Though the company's clients have multiple tools, they were not able to integrate all of the cloud accounts in a single SIR tool, which is why we had to use Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks to monitor all of our company's clients' cloud accounts.
The solution provides security scanning for multi and hybrid cloud environments, but it does not provide the details about the product that provides the security. Most of the time, it just provides an overview of the security gaps. In real life, I didn't see any of the scenarios where it is protecting our company's infrastructure. Clients are sometimes not ready to use runtime protection for the Prisma Cloud because they don't want to take any risks in the production environment.
The comprehensiveness of Prisma Cloud for protecting the full cloud-native environment involves network protection. The most important thing is network security, and the second is IAM security, which is important for the banking team. I see that the tool has a large number of containers. Deployment and pipeline security are the main areas for the banking sector. Our clients don't use much of Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks because it contains complexity, and the UI is not user-friendly. There have been multiple cases of their client complaining about the UI. From the standpoint of the client, the tool is too complex.
Speaking about the tool's help that allows users to take a preventative approach to cloud security, I would say that based on the asset inventory, we check the details about the assets and the number of assets. Secondly, we go through the alerts, which consist of IAM and the network security rules. Following the severity, like critical, high, or medium, we first resolve those issues and take steps monthly. The alerts that are generated monthly should be resolved only in that month.
After the deployment, it took three to four months to notice the value derived from using the solution, from my point of view and experience.
The discovery is good. The discovery provides details about the assets and the data, along with the data inside the infrastructure and about the infrastructure. There are some issues because if only about the data, it does not give out any issues for the user and instead gives more information about the infrastructure and some within the infrastructure.
Palo Alto DSPM did not discover much data existing outside of our company's official IT systems.
The solution provides insights into the content that has been discovered, along with some detailed information.
I cannot reveal the type of insights into the content that the solution has provided because our client would not want our company to open up about such details.
The insights into the content have affected the data security operations since following the compliance provides and helps clients regulate their security. It also prevents data breaches. The data breaches open up whatever data can be opened, and it helps clients to determine what data they need to secure and how. Speaking about data security posture, our company's clients take steps to resolve any issues because they want to save their reputation, especially in scenarios involving hacking.
It took around two to three months to see the value derived from the use of the product.
The tool provides an automated discovery of new data assets as they get onboarded. It does take one to two days on an average basis to show all the data.
In terms of whether the solution provides a prioritized list of all the data security posture issues in our company's environment, I can say that as soon as the assets are discovered, Prisma Cloud starts scanning and does all of the data security scanning. It does not take much time, and it can be done in four to five hours. If it is a large-scale infrastructure, then it can take an average of eight to ten hours.
I have not used the solution's connectors for the SOC's DDR solution to help automate remediation since the plant where it is used did not integrate Prisma Cloud with the same tools they use, with one of the reasons being that Prisma Cloud overflows the alerts, and they did not want alerts to overflow with their production in an SIMP environment.
The solution provides visibility and control regardless of how complex or distributed the cloud environment becomes, but when it comes to getting the data from the UI shown to the upper management, things do become complex because the tool doesn't have many options to import or export data.
I cannot say that the solution has reduced all the alerts by prioritizing the ones that have the most impact on sensitive data. The alerts that were critical and high, have been resolved by the team, while also taking care of areas involving IAM and networks.
The prioritization of alerts in the tool has affected our company's operations, and from my point of view, right now, I am able to show my CIS and the upper management team what steps we have taken and how the issues that are there as per the alerts have been resolved based on the critical, medium and high severity basis. I can say that 60 percent of the issues have been resolved as per the alerts. It gives me the flexibility to provide details to the management team that we are on track to provide security to our infrastructure. It gives me the flexibility to provide data to management for some time. As the environment grows, it generates a lot of alerts, and it takes time to resolve all of them.
The solution does not require any maintenance, and one just needs to make sure that the tool is up to date.
Based on my experience, I would recommend Prisma Cloud because I have hands-on experience with the solution. The integration is easy. The tool provides visibility in the infrastructure and for the alerts about the security gaps, the tool provides precise details. Talking about the new app in the tool, I would say little improvements are required. The tool is quite informative for me, but from the client side, it does require some improvement.
If someone has a large infrastructure, I won't recommend Prisma Cloud to them. If they have medium and enterprise, then I will recommend Prisma Cloud to such people because it can handle and, as per the working out of the tool, it can change the details about the small-scale, medium-scale, and enterprise businesses, but not for the large scale enterprises.
I rate the tool an eight out of ten.