are focused on infrastructure. We are trying to automate as much as we can, and Prisma Cloud supports most of that. There are still some cases where you have to log into the Console and do some clicking around. However, for the most part, we are trying to automate as much as we can to scale those operations with a very small infrastructure and security team.

Their customer and technical support is very good. They helped us on scoping, getting an estimate for how many workloads and resources that we had. Their support team helped us through some issues on the configuration in the API on the Defender side. We had a couple questions that came up and the customer success and support engineers were very responsive and helpful. 

The sales team was really good. We leveraged some of our relationships, working extensively with some of the leadership at Palo Alto in Unit 42 on their threat team. The sales team gave us a pretty good deal right before the end of the year, last year. So, we were able to get a good discount, so we were able to get the purchase done. Overall, it was a good experience.

This was a new implementation for our company.

Deploying the baseline for Prisma Cloud, its API configuration, was straightforward. To set up the API roles and hook in the API connectivity, we were able to do that within a couple of hours. The Prisma Cloud piece at the API level was very quick. The Defender agents were a bit more complicated because we had to deploy the Compute Defender agents into our containers, Docker, and Kubernetes. That was a little more complex, because we were deploying, not just connecting an API. We were deploying agents within our environment. So, the API side was very simple and fast. The Defender side was a bit more complicated.

We are still working on expanding and deploying some more Defender agents. The API piece was deployed within about a week, which was very fast. On the Defender side, with the infrastructure team's input, it took us several weeks to get the Defender agents deployed.

When we deployed Prisma Cloud, we established some baselines for security and our infrastructure team for what was running in the cloud. They were using some automation and scripting. They thought everything was okay with the script: We just run a script and it deploys this server and infrastructure in the cloud. What we found was that there were some misconfigurations. They had a default script that was opening up some ports that were not needed. So, we worked with the infrastructure team, went back, and said, "Okay, these ports were uncovered with our Prisma Cloud scanning. Is there a business use? Is there any valid reason for these ports to be open?" The team said, "No we don't really need these ports." It was just a default that we need to deploy in Google or AWS. It was just a default that was added in. So, we worked with them to go back and change some of their defaults, then change some of their scripts. Now, in future cases, when they deploy the Terraform script, it would make sure that those ports are automatically closed.

We purchased directly from Palo Alto. We didn't use a system integrator. We purchased directly from them and went through their support team. I have a good relationship with the sales and customer success team at Palo Alto just from past relationships. So, we did a direct purchase.

We will eventually see return on investment just out of the automation and the ability to scale the platform up.

We have reduced alert investigation times by approximately a couple hours a week.

The pricing is good. They gave us some good discounts right at the end of the year based on the value that it brings, visibility, and the ability to build in cloud, compliance, and security within one dashboard. 

We did look at a couple other vendors who do similar cloud workload protections. Based on the relationships that we have with Palo Alto, we knew that Palo Alto was kind of the leader in this space. We had hands-on experience with the tool and Palo Alto was also a customer of ours. So, we had some strong relationships and Palo Alto was the leader. 

We did some demos with different tools that were not as comprehensive. We had some tools that we looked at which just focused more on the container side and some that focused more on the cloud API layer. Since Prisma Cloud has unified some of these different pieces into one platform, we ultimately decided that Prisma Cloud was going to be the best solution for us.

It is a good tool. Work with your stakeholders and cloud teams to implement Prisma Cloud within as many environments as you can to get that rich amount of data, then come up with a strong strategy for integrations and alerting. Prisma Cloud has a lot of integrations out-of-the-box, like ServiceNow, Jira, and Slack. Understand what your business teams need as well as what your engineering and developers need. Try to work on the integrations that allow for the maximum amount of integration and automation within a cloud environment. So, work with your business teams to come up with a plan for how to implement it in your cloud, then how to best integrate the tooling and alerting.

While Prisma Cloud does have the ability to do auto-remediation, which is a part of their automation, we didn't turn any of that on now because those features have a tendency to sometimes break things. For example, it will automatically shut down a security group or server that can sometimes have an impact into availability. So, we don't use any of the auto-remediation features, but we do have automation setup with Jira and Slack to create tickets and events for our ticketing and infrastructure teams/Slack channels.

We definitely want to continue to explore and build-in some of the Shift Left principles, getting the tool into our dev cycles earlier. We do have some plans to expand more on the dev side. I am hiring an AppSec engineer who will be focused more on the development and AppSec side. That is something that is in our roadmap. It has just been something that we have been trying to work on and get into our backlog of a lot of projects.

I would rate this solution as a nine out of 10.

We have a very large public cloud estate. We have nearly 300 public cloud accounts, with almost a million things deployed. It's pretty much impossible to track all of the security and the compliance issues using anything that would remotely be considered homegrown—scripts, or something that isn't fully automated and supported. We don't have the time, or necessarily even the desire, to build these things ourselves. So we use it to track compliance across all of the various accounts and to manage remediation. 

We also have 393 applications in the cloud, all of which are part of various suites, which means there are at least 393 teams or groups of people who need to be held accountable for what they have deployed and what they wish to do. 

It's such a large undertaking that automating it is the only option. To bring it all together, we use it to ensure that we can measure and track and identify the remediation of all of our public cloud issues.

The solution provides risk clarity at runtime and across the entire pipeline, showing issues as they are discovered during the build phases. Our developers are able to correct them using the tools they use to code. It gives our developers a point to work towards. If the information provided by this didn't exist, then we wouldn't be able to give our developers the direction that they need to go and fix the issues. It comes back to ownership. If we can give full ownership of the issues to a team, they will go fix them. Honestly, I don't care how they fix them. I don't really mind what tools they use.

It is reducing run-time alerts. It's still in the process of working on those, but we have already seen a significant decrease, absolutely.

The entire concept is the right thing for us. It's what we need. The application is the feature, so to speak it. What it does is what we want it for: looking across the various cloud estates and providing us with information about what's going on in our cloud, where it is, when it happened. The product is the most valuable feature. It's not a do-all and end-all product. That doesn't exist. But it's a product with a very specific purpose. And we bought it for that very specific purpose.

When it comes to protecting the full cloud native stack—the pure cloud component of the stack—it is very good.

One of the main reasons we like Prisma Cloud so much is that they also provide an API. You can't expect to give someone an account on Prisma Cloud, or on any tool for that matter, and say, "Go find your things and fix them." It doesn't work like that. We've got to be able to clearly identify who owns what in our organization so that we can say, "Here's a report for your things and this is what you must go and fix." We pull down the information from the API that Prisma Cloud provides, which is multi-cloud, multi-account—hundreds and hundreds of different types of alerts graded by severity—and then we can clearly identify that these alerts belong to these people, and they're the people who must remediate them. That's our most important use case, because if you can't identify users, you can't remediate. No user is going to sit there going through over a million deployed things in the public cloud and say, "That one's mine, that one's not, that's mine, that's not." It's both the technology that Prisma Cloud provides and the ability to identify things distinctly, that comprise our use case.

It also provides the visibility and control we need, regardless of how complex or distributed our cloud environments become. It doesn't care about the complexity of our environment. It gives us the visibility we need to have confidence in our compliance. Without it, we would have no confidence at all.

It is also part of our DevOps processes and we have integrated security into our CI/CD pipeline. To be honest, those touchpoints are not as seamless as they could be because our processes do rely on multiple tools and multiple teams. But it is one of the key requirements in our DevOps life cycle for the compliance component to be monitored by this. It's a 100 percent requirement. The teams must use it all the time and be compliant before they move on to the next stage in each release. It is a bit manual for us, but that's because of our environment. It's given our SecOps teams the visibility they need to do their jobs. There's absolutely no chance that those teams would have any visibility, on a normal, day-to-day basis, simply because the SecOps teams are very small, and having to deal with hundreds of other development teams would be impossible for them on a normal basis.

Based on my experience, the customization—especially the interface and some of the product identification components—is not as customizable as it could be. But it makes up for that with the fact that we can access the API and then build our own systems to read the data and then process and parse it and hand it to our teams. At that point, we realized, "Okay, we're not never going to have it fully customizable," because no team can expect a product, off-the-shelf, to fit itself to the needs of any organization. That's just impossible.

So customization from our perspective comes through the API, and that's the best we can do because there is no other sensible way of doing it. The customization is exactly evident inside the API, because that's what you end up using.

In terms of the product having room for improvement, I don't see any product being perfect, so I'm not worried about that aspect. The RedLock team is very responsive to our requirements when we do point out issues, and when we do point out stuff that we would like to see fixed, but the product direction itself is not a big concern for us.

We've been using it since before it was called Prisma Cloud. We're getting on towards two years since we first purchased it.

The stability of Prisma Cloud is very good. I have no complaints along those lines. It seems to fit the requirements and it doesn't go down. Being a SaaS product, I would expect that. I haven't experienced any instability, and that's a good thing.

Again, as a SaaS product, I would expect it to just scale.

We regularly use Palo Alto technical support for the solution. I give it a top rating. They're very good. They have a very good customer success team. We've never had any issues. All our questions have been answered. It has been very positive.

We did not have a previous solution.

The initial setup was very straightforward. It's a SaaS product. All you have to do is configure your end, which isn't very hard. You just have to create a role for the product and, from there on, it just works, as long as the role is created correctly. Everything else you do after that is managed for you.

We have continuously been deploying it on new accounts as we spin them up. Our deployment has been going on since year one, but we've expanded. Two years ago we probably had about 40 or 50 cloud accounts. Now, we have 270 cloud accounts.

We have a team that is dedicated to managing our security tools. Something this big will always require some maintenance from our side: new accounts, and talking to internal teams. But this is as much about management of the actual alerts and issues than it is anything else. It's no longer about whether the tool is being maintained. We don't maintain it. But what we do is maintain our interaction with the tool. We have two people, security engineers, who work with the tool on a regular basis.

It's a non-functional ROI. This isn't a direct-ROI kind of tool. The return is in understanding our security postures. That's incredibly important and that's why we bought it and that's what we need from it. It doesn't create funds; it is a control. But it certainly does stop issues, and how do you quantify that?

Pricing wasn't a big consideration for us. Compared to the work that we do, and the other costs, this was one of the regular costs. We were more interested in the features than we were in the price.

If a competitor came along and said, "We'll give you half the price," that doesn't necessarily mean that's the right answer, at all. We wouldn't necessarily entertain it that way. Does it do what we need it to do? Does it work with the things that we want it to work with? That is the important part for us. Pricing wasn't the big consideration it might be in some organizations. We spend millions on public cloud. In that context, it would not make sense to worry about the small price differences that you get between the products. They all seem to pitch it at roughly the same price.

Before the implementation of Prisma Cloud, there were only two solutions in the market. The other one was Dome9. We did an evaluation and we chose this one, and they were both very new. This is a very new concept. It pretty much didn't exist until Prisma Cloud came along.

The Prisma Cloud solution was chosen because of the way it helped integrate with our operations people, and our operations people were very happy with it. That was one of the main concerns.

Both solutions are very good at what they do. They approach the same problem from different directions. It was this direction that worked for us. Having said that, certain elements of Prisma Cloud were definitely more attractive to us because they matched up with some of our requirements. I'm very loath to say one product is better than the other, because it does depend on your requirements. It does depend on how you intend to use it and what it is, exactly, that you're looking for.

You need to identify how you'll be using it and what your use cases are. If you don't have a mature enough organizational posture, you're not going to use it to actually fix the issues because you won't have the teams ready to consume its information. You need to build that and that needs to be built into the thinking around that product. There's no point having information if you're not going to act on it. So understand who is going to act on it, and how, and then you've got a much better path to understanding your use for this. There's no point in buying a product for the sake of the product. You need the processes and the workflows that go with it and you need to build those. It's not good enough to just hope that they will happen.

The solution doesn't secure the entire spectrum of compute options because there are other Palo Alto products that secure containers, for example. This is very specifically focused on the configuration of the public cloud instances. It doesn't look inside those instances. You would need something else for that. You don't want to be using other products to do this. You don't want to mistake this for something that does everything. It doesn't. It is a very specific product and it is amazingly good at what it does.

We do integrate it with our workflow as part of the process of getting an application onto the internet. It does integrate with our workflow, giving us a posture as part of the workflow. But it is not a workflow tool.

It definitely does multi-cloud. It does the three major ones plus Alibaba Cloud. It doesn't reach into hybrid cloud, in the sense that it doesn't understand anything non-cloud. We don't use it to provide security, although it is very good for that. We already have an advanced security provision posture, because we are a very large organization. We just use it to inform us of security issues that are outside our other controls.

Prisma Cloud doesn't provide us with a single tool to protect all of our cloud resources and applications in terms of security and compliance reports because we have non-cloud-related tools being folded into the reports as well. Even though it works on the cloud, and is excellent at what it does, we integrate it with our Qualys reports, for example, which is the scanning on our hosts. Those hosts are in the cloud, but this doesn't touch them. There's no such thing as a single security tool, frankly. It's basically part of our portfolio and it's part of what every organization needs, in my opinion, to be able to manage their cloud security postures. Otherwise, it would just never work.

Primarily the intent was to have a better understanding of our cloud security posture. My remit is to understand how well our existing estate in cloud marries up to the industry benchmarks, such as CIS or NIST, or even AWS's version of security controls and benchmarks.

When a stack is provisioned in a cloud environment, whether in AWS or Azure or Google Cloud, I can get an appreciation of how well the configuration is in alignment with those standards. And if it's out of alignment, I can effectively task those who are accountable for resources in clouds to actually remediate any identifiable vulnerabilities.

The solution is really comprehensive. Especially over the past three to four years, I was heavily dependent on AWS-native toolsets and config management. I had to be concerned about whether there were any permissive security groups or scenarios where logging might not have been enabled on S3 buckets, or if we didn't have encryption on EBS volumes. I was quite dependent on some of the native stacks within AWS.

Prisma not only looks at the workloads for an existing cloud service provider, but it looks at multiple cloud service providers outside of the native stack. Although the native tools on offer within AWS and Azure are really good, I don't want to be heavily dependent on them. And with Google, where they don't have a security hub where you can get that visibility, then you're quite dependent on tools like Prisma Cloud to be able to give you that. In the past, that used to be Dome9 or Evident.io. Palo Alto acquired Evident.io, and that became rebranded as this cloud posture management solution. It's proven really useful for me.

It integrates capabilities across both cloud security posture management and cloud workload protection. The cloud security posture management is what it was initially intended for, looking at configuration of cloud service workloads for AWS, Azure, Google, and Alibaba. And you can look at how the configuration of certain workloads align to standards of CIS, NIST, PII, etc.

And that brings our DevOps and SecOps teams closer together. The engineering aspect is accountable for provisioning dedicated accounts for cloud consumers within the organization. There might be just an entity within the business that has a specific use case. You then want to go to ensure that they take accountability for building their services in the cloud, so that it's not just a central function or that engineering is solely responsible. You want something of a handoff so that consumers of cloud within the organization can also have that accountability, so that it's a shared responsibility. Then, if you're in operations, you have visibility into what certain workloads are doing and whether they're matching the standards that have been set by the organization from a risk perspective.

You've also got the software engineering side of the business and they might just be focused on consuming base images. They may be building container environments or even non-container environments or hosting VMs. They also have a level of accountability to ensure that the apps or packages that they build on top of the base image meet a certain level of compliance, depending on what your business risk-appetite is. So it's really useful in that you've got that shared accountability and responsibility. And overall, you can then hand that off to security, vulnerability management, or compliance teams, to have a bird's-eye view of what each of those entities is doing and how well they're marrying up to the expected standards.

Prior to Prisma cloud, you'd have to have point solutions for container runtime scanning and image scanning. They could be coupled together, but even so, if you were running multiple cloud service providers in parallel, you could never really get the whole picture from a governance perspective. You would struggle to actually determine, "Okay, how are we doing against the CIS benchmark for Azure, GCP, and AWS, and where are the gaps that we need to address from a governance and a compliance perspective so as to reduce our risk and the threat landscape?" Now that you've got Prisma Cloud, you can get that holistic view in a single pane of glass, especially if you're running multiple cloud workloads or a number of cloud workloads with one cloud service provider. It gives you the ability to look at private, public, or hybrid offerings. It saves me having to go to market and also run a number of proofs of concepts for point solutions. It's an indication of how the market has matured and how Palo Alto, with Prisma Cloud in particular, understands what their consumers and clients want.

It can certainly help reduce alert investigation times, because you've got the detail that comes with the alert, to help remediate. The level of detail offered up by Prisma Cloud, for a given engineer who might not be that familiar with a specific type of configuration or a specific type of alert, saves the engineer having to delve into runbooks or online resources to learn how to remediate a particular alert. You have to compare it to a SIEM solution where you get an event or an alert is triggered. It's usually based on a log entry and the engineer would have to then start to investigate what that alert might mean. But with Prisma Cloud and Prisma Cloud Compute, you get that level of detail off the back of every event, which is really useful.

It's hard to quantify how much time it might save, but think about the number of events and what it would be like if they didn't have that level of detail on how to remediate, each time an event occurred. Suppose you had a threshold or a setting that was quite conservative, based on a particular cloud workload, and that there were a number of accounts provisioned throughout the day and, for each of those accounts, there were a number of config settings that weren't in alignment with a given standard. For each of those events, unless there was that level of detail, the engineer would have to look at the cloud service provider's configuration runbooks or their own runbooks to understand, "Okay, how do I change something from this to this? What's the polar opposite for me to get this right?" The great thing about Prisma Cloud is that it provides that right out-of-the-box, so you can quickly deduce what needs to be done. For each event, you might be saving five or 10 minutes, because you've got all the information there, served up on a plate.

For me, what was valuable from the outset was the fact that, regardless of what cloud service provider you're with, I could segregate visibility of specific accounts to account owners. For example, at AWS, you might have an estate that's solely managed by yourself, or there might be a number of teams within the organization that do so.

You can also integrate with Amazon Managed Services. You can also get a snapshot in time, whether that's over a 24-hour period, seven days, or a month, to determine what the estate might look like at a certain point in time and generate reports from that for vulnerability management forums. In addition to that, I can get a snapshot of what I deemed were the priority vulnerabilities, whether it was identity access management, key rotation, or secrets management. Whatever you deem to be a priority for mitigating threats for your environment, you can get that as a snapshot.

You can also automate how frequently you want reports to be generated. You can then understand whether there has been any improvement or reduction in vulnerabilities over a certain time period.

The solution also enables you to ingest logs to your preferred SIEM provider so that you've got a better understanding of how things stack up with event correlation and SIEM systems.

If you've got an Azure presence, you might be using Office 365 and you might also have a presence in Google Cloud for the data, specifically. You might also want to look at scenarios where, if you're using tools and capabilities for DevOps, like Slack, you can plug those into Prisma Cloud as well to understand how well they marry up to vulnerabilities. You can also use it for driving out instant vulnerabilities into Slack. That way, you're looking at what your third-party SaaS providers are doing in relation to certain benchmarks. That's really useful as well.

In addition, an engineer may provision something like a shared service, a DNS capability, a sandbox environment, or a proof of concept. The ability to filter alerts by severity helps when reporting on the services that have been provisioned. They'll come back as a high, medium, or low severity and then I ensure that we align with our risk-appetite and prioritize higher and medium vulnerabilities so that they are closed out within a given timeframe.

When it comes to root cause, Prisma Cloud is quite intuitive. If you have an S3 bucket that has been set to public but, realistically, it shouldn't have been, you can look at how to remediate that quite intuitively, based on what the solution offers up as a default setting. It will offer up a way to actually resolve and apply the correct settings, in line with a given standard. There's almost no thinking involved. It's on-point and it's as if it offers up the specific criteria and runbooks to resolve particular vulnerabilities.

That assists security, giving them an immediate way to resolve a given conflict or misalignment. The time-savings are really incomparable. If you were to identify a vulnerability or a risk, you might have to draw up what the remediation activity should look like. However, what Prisma Cloud does is that it actually presents you with a report on how to remediate. Alternatively, you can have dynamic events that are generated and applied to Slack, for example. Those events can then be sent off to a JIRA backlog or the like. The engineers will then look at what that specific event was, at what the criteria are, and it will tell them how to remediate it without their having to set time aside to explain it. The whole path is really intuitive and almost fully automated, once it's set up.

One scenario, in early days, was in trying to get a view on how you could segregate account access for role-based access controls. As a DevSecOps squad, you might have had five or six guys and girls who had access to the overall solution. If you wanted to hand that off to another team, like a software engineering team, or maybe just another cloud engineering team, there were concerns about sharing the whole dashboard, even if it was just read-only. But over the course of time, they've integrated that role-based access control so that users should only be able to view their own accounts and their own workloads, rather than all of the accounts.

Another concern I had was the fact that you couldn't ingest the accounts into Prisma Cloud in an automated sense. You had to manually integrate them or onboard them. They have since driven out new features and capabilities, over the last 12 months, to cater for that. At an organizational level you can now plug that straight into Prisma Cloud, as and when new accounts are provisioned or created. Then, by default, the AWS account or the Azure account will actually be included, so you've got visibility straight away.

The lack of those two features was a limitation as to how far I could actually push it out within the organization for it to be consumed. They've addressed those now, which is really useful. I can't think of anything else that's really causing any shortcomings. It's everything and more at the moment.

I've been using Prisma Cloud for about 12 months now

It's pretty straightforward to run an automated setup, if you want to go down that route. The capabilities are there. But in terms of how we approached it, it was like a plug-and-play into our existing stack. Within AWS, you just have to point Prisma Cloud at your organizational level so that you can inherit all the accounts and then you have the scanning capability and the enforcement capability, all native within Prisma Cloud. There's nothing that we're doing that's over and above, nothing that we would have to automate other than what is actually provided natively within Prisma Cloud. I'm sure if you wanted to do additional automation, for example if you wanted to customize how it reports into Slack or how it reports into Atlassian tools, you could certainly do that, but there's nothing that is that complex, requiring you to do additional automation over and above what it already provides.

I haven't gone about calculating what the ROI might be.

But just looking at it from an operational engineering perspective and the benefits that come with it, and when it comes to the governance and compliance aspects of running AWS cloud workloads, I now put aside half an hour or an hour on a given day of the week, or alternative days of the week. I use that time to look at what the client security posture is, generate a number of reports, and hand them off to a number of engineering teams, all a lot quicker than I used to be able to do so two or three years ago.

In the past, at times I would have had to run Trusted Advisor from AWS, to look at a particular account, or run a number of reports from Trusted Advisor to look at multiple accounts. And with Trusted Advisor, I could never get a collective view on what the overall posture was of workloads within AWS. With Prisma Cloud, I can just select 30 AWS accounts, generate one report, and I've got everything I need to know, out-of-the-box. It gives me all the different services that might be compliant/non-compliant, have passed/failed, and that have high, medium, or low vulnerabilities. It has saved me hours being able to get those snapshots.

I can also step aside by putting an automated report in place and receive that on a weekly basis. I've also got visibility into when new accounts are provisioned, without my having to keep tabs on whether somebody has just provisioned a new account or not. The hours that are saved with it are really quite high.

As it stands now, I think things have moved forward somewhat. Prisma and the suite of tools by Palo Alto, along with the fact that they have integrated Prisma Cloud Compute as a one-stop shop, have really got it nailed. They understand that not all clients are running container workloads. They bring together point solutions, like what used to be Twistlock, into that whole ecosystem, alongside a cloud security posture management system, and they'll license it so that it's favorable for you as a consumer. You can think about how you can have that presence and not then be dependent on multiple third-parties.

Prisma cloud was originally destined for cloud security posture management, to determine how the configuration of cloud services aligns with given standards. Through the evolution of the product, they then integrated a capability they call Prisma Cloud Compute. That is derived from point solutions for container and image scanning. It has the capabilities on offer within a single pane of glass.

Prior to the given scenario with Prisma Cloud, you'd have to either go to Twistlock or Aqua Security for container workloads. If you were going open source, obviously that would be free, but you'd still have to be looking at independent point solutions. And if you were looking at governance and compliance, you'd have to look at the likes of Dome9, Evident.io, and OpenSCAP, in a combination with Trusted Advisor. But the fact that you can just lean into Prisma Cloud and have those capabilities readily available, and have an account manager that is priced based on workloads, makes it a favorable licensing model.

It also makes the whole RFP process a lot more streamlined and simplified. If you've got a purchasing specialist in-house, and then heads-of-functions who might have a vested interest in what the budget allocation is, from either a security perspective or from a DevOps cloud perspective, it's really quite transparent. They work the pricing model in your favor based on how you want to actually integrate with their products. From my exposure so far, they have been really flexible on whatever your current state is, with a view to what the future state might be. There's no hard sell. They "get" the journey that you're on, and they're trying to help you embrace cloud security, governance, and compliance as you go. That works favorably for them as well, because the more clients that they can acquire and onboard, the more they can share the experience, helping both the business and the consumer, overall.

Prior to Prisma cloud, I was looking at Dome9 and Evident.io. Around late 2018 to early 2019, Palo Alto acquired Evident.io and made it part of their Prisma suite of security tools.

At the time, the two that were favorable were Evident.io and Dome9, side-by-side, especially when running multiple AWS accounts in parallel. At the time, it was Dome9 that came out as more cost-effective. But I actually preferred Evident.io. It just happened to be that we were evaluating the Prisma suite and then discovered that Palo Alto had acquired Evident.io. For me that was really useful. As an organization, if we were already exploring the capabilities of Palo Alto and had a commercial presence with them, to then be able to use Prisma Cloud as part of that offering was really good for me as a security specialist in cloud. Prior to that, if as an organization you didn't have a third-party cloud security posture management system for AWS, you were heavily dependent on Trusted Advisor.

My advice is that if you have the opportunity to integrate and utilize Prisma Cloud you should, because it's almost a given that you can't get any other cloud security posture management system like Prisma Cloud. There are competitors that are striving to achieve the same types of things. However, when it comes to the governance element for a head of architecture or a head of compliance or even at the CSO level, without that holistic view, if you use one of them you are potentially flying blind. 

Once you've got a capability running in the cloud and the associated demand that comes through from the business to provision accounts for engineers or technical service owners or business users, the given is that not every team or every user that wants to consume the cloud workload has the required skill set to do so. There's a certain element of expertise that you need to securely run cloud workloads, just as is needed for running applications or infrastructure on-premise. However, unless you have an understanding of what you're opening up to—the risk element to running cloud workloads, such as a potential attacks or compromise of service—from an organizational perspective, it's only a matter of time before something is leaked or something gets compromised and that can be quite expensive to have to manage. There are a lot of unknowns. 

Yes, they do give you capabilities, such as Trusted Advisor, or you might have OpenSCAP or you might be using Forseti for Google Cloud, and there are similar capabilities within Azure. However, the cloud service providers aren't native security vendors. Their workloads are built around infrastructure- or platform-as-a-service. What you have to do is look at how you can complement what they do with security solutions that give you not just the north-south view, but the east-west as well. You shouldn't just be dependent on everything out-of-the-box. I get the fact that a lot of organizations want to be cloud-first and utilize native security capabilities, but sometimes those just don't give you enough. Whether you're looking at business-risk or cyber-risk, for me, Prisma Cloud is definitely out there as a specialist capability to help you mitigate the threat landscape in running cloud workloads.

I've certainly gone from a point where I understood what the risk was in not having something like this, and that's when I was heavily dependent on native tools that are offered up with cloud service providers. 

The first release that came out didn't include the workload management, because what happened, I believe, was that Palo Alto acquired Twistlock. Twistlock was then "framed" into cloud workload management within Prisma Cloud. What that meant was that you had a capability that looks at your container workloads, and that's called Prisma Cloud Compute, which is all available within a single pane of glass, but as a different set of capabilities. That is really useful, especially when you're running container workloads.

In terms of securing the entire development life cycle, if you integrate it within the Jenkins CI/CD pipeline, you can get the level of assurance needed for your golden images or trusted image. And then you can look at how you can enforce certain constraints for images that don't match the level of compliance required. In terms of going from what would be your image repository, when that's consumed you have the capability to look at what runtime scanning looks like from a container perspective. It's not really on par with, or catering to, what other products are looking at in terms of SAST and DAST capabilities. For those, you'd probably go to the market and look at something like Veracode or WhiteHat.

It all depends on the way an organization works, whether it has a distributed or centralized setup. Is there like a central DevOps or engineering function that is a single entity for consuming cloud-based services, or is there a function within the business that has primarily been building capabilities in the cloud for what would otherwise be infrastructure-as-a-service for internal business units? The difficulty there is the handoff. Do you look at running it as a central function, where the responsibility and the accountability is within the DevOps teams, or is that a function for SecOps to manage and run? The scenario is dependent on what the skill sets are of a given team and what the priorities are of that team. 

Let's say you have a security team that knows its area and handles governance, risk, and compliance, but doesn't have an engineering function. The difficulty there is how do you get the capability integrated into CI/CD pipelines if they don't have an engineering capability? You're then heavily relying on your DevOps teams to build out that capability on behalf of security. That would be a scenario for explaining why DevOps starts integrating with what would otherwise be CyberOps, and you get that DevSecOps cycle. They work closer together, to achieve the end result. 

But in terms of how seamless those CI/CD touchpoints are, it's a matter of having security experts that understand that CI/CD pipeline and where the handoffs are. The heads of function need to ensure that there's a particular level of responsibility and accountability amongst all those teams that are consuming cloud workloads. It's not just a point solution for engineering, cloud engineering, operations, or security. It's a whole collaboration effort amongst all those functions. And that can prove to be quite tricky. But once you've got a process, and the technology leaders understand what the ask is, I think it can work quite well.

When it comes to reducing runtime alerts, it depends on the sensitivity of the alerting that is applicable to the thresholds that you set. You can set a "learning mode" or "conservative mode," depending on what your risk-appetite is. You might want it to be configured in a way that is really sensitive, so that you're alerted to events and get insights into something that's out of character. But in terms of reducing the numbers of alerts, it all depends on how you configure it, based on the sensitivity that you want those alerts to be reporting on.

I would rate Prisma Cloud at eight out of 10. It's primarily down to the fact that I've got a third-party tool that gives me a holistic view of cloud security posture. At the click of a button I can determine what the current status is of our threat landscape, in either AWS or Azure, at a conflict level and at a workload level, especially with regards to Prisma Cloud Compute. It's all available within a single pane of glass. That's effectively what I was after about two or three years ago. The fact that it has now come together with a single provider is why I'd rate it an eight.

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.

When we migrated our workloads from the on-prem to the cloud, we used Prisma Cloud to tell us whether our workloads were PCI compliant.

Prisma Cloud ensures that our organization is PCI compliant.

The most valuable feature is its cloud security posture management. Prisma Cloud is very easy to use and gives us daily reports.

The user interface should be improved and made easier.

We have been using Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks for five years.

The stability is good.

The scalability is good.

Prisma Cloud’s customer support is good.

We have seen an ROI with respect to time and metrics.

Regarding Prisma Cloud's pricing, we started small, and then we just kept on growing.

Before choosing Prisma Cloud, we evaluated SolarWinds as an option. We chose Prisma Cloud because SolarWinds wasn't an enterprise-level software.

The solution has a moderate level of ease of use. Prisma Cloud has helped free 50% of our staff's time to work on other projects. Many tasks were done manually before, but now things are faster with Prisma Cloud.

We are trying to learn about new cybersecurity issues and what other solutions are available to combat them.

Overall, I rate Prisma Cloud an eight out of ten.

I use it for testing and visibility.

Palo Alto has helped our organization improve its security posture.

CSPM is the most valuable feature.

They should improve user experience. It is complicated to integrate the solution with the public cloud provider.

I have been using the solution for two years.

I’m happy with the stability of the solution.

The solution has strong scalability.

We have seen an ROI on the solution. We have full inventory visibility and a full security posture.

The pricing of the solution is fair.

I attend the RSA conference to close gaps. Attending the conference impacts our cybersecurity purchases because it helps us build a roadmap for future evolution. Overall, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.