When comparing Microsoft and Palo Alto Networks in the context of Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM), it's important to consider the strengths and focus areas of each vendor's offerings. Microsoft Defender for Cloud and Palo Alto's Prisma Cloud designed for managing cloud security risks, ensuring compliance, and automating governance across cloud environments.
Defender provides a unified security management system that strengthens the security posture of your data centers, and it is particularly well-integrated with Azure services, although it also supports multi-cloud environments to an extent. Defender receives positive feedback for its threat protection, seamless integration with Microsoft tools, and reasonable pricing options. Prisma Cloud is a comprehensive cloud-native security platform that integrates security across the full development lifecycle and cloud environments, including AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure. The solution is commended for its robust security features, and comprehensive compliance capabilities.
The summary above is based on 134 interviews we conducted recently with Palo Alto Networks and Microsoft Defender users. To access the review's full transcripts, download our report.
"It is fairly simple. Anybody can use it."
"PingSafe offers comprehensive security posture management."
"Cloud Native Security is user-friendly. Everything in the Cloud Native Security tool is straightforward, including detections, integration, reporting, etc. They are constantly improving their UI by adding plugins and other features."
"The UI is very good."
"PingSafe offers three key features: vulnerability management notifications, cloud configuration assistance, and security scanning."
"I did a lot of research before signing up and doing the demo. They have a good reputation as far as catching threats early on."
"Cloud Native Security is a tool that has good monitoring features."
"Support has been very helpful and provides regular feedback and help whenever needed. They've been very useful."
"We can create alerts that trigger if there is any malicious activity happening in the workflow and these alerts can be retrieved using the query language."
"The first valuable feature was the fact that it gave us a list of everything that users were surfing on the web. Having the list, we could make decisions about those sites."
"Provides a very good view of the entire security setup of your organization."
"The security policy is the most valuable feature for us. We can go into the environment settings and attach any globally recognized framework like ISO or any benchmark."
"The solution is very easy to deploy."
"With respect to improving our security posture, it helps us to understand where we are in terms of compliance. We can easily know when we are below the standard because of the scores it calculates."
"Most importantly, it's an integrated solution. We not only have Defender for Cloud, but we also have Defender for Endpoint, Defender for Office 365, and Defender for Identity. It's an integrated, holistic solution."
"Good compliance policies."
"The most valuable feature of Prisma Cloud is WAF (web application firewall)."
"As a pure-play CSPM, it is pretty good. From the data exposure perspective, Prisma Cloud does a fairly good job. Purely from the perspective of reading the conflicts, it is able to highlight any data exposures that I might be having."
"The solution's dashboard looks very user-friendly."
"Integrating with a CI/CD pipeline and incorporating a vulnerability assessment process are highly effective features, especially when combined with runtime protection."
"It supports the multi-cloud environment beautifully."
"The CSPM and CWPP functionalities are pretty good."
"Prisma Cloud also provides the visibility and control you need, regardless of how complex or distributed your cloud environments become. It helps to simplify that complexity. Now we know what the best practices are, and if something is missing we know."
"It provides insights into potential vulnerabilities in our code, helping us identify and rectify issues before they can be exploited."
"PingSafe's current documentation could be improved to better assist customers during the cluster onboarding process."
"PingSafe can improve by eliminating 100 percent of the false positives."
"If I had to pick a complaint, it would be the way the hosts are listed in the tool. You have different columns separated by endpoint name, Cloud Account, and Cloud Instances ID. I wish there was something where we could change the endpoint name and not use just the IP address. We would like to have custom names or our own names for the instances. If I had a complaint, that would be it, but so far, it meets all the needs that we have."
"We use PingSafe and also SentinelOne. If PingSafe integrated some of the endpoint security features of SentinelOne, it would be the perfect one-stop solution for everything. We wouldn't need to switch between the products. At my organization, I am responsible for endpoint security and vulnerability management. Integrating both functions into one application would be ideal because I could see all the alerts, heat maps, and reports in one console."
"I used to work on AWS. At times, I would generate a normal bug in my system, and then I would check PingSafe. The alert used to come after about three and a half hours. It used to take that long to generate the alert about the vulnerability in my system. If a hacker attacks a system and PingSafe takes three to four hours to generate an alert, it will not be beneficial for the company. It would be helpful if we get the alert in five to ten minutes."
"I export CSV. I cannot export graphs. Restricting it to the CSV format has its own disadvantages. These are all machine IP addresses and information. I cannot change it to the JSON format. The export functionality can be improved."
"We are experiencing problems with Cloud Native Security reporting."
"The cost has the potential for improvement."
"Another thing that could be improved was that they could recommend processes on how to react to alerts, or recommend best practices based on how other organizations do things if they receive an alert about XYZ."
"The solution's portal is very easy to use, but there's one key component that is missing when it comes to managing policies. For example, if I've onboarded my server and I need to specify antivirus policies, there's no option to do that on the portal. I will have to go to Intune to deploy them. That is one main aspect that is missing and it's worrisome."
"The documentation could be much clearer."
"We would like to have better transparency as to how the security score is calculated because as it is now, it is difficult to understand."
"Customizing some of the compliance requirements based on individual needs seems like the biggest area of improvement. There should be an option to turn specific controls on and off based on how your solution is configured."
"The initial setup is not actually so complex but it feels complex because there are many add-ons. There are many options and my team needs to be aware of all of these changes happening on the backend which is a distraction."
"I would like to see better automation when it comes to pushing out security features to the recommendations, and better documentation on the step-by-step procedures for enabling certain features."
"The remediation process could be improved."
"I think Prisma Cloud could improve its preventive governance policy and CWP run time modules."
"We had some teething issues with Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks, but overall, it did what we expected."
"Sometimes, when you assign subnets to regions, the IP address will jump from one location to another because it will automatically change substantially. Then, we need to add those IP subnets to our firewall for existing access. The need to update those subnets potentially causes maintenance or access issues. So far, we can only provide bigger customers with six subnets, and a small company may not be able to access those services."
"Areas like the deployment of their defenders and their central control need manual intervention. They should focus more on automation. They have a very generic case for small companies. However, for bigger companies to work, we have to do a lot of changes to our system to accommodate it. Therefore, they should change their system or deployment models so it can be easy to integrate into existing architectures."
"Prisma Cloud lags behind in terms of security automation capabilities."
"We would like it to have more features from the risk and compliance perspectives."
"We identified two things that we felt would be great to have, but they are under NDA. So, I can't disclose them. Other than those two things, we identified a generic bug in the secret key management service on AWS that needs to be fixed. We reported it to them, and we want them to fix it."
"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."
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Microsoft Defender for Cloud is ranked 3rd in Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) with 46 reviews while Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks is ranked 1st in Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) with 82 reviews. Microsoft Defender for Cloud is rated 8.0, while Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Microsoft Defender for Cloud writes "Provides multi-cloud capability, is plug-and-play, and improves our security posture". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks writes "The dashboard is very user-friendly and can be used to generate custom RQL based on user requirements". Microsoft Defender for Cloud is most compared with AWS GuardDuty, Microsoft Defender XDR, Wiz, Microsoft Defender for Endpoint and Azure Firewall, whereas Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks is most compared with Wiz, Aqua Cloud Security Platform, AWS Security Hub, CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security and AWS GuardDuty. See our Microsoft Defender for Cloud vs. Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks report.
See our list of best Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) vendors, best Container Security vendors, and best Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) vendors.
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